We are dwindling: our days, our height, our remaining life expectancy. Our knees may hurt at times and our eyesight is less acute. Our hearing is much less sensitive and our memory may not work so well.
"Kenny Spinksmeyer! That's the name I was trying to think of last week. And you say my memory isn't as good as ever!"
(link to the comic "Pickles)
The biological drive to admire the bodies and faces of those in their twenties has to give way, as we approach 80 years old, to a modified attraction to wisdom, wit and weight that is more appropriate to an older person. Google can do many things very quickly and directly and one of them is to give you your BMI, your body mass index measure. Just put "BMI" into the Google search window and you have a place to enter your height and your weight. My height used to be 6 ft. 3 in. but now it is 5 ft. 3 in. I have heard several times that "older people" are better off with a BMI between 25 and 30. Supposedly, I may survive future disease or surgery more comfortably with "extra" pounds than with the usual recommendation of BMI of 25.
Given magazines, beauty standards and a youth-oriented culture, it is easy to feel bad about my limitations and lack of Olympic qualities. One of the many advantages of hanging around with people close to my age is that I am more likely to be accepted as an ok specimen of male human. However, listening to "The Secret Life of Fat" by Sylvia Tara gives me such an appreciation of body fat and nature's complex, long-range plans for me and my tribe that fat seems marvelous and precious.
With all the lovely, sprightly bodies and spirits around, it is easy to be down, even ashamed of wrinkles and sags. I don't have the body I had when I was 25 but I used that body to build this one. I say that I still carry the innate profile Nature pushes but I am smart enough to modify that picture. Rodin's lovely statue "She who was once the helmet maker's beautiful wife" shows a elderly woman nude who is far beyond wanting, needing or even being able to create children. Her body, as is, shouts achievement and beauty but a different sort from the nubile kind. Less shame and more pride, more appreciation, more respect!
I tried to make a link but I find that you need to enter the quoted name of the work to see a picture of it.
