Intimations of mortality

Most of the time I do not at all feel my age. I have just observed my 56th birthday. That number alone is incomprehensible, a concrete number, yes, but really only a vague signifier of the passage of time, an ultimately useless benchmark that only measures out my life in the passage of decades and years.

I pride myself on my unwrinkled face, my quick and rather agile gait, by ability still to take two steps at a time up staircases if I want to, and the relative ease with which I can walk miles along my favorite nature preserve and park trails. I don't get a lot of sleep, and I don't seem to need much. I eat a good, balanced diet, take vitamins, keep my mind stimulated to the point of overstimulation, keep up with what is going on in the world, for better or worse, and deem myself in pretty good health. I am extremely grateful for this.

However, being an observant person by nature and practice, I am sometimes brought face to face with my own mortality, as we all are. This often occurs unexpectedly and in the midst of the most ordinary, innocuous settings, such as a grocery store. There, the other night, bustling about the aisles with my blue, plastic grocery basket, I can across a man, not too many years older than myself, maybe 65, maybe 70, but who seemed to me "elderly" -- pale white legs, slightly wobbly, three-pronged walking cane inside his grocery cart, going his way in slow-motion animation, basically, as do most "elderly" people in grocery stores. They are the shoppers who seem to have all the time in the world to browse the aisles while I just want nothing more than to zip around them and get the heck out of there. That man the other night just struck me as frail, losing the battle to stay mobile and limber with the inexorable passage of years. They will pass soon enough for me, too.

I watched him out of the corner of my eye with a sort of grim fascination, pondering the implications for my own invevitable slowing down. I glanced at his cart: the gallon of low-fat mik, the two loaves of bread that looked very familiar, perhaps the same Pepperidge Farm whole wheat bread that I buy. That gentleman could have been me, up the road, many years from now, hopefully. But I don't want to think about it anymore.

(This is the third and final entry I am posting that was written during a long night of waiting with nothing to do during an open-house March 27 at a local middle school. I was in an empty health sciences classroom, at the end of a long hallway, and everyone seems to stop just short of the room I was in and thus missed my presentation. Fortunately, I had some scrap paper and a pen because I did not feel like reading anything.)