#275 Looking Down the Road

Age brings changes. They say that the difference between a conservative and a liberal is about twenty years. Or ten years of acute cynicism. They say that liberals think with their heart and conservatives think with their brain, having had their heart stepped on too much in their youth. I don’t agree. I see conservatives and liberals of all ages, it’s the other ways we age that are weird.
Old people are interesting. Nature seems to reduce all of us top a common physique. I was driving around the other day and I found myself behind a slow-moving automobile, perhaps one of the Electra or Marquis or Bonneville class of automobiles. The giants of the road before Hummers, but not the Cadillacs, the 6 tons of metal for the common man, or should I say the common old man. Surprise, the oldster was driving slow. Having 6 tons of steel wrapped around his brittle bones wasn’t enough, he was gonna keep the impact speed down below airbag-triggering level. I’m sure he was being prudent. His reaction time was probably down to a drunk’s on a whole bottle of tequila or perhaps a Quaaluder on one too many Lunestas. In any event, when I looked through his rear window I thought it was my dad—posture hunched, wisps of hair poking out beneath the promotional RV company baseball cap pulled down to ear level, two giant ears jutting proudly away from the sides of his head like mainsails in a stiff breeze, or perhaps car doors, Bonneville car doors at that. I knew he would have other oldster facial similarities. His nose would take up half his receding face, festooned with purple blood vessels and pores the size of wading pools. His chin would disappear into the comforting folds of his wattle, sprung rooster-like from the bottom of his ageing face in the last decade. His eyes would have that glazed look, as he tried to puzzle out whether he had enough green left on the light to risk the traffic signal actually turning yellow while he was still in the intersection. Nature’s way. We all get less attractive. So nature helps us endure by turning us slowly blind, blurring life’s ugly protuberances. It gives us big ears, so we can harvest in what little sound our inner ears can still register and also, apparently, to function as sort of curb feelers for our head, warning us before we totally nod off during a conversation that we need to jerk back up. Not that jerking is a great idea. So we kind of do a slow reverse nod as if we weren’t falling asleep at all, but were actually engaged in some kind of septuagenarian yoga. The blindness also functions as a means to help us ignore how poorly we are cleaning our households, as the clutter builds up and the dust bunnies gather in herds on the floor. The dust bunnies have their own purpose in nature’s grand design. They’re there to cushion our fall so we don’t break a hip.
America, ya gotta love it.