ON BEING 83

I take nine pills at breakfast and five pills after my afternoon nap. Or is it the other way around?

Newsday prints lists of celebrities’ birthdays, and most mornings I haven’t heard of half of them.

There are more noises in my pants than there used to be, especially after meals. The noises are also louder. Who says I don’t hear as well as I once did?

My two little fingers could be described as deviated digits. They both point toward my thumbs. No, this is one thing I don’t blame on the current occupant of the White House.

I was washing my hands frequently, way before the CDC recommended it. I’ve been doing that for years because I urinate more often than most people.

It takes me a while to lift a leg high enough to get on my bicycle.

My toes have moved. When trying to touch them with my fingers, they are farther away than they were when I was 73.

Nearly every day I discover a new bruise somewhere around my expanding stomach. At times the middle of my body looks like a paint chart at a Sherwin Williams store.

Ten minutes is longer than I remember it being or at least it is when I’m on an elliptical machine at a local park.

I have trouble holding on to things, be it coffee from the deli or my house keys. When leaving the house, I have dropped my keys so many times I just consider bending over to get them an addendum to my morning stretching routine.

The dictionary I keep by my computer, “The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language,” is heavier than it was five years ago.

I need a training bra if they still sell them.

I watch too much television.

Only about half the actors currently making films and videos enunciate. All the British crime shows my wife Irene watches should automatically come with closed captioning. Could the British be putting us on, making a mumblers’ version of all their crime programs and selling them only to the States?

Some of the analysts on cable TV “news” look so young I don’t understand why they aren’t studying for their SATs.

I know what “woke” means but frankly don’t want to know what Generation X, Millennials and all those other categories are.

I could live to be 183 and would never understand why you need both a password and a passcode for some of these new devices.

We don’t have all that much money in the bank, so I don’t see why the kids were upset after I told them I had changed my bank PIN from 1234 to 4321.

I left journalism 14 years ago and still have a recurring dream about failing to write enough stories to fill a newscast. Do retired sex workers have dreams about their work? Is there video of them talking about this? What channel is it on?

-0-