Virgil
Fleeting Youth
by , 12-14-2008 at 07:06 PM (5069 Views)
You know it’s a sign of advancing years that one starts to complain about aches and pains. I’m going to be 47 tomorrow and I have to admit lately I’ve had quite a few, more than I remember at any one given time. My right shoulder has been bothering me for a while now, arthritis perhaps. My mother’s side is very prone to arthritis and I hear it from my mother and her brother. I take the dog to open fields on weekends and we play fetch with a tennis ball, and so perhaps the throwing motion has been aggravating it. My lower back has been either stiff or outright achy for the past two months, ever since I traveled for work. I think I threw it out by wielding my luggage around in the airports. And it does not seem to want to get back to normal. My front instep on my left foot has been very tender now for several weeks. I guess it’s from jogging on the treadmill at the gym. I don’t know. But it too doesn’t want to get better. And the most serious one I think is the pain on the left side of my abdomen, sometimes underneath the rib cage, sometimes near the hip bone, sometimes shooting down my groin, and sometimes along my inner left thigh. And sometimes all at once. This one worries me a little more than the others because it covers such a good area of flesh and it has been achy since March, which is quite a long time. Now it has not been a constant ache since March, it seems to get better and then it returns. A few times I was ready to go to the doctor over it, but every time I make up my mind to go it goes away and I change my mind. I know when I hurt it too. I was at the gym doing squats and I may have been doing them with too much weight and I felt a sharp twinge in my left side which caused me to abruptly stop. Hmm. It passed and I continued. I felt around for a bulge, but no it doesn’t seem like I herniated it. I hope not, but the pain seems to return. And there are other bothersome pains: my left thumb, my right knee cap, neck. Now I must admit that none of these pains have stopped me from going to the gym. I have taken a day or so off here and there or I pop some Advil and rub some Bengay to the sore spot, but I have continued on. I should take more time to recover given my age. I just hate to admit I’m old.
It’s also a sign of advancing years that one feels the need to tell people of their maladies. And so here I am, telling you in excruciating detail as if anyone cares. None of these are life threatening and none are serious, but why do we old geezers like to tell people of our aches and pains? Is it because we feel them every minute of the day and so they are on our minds? Certainly some here on these blogs have brought up some potentially serious health issues, and none of mine compare. No the reason I’m complaining is because I feel my age. That’s what this blog is about, not the aches or the complaints or the health issues. It’s age. 47 years old. Forty-seven. For-ty-se-ven. F-o-r-t-y-s-e-v-e-n. I’m almost fifty, half a decade, and at fifty there is no getting around it your youth has definitely gone. We kid ourselves in our thirties, “we’re just big kids at heart” we say. Or in our forties we’re middle aged, and I guess that’s right. But at fifty we’ve pushed middle age and it’s really getting too close to the end. When are we actually geriatric? Fifty-five or so? Well I’m now less than ten years away form that. Am I making a mountain over a mole hill? Perhaps. But life seems to be flying by. It seems only yesterday I was thirty-five, starting the project at work for which I owe my reputation. I was on that for eight years, taking it from early development to production. If I do that with my current project, by the end of it I will be in my golden years. And then I have to think, perhaps one more major project and that will be a career? I don’t know. I am measuring out my life with coffee spoons.
But you know a couple of weeks ago I found an old security badge I had for work and on it was my photo. This goes back to 1986 and I had to be 24 or 25 years old at the time, depending when it was actually taken. It was actually a pretty good photo of me, and since I didn’t have too many pictures of me from that time I scanned the photo, cut out the badge part, and enlarged it. Here it is, Virgil as a young man. Look at the long hair and those curls and that baby face and I even had a tie on. I remember I wasn’t too good back then at knotting a tie. Ah such is youth.
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal - yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
-John Keats
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