Aging is not easy. "Getting old is not for sissies," expresses the thought a little more emphatically. Advertisers selling golf-course condos and resort vacations may try to tell you that the latter days of our lives are "golden," but even they know better.
There are two naturally stressful and difficult times in every person's life: adolescence and the onset of old age. In both, all of us experience dramatic and rapid physical and hormonal changes. The main event of the teen years is the genesis of a dragon-like lust whose fiery breath consumes the adolescent mind. But as the body begins to deteriorate and is invaded by disease, the dragon mostly sleeps, only occasionally raising its head with a feeble roar which sounds more like a bleat.
The oddest coincidence of my life is that my decline parallels the decay of the nation and society I live in. When I was a baby, Americans were confident and hopeful. It was an article of faith that the next generation would "do better" than the last. America made tangible goods of lasting value. The town where I spent my small kidhood made steel.
Now weeds sprout from the floors of the abandoned steel factories, and birds nest in their rafters. Our immediate ancestors lived in split-level three-bedroom ranch houses. Our children will soon be inhabiting hobbit houses made of mud.
I'm witnessing the ending of the industrial age. I hope I'm not making that sound like a bad thing.
Grass grows on the master's grave, Ben Bolt,
The Spring of the brook is dry;
And of all the boys who were schoolmates then
There are only you and I.
--30--
2 comments:
That cob house is probably sturdier than my wood framed one.
The builder of that house changed his mind about a cob bench he'd erected and wanted to put something else there. He had no end of difficulty demolishing the bench. Apparently, when mixed in the right proportions of mud, sand, and straw, that stuff is nearly indestructible.
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