(828) 526-0173 | [email protected] | Copyright 2024 – All Rights Reserved.
The Same Age as Old People
Written By: Donna Rhodes | Issue: Winter - 2023
Donna’s able to tap dance around temporary aphasia with some clever mental gymnastics.
illustration by Norma Jean Zahner
I hate to admit it, but I’m becoming more and more forgetful.
When I forget a word, I’ve taken to saying, “I can’t think of the English word for it.” That way people will think I am a polyglot or at least bilingual instead of a total idiot.
And if they just won’t let go of it, and they ask me the foreign word I was thinking, I act cool and say, “Carnustirfargen.” At that moment I am enormously pleased with myself for thinking fast enough to make up a five-syllable word. But then I am in a corner because I’ll never remember a five-syllable made-up word that I may have to repeat later in conversation.
This is the stage of life where I feel 30-ish, my jokes are somewhere in the puberty-age category (if I can even remember them …, Carnustirfargen) and my body parts look like mummified apples and haired-over cukes in the back of refrigerator drawers.
I see people my age scaling Whiteside, hanging upside-down in yoga straps, or lifting three bags of groceries with one arm while steering a leashed Labradoodle with the other. Personally, I am just thrilled with getting one leg through my underwear without having to hold on to the walls and a door handle.
Where were we? Oh, yeah, making up stuff to cover up other stuff like: the older we get the more weight we gain, because it’s all that information we keep stuffing into our brains. Okay, I’m sticking with that. That 10 pounds I gained over the summer is brain matter. If your read this article 12 more times and eat a pound of dark chocolate (it’s good for you, right?) you can use that excuse right along with me.
Covering up approaching senility is damn hard work. But the hardest work is being the same age as old people.
