Intimations of Advancing Age

Yesterday, on a perfectly beautiful spring day here in the Annex, I felt unwell. Not so unwell that I couldn’t carry on my usual activities. In the morning I had a session with a couple exploring how to reconnect with one another after a years-long pattern of emotional separation. At lunch time Catherine, Theoren, and Emily arrived to enjoy Mark’s Mexican extravaganza meal on the deck outside our kitchen. Catherine and I managed a brief walk with Bacon (yes, Bacon!), their now four year old, funny-face dog, and caught up with each other’s recent activities and thoughts. After lunch we looked through three of the photo books that I have been putting together – great hilarity over many of the pics, particularly the series of shots that illustrate Emily’s introduction to the joys of chocolate at her first birthday party. The first tentative taste of her cake (by hand, I might mention) is followed by more and more enthusiastic applications of the treat to her now plastered mouth. The final shot shows a satisfied visage covered from jaw to hair line with her newly discovered favourite.

On the living room TV set the Jays were tromping Baltimore 11-3. I slipped in periodically to witness their explosion of bat wizardry. Yay, Blue Jays!! After the kids left I had a nap, quite a regular part of my afternoon, I confess, and then Mark and I walked along Bloor into what is now called Koreatown, the stretch of Bloor between Bathurst and Christie. So many and varied people were out and about lapping up the warm, sunny air, feasting in the general happiness of former prisoners of winter. We picked up fruit and vegetables, as well as some Korean specialties for Mark’s supper.

Still, throughout all of this I felt unwell. Main symptoms: a slight nausea and a feeling of general lassitude. The main downside: it put me off my food!! I am a person who seriously enjoys her meals and daily treats – the latter mainly of a chocolaty nature. 

You may find what I am saying to be silly and of little consequence, but to me the thought that this could someday be a feature of advancing age, a lingering dis-ease, i.e., the loss of a capacity to enjoy the simple, primitive pleasure in eating foods that one has enjoyed, was a real downer. There are so many basic facilities that we take entirely for granted until they are challenged. Being able to move about the world comfortably, to read (a capacity my mother lost years before her death because of advancing blindness), and to hear without strain the conversations of others and the sounds of music: all of the functions of our miraculous bodies that we take so for granted until they begin to fail gradually or in some rapid, calamitous fashion. Truly, we don’t know what we’ve got ‘til it’s gone.

Full disclosure: the feeling of being unwell past into history last night. It did, however, bring me up short and on to reflections of the importance of appreciating all that I regularly enjoy in this the middle passage of my advancing years. Further up-dates may follow as time passes. Be well!

P.S. To follow up with an earlier post in which I wrote about the torturous nature of a fitness class at the JCC: after mature (ahem) deliberation I decided to scale down those strenuous expectations of my body and have opted instead to begin with regular Pilates and yoga classes, one each day Monday to Friday. I have just returned from my second class in Pilates, a thorough work-out which has impressed upon me the existence of muscle groups of which I have been only theoretically aware. It is torture at a manageable level. But oh how happy one finds oneself when the hour is completed and one emerges into the spring air at Bloor and Spadina, filled with a sense of virtue and with no little pride that one's aging body can still learn new tricks.