ON MY MIND
A slightlybelowaverage life by Paul Kandarian
We’ve all seen these ridiculous memes on Facebook that screw around with age and aging.
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ike if you add 70 years to my birthday it’s 2023, but if you subtract 70 it’s 1883. They do that do make you feel older. But truthfully, my body feels like it was born in 1883 anyway and, as the old cowboy saying goes, now looks like I been rode hard and hung out to dry wet. I turn 70 on October 13. I distinctly remember when my grandparents turned 70, and then my parents and I thought “Holy crap! 70! I’ll never 22
be 70!” not meaning I’d die, (although I treated too much of my youth like a discarded coke straw at Studio 54), but that I felt it impossible that anyone as young as I was could turn 70. It was unthinkable, unimaginable, unfathomable. I’d be 22 for ever and ever – lithe, young, supple, unbreakable, immortal – I’d convinced myself. And learned many years later that the biggest lies you’ll ever hear are the ones you tell yourself.
September 2023 | The South Coast Insider
But hey, 70 years on a planet spinning at 1,000 mph that we’ve assumed would give us all the inexhaustible resources we’d ever need (whoops!), well, that’s not a bad stretch. I’m in no way ready to say 70 is enough. I’d love 70 more. But only if I’m not reduced to a shriveled lump of brokendown body and soul drooling and mumbling and wondering what the hell is taking the Grim Reaper so long to show up.
I remember when people would be amazed at humans living to 70. Now 80 is pretty common; my folks died in their late 80s. And 90 isn’t as rare as it used to be, nor really is 100. And this is despite living in a country with the world’s highest gun fatality rate, an obesity epidemic that’s not going anywhere fast, a crippling death rate from drugs, and a raging pandemic every so often. In fact, our life expectancy is now 76.4