Aging sneaks up on you slyly. Unless you have a bad illness that ages you rapidly, or genes that do the same, you hardly ever notice that you’re loosing things like stamina and flexibility. Until you pull a muscle doing something you did a zillion times before and your body didn’t complain about it. There’s a character in a Hemmingway novel who is asked how he went broke, and he replied “Gradually then suddenly.” Growing old is like that. At least it’s been like that for me. 

And I’ve noticed I have it good by comparison with a bunch of my kidhood peers. I still get a lot of complements on how young I look for my age (71). But that might mostly be because of something a shrink I went to once told me, that I “present young”. Mindset does affect appearance. In many ways I still have this inner point of view that I’m a teenager or at best a young adult.

So this morning at Disney world, as I’m coaxing my stiff body into my clothes for a walk around Saratoga Springs (I did a lot of walking yesterday and I’ll probably do that again today), that I have to realize once again that I’m Not a young adult. I’m an old man. It still mostly doesn’t bother me, or at any rate I can ignore it most of the time. It’s when I can’t that I wish I had my twenty-something body back again. But this morning I had a thought: what if I actually could be transported back into my twenty-something body again, even if just for an hour or two while I stroll around the parks here. Would it be a pleasant couple hours, or would it shock me to actually see how much aging as taken away from my body over the decades, that I haven’t really noticed because it all happened so gradually?

Maybe its just as well I don’t have that kind of magic.