There is a scene from the movie "Lethal Weapon 3" where Riggs and Murtaugh are struggling to keep up with the physical demands of their police job while battling the pains of middle age. Shouting out loud, repeatedly, "We're not too old for this", they try to vocalize positive thinking to change reality through sheer force of will. I can relate.
Whenever I discover a new pain in my knee or notice the numbers on my bathroom scale creeping higher, the scene from that movie replays in my head. I know that there are many "first-time events" in middle age that don't count as traditional milestones, but I'm also guilty of ignoring significant events that, to anyone else, were as bright as a blinking neon sign. It's a little trick of self-delusion called, "Denial." Maybe you can relate.
Get Off My Lawn
It had been years since I'd heard the sound of a 1975 Puch moped. I'd heard it all the time as a kid. At my grandparents’ house, the sounds of mopeds, motorcycles, and all-terrain vehicles were the typical white noise you'd expect to hear amidst the songs of whippoorwills and mockingbirds in eastern Kentucky. When I heard it again a few years ago, I would have thought it would have juggled some deep memory of my childhood that would allow me to float in the reverie of those nostalgic waters. But that didn't happen.
No, I didn't giggle remembering the first time I'd seen Greg Barnes flip his moped over a pile of coal. Nor did the sound of hearing that moped motor again trigger another favorite memory where I laughed at a short fat kid riding Barnes's moped near the general store. I can see his face now with that flaming red hair and freckles. His pudgy belly oozed from underneath his t-shirt. Grinning, he drove by, looked over at us, and smiled so wide that his eyes nearly shut. I heard the “nink, nink' of that goofy-sounding horn from the moped.
Aside:
I believe the engineers of the 1970s Puch mopeds must have had some qualms about the amount of self-respect a person would have to have to choose this moped over a motorcycle or bicycle. I don't know what the final straw must have been to piss this particular engineer off. I'm convinced that whatever the cause of the dispute, he or she deliberately hacked the horn on those models from the typical “Beep, Beep” you'd expect so as to ensure everyone heard that laughable "Nink, Nink" sound instead when the rider needed to alert traffic (or embarrass themself if attempting to show off.) Mission accomplished.
Two seconds later little heavy-set freckles swerved the handlebars violently to avoid an oncoming pick-up truck. The moped jerked off the road toward the train tracks. His little legs shot straight out from his flanks like the wings of a pelican coming in for a landing, as the moped floundered and bounced over the rocks and onto the railroad track. Shockingly he managed not to crash the thing. No, those fond memories didn't bubble up when I heard that "nink, nink" sound again. This time it was a few decades later.
With that startling and yet familiar sound, the person I have come to know as "myself" fainted and the little trunk monkey from my hippocampus sprang up and took the wheel.
My body vaulted from my chair by reflex and followed some pre-programmed instructions. My right hand yanked the back door open. My feet took off dragging me out towards a Puch moped that had entered my property by driving off the main road, passing through my neighbors' yards, crossing my front lawn, and proceeding through my unfenced backyard towards an escape route. On the small seat, two kids sat tightly squeezed, with their eyes bulging out of their heads, and legs extended to the side, displaying the usual posture of "stop this crazy thing" that one would expect before an impending crash.
Before I could comprehend the sensations of a fist-shaking urge, my hands began to clench and quiver involuntarily in front of me. My fists balled up and flailed about over my head and in front of my face like some old codger from a comic strip. I heard a strange voice come out of me with fervor. It shouted,
"Get off my lawn!"
And that was that. Just like Bill Bixby turning into the Incredible Hulk, I had unknowingly transformed into a middle-aged grumpy grump. But I dismissed that thought rather quickly. The wonderful thing about bias, you can convince yourself to believe anything to get over uncomfortable truths: which is another way of saying that something which is not exactly a lie is still conveniently something that is not precisely true.
High Blood Pressure In The Twilight Zone
My wife always dropped the boys off at the daycare center in the mornings (the boys ages were three and two years old at the time). I had the pleasure of picking them up at the end of each day.
However, before arriving, I had to cross this tiny one-lane bridge followed by a speed bump immediately on the other side. The double thump of my tires rolling over the speed bump was like listening to a record player get bumped from playing the Beatles at speed 78 down to 33.
Side Story:
One time when I was thirteen years old, I was foolishly running around and getting into mischief in the middle of one summer night until a series of bad choices, bad luck, and bad timing placed me in the middle of nowhere, on an empty street deep in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, staring down at the business end of a 0.412 gauge shotgun. That story is for another time. However the sense of complete helplessness in the face of imminent death and self-reflection of "How did I end up here," bundled into a web of complex emotions that I find difficult to describe”
Looming danger gave birth to the typical, 'fight or flight', you would expect. While utterly terrified, I simultaneously felt a sensation like having scales falling from my eyes, letting hindsight shine brighter than the sun.
The realization crashed home that you can't fight, can't run, and would love to not remain still, yet you yourself have made every decision willingly to put yourself right where you are and you have no choices whatsoever to change the situation. All you can do is surrender to the whims of fate and let the waves of chance toss you where they will. I have a word for this feeling, for lack of better words to describe it. I call it the "dread-quake".
Every day when I crossed that little bridge approaching the daycare center, the memory of staring down the barrel of that shotgun from my youth haunted me afresh. By some twist of fate, that little bridge with its hellish speed bump triggered that surge of helplessness and horror, like passing the signpost to my personal twilight zone. The association between this place of children's joy and games and my childhood near-death experience had locked together in an eerie fashion.
"Chloe, make sure there is nothing in the car that your brothers might want to hold, eat, smile at, play with, throw, or squeeze.
Hide all those things in the back, before they hop in.”
Chloe, do not tell your brothers that you have any leftover snacks in your backpack, because you will definitely either:
not have the same amount for both of them,
the wrong flavor of the thing that they hadn't wanted until
the thought of you having something they might want makes them think of the thing they really want, but you haven't got.
Or you’ll end up offering them something they don't like and really really want me to appreciate their resentment for having offered them that instead!
Chloe, it's best to try and not give them any ideas of any kind, whatsoever."
Thirty seconds after the “daughter, don't screw this up for us mission brief”, my stomach gave me the first indication of flight or fight syndrome experienced by all primates when they suddenly come into contact with a dangerous predator.
"When our hamburger-size ancestors lived in trees, it was extraordinarily valuable to be able to respond immediately to the potential presence of a predator. Many primate species have alarm calls that are specific for different predators. The first primate nouns were almost certainly those embedded in calls that meant, "Oh $#!%, big cat!" "Oh $#!%, giant eagle!" or "... did you see the size of that snake?" In this way, predators may have had a positive impact on who we are now, having given us the precursors of language, or at the very least, cussing."
I opened the classroom door and saw both of my handsome sons. I smiled and offered them hugs.
"Hello boys, glad to see you! Gimme a hug!" Nope. Instead, it's,
"Hold my backpack, Dad."
"Why didn't Mamma pick us up, Dad?"
"I want to stop and play in the water fountain, Dad."
I finally almost got them in the car and held my breath for the start of the ten-mile drive home and then it happens. As fate watched me cling to a thread of hope, it gave me one more turn of the screw. My youngest son decided that he didn't want me to be the one to drive him home, he would not sit in his car seat, and he would not permit me to buckle his seat belt. Three-year-olds are not supposed to have the strength and dexterity of an adult chimpanzee, but there it was. Nothing short of a jiu-jitsu master or a small hydraulic press could get him buckled into that car seat.
Aside:
The Graco car seat company should do a public service announcement for dads on how to deal with crap like this. Personally I think that the same gremlin of a engineer who got his kicks from screwing around with the horn sounds on those Puch mopeds took a turn working on the buckle mechanisms for the Graco car seats. For something supposed to hold together in case of a crash, they are the simplest thing in the world for a toddler to unfasten.
No amount of coaxing or bribes helped the situation. Nothing worked. Then I remembered to bring a spring-loaded locking carabiner that I quickly snapped across the car seat belt straps finally preventing little Houdini from getting loose. This triggered the Godzilla screams. His little swollen red face filled with tears, and he emitted a perpetual roar. I tried to calm him but my soothing tones were like gasoline on a fire. The only word I could make out from the screams was,
"NO!”
"Deep breaths!" I say to myself.
I cranked the music volume on my thirty-two decibel, noise-cancelling, earbuds and still couldn't drown out the screams." My heart beat faster, and I grew short of breath. This ten-mile trek home felt longer than a ten-hour drive to the coast. The roar was amplified by a choking cough as my son vomited from his screaming session. He took a breath and picked up where he left off. Fifteen minutes later, we finally got home, he turned the tantrum off and went to Mamma. I sat in the car, alone, wishing that I had a good paper bag to breathe into. From the corner of my eye, just out of my peripheral vision, I saw him again. Rod Serling stood in my neighbor's driveway smoking a cigarette and delivering a monologue to someone I couldn't see. I quickly looked over in that direction, but there was no one there. Some similar version of this episode happened every day for over a year. Let that sink in.
“Surprise!” My doctor discovered that I have high blood pressure.
"But that's normal," I thought. Consider my situation. I take daily vitamins, so what's another pill or two to help fix that? It’s just temporary.
“This is is just a season.” My wife reminded me.
“Taking more medicine has nothing to do with me flirting with a mid-life crisis or anything. It’s not because I'm getting older and out of shape that I need medicine to moderate my health. It's just that the kids are stressing me out, and I don't handle the screaming well.”
Cognitive Bias raises its head, and I turn away pretending I don't see it.
Skateboard Reverie
I'd never seen a real half-pipe skate park in my life until I was in college. Television and video games educated me plenty on the skateboarding sport of my youth. I was drawn to it the same as my friends. Without a half pipe, convenience permitted us to make use of tying a rope to the back of a go-cart and develop the sport of road skiing.
Coming to a Red-Neck Olympics near you!
We were convinced that fame and fortune, well at least college scholarships, were ripe in front of us for the taking. All we had to do was practice. Needless to say, the sport never took off. I didn't develop any “rad skills” for the skateboard park either by the time I finally found one at the age of eighteen. But I did discover, and fully appreciate, Newton's third law of motion.
In the context of a go-cart and tethered skateboard rider traveling at a steady rate of thirty miles per hour, if the former abruptly halts its motion, the latter skateboard and rider continue to propel forward at the same thirty miles per hour, ultimately hurtling towards the now static go-cart. This also fully illustrated my understanding of what defined an inelastic collision in physics. So, my thirst for skateboarding was fully quenched and my intrigue for science and physics was kindled.
This didn't prevent me from trying to explain to my seven-year-old son (a few decades later) how he should correctly position his weight on a skateboard when he wanted to learn how to ride. After several failed attempts, I watched him. He came to me with that downtrodden look and I knew it was one of those special moments when a Father imparts some grand wisdom and shares the moment that helped his son achieve something new. Suddenly I imagined I was Michael Landon, and this was a modern-day version of an episode of "Little House On The Prairie."
"Gee Pa, can you show me how to do this?"
"Sure son." I imagined. "That's what fathers do. Now let’s finish shucking this corn together. Then after supper, I'll teach you." Reality went something like this.
"Jack, hold my wallet and watch this." I put one foot on the skateboard and began.
"Put your foot here, and then lean into the board as you push off with your other foot." Two seconds go by. My son says to me,
"Dad, are you OK?"
The lesson is over. I slowly peeled myself up off the driveway and did my worst Yosemite Sam impression as I stomped back into the house hurling curses under my breath.
“And Michael Landon's not that great of an actor anyway!"
This ought to have been another exhibit in the mounting circumstantial evidence in my "grumpy old man" trial. I was convinced of the presumption of innocence and would not plead guilty without further proof, so I put the matter away. Again, I denied the existence of critical feedback about myself and reality.
The Bald Spot
You would think that it would happen slowly. If a hairline recedes, it happens bit by bit. I had this growing bald spot in the crown of my head so I couldn't see it. No one bothered to let me know about it until one day somebody made a joke. I grabbed a mirror and was horror-stricken when I saw I was becoming Friar Tuck. I asked my wife why she didn't tell me. She struggled to come up with an excuse.
“Oh well, if I don't see it, I can pretend it isn't really happening.”
So that's what I did. I stopped using a hand mirror to check on it. Again, life was giving me some important feedback about changes that I chose to ignore.
The Rain Puddle
It had been raining one evening as I exited the building where I worked. Making my way to the car, I noticed the water had pooled in several places. One such large puddle blocked my way to my car. I didn't think twice. A thousand times I've jumped over track hurdles, fallen trees, fences, or garbage cans. I took three quick steps and leaped over what should have been an easy hop over a puddle about eight feet in diameter. I didn't make it. As simple a thing as this, which compared to others I've already mentioned, ought to have been the easiest to shrug off. But not this time. I couldn't just say,
"Well, I had the wrong shoes on." Or,
"I just misjudged the distance."
No! No for some reason I still don't quite understand, this was the foolish thing that brought my house of cards crashing down. The facade that I'm just a young adult with mild anxiety and new responsibilities fell apart. All the pieces I'd ignored for so long suddenly fell into place.
1. Yelling at young kids to get off my lawn.
2. Blood pressure medication.
3. Loss of muscle mass.
4. I can't rock climb anymore.
5. I fell off the skateboard as soon as I tried to stand on it.
6. I'm going bald.
7. I have one of those geriatric seven-day pill holders to keep my medicine together.
8. I complain too often about politics and taxes.
9. I couldn't jump over that rain puddle.
I couldn't see it before, but Mr. Cognitive Bias had always been there, making me believe he wasn't. But I could see him now.
As I was walking up the stair
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
I wish, I wish he'd stay away.
Verdict and Inspiration
I can't perform the same physical feats that I used to, and my once-rock-solid abs are now a lot softer around the edges (a great deal softer). On the plus column, I have grown a little wiser with every new wrinkle I discover in addition to a newfound appreciation for early bedtimes.
Coming to terms with getting older reminded me how easily cognitive biases and denial can creep into our lives. Along with my list of medicines I also have to remind myself that taking a strong dose of uncomfortable truth now and then is likely more important for my health and longevity than my other pharmaceutical medicines. And if you too find that uncomfortable truth is a bitter pill too big to swallow, then try to learn to accept it before it’s too late and you discover it’s now a suppository.