The new wonder years

Sometimes I’m lucky to not have a full-time, live-in life partner/adviser/therapist.

About now she’d be after me to get a silicone brain implant.

Yes, the 50s are a challenging time of life. Just to get through the lumpy butt years, you need industrial strength Preparation H, FDA-approved pharmaceuticals and other preservatives.

That’s just for starters.

If you’re younger, you should care. Before you know it you’ll be in your 50s, too. At incredible speed you’ll go from the vibrancy of youth to being a nostalgia item. You’ll wonder if the light at the end of the tunnel is an approaching train loaded with preservatives.

For those further along in advancing old fartiness, you can laugh about what those in their 50s don’t yet know, what’s coming next.

The 77-year-old father of the Wonder Woman, aka my girlfriend, laughed when he saw the title of a book I was reading, “Younger Next Year.”

The laugh seemed to suggest, “Just wait, Bozo. You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

The new Baby Boomer slogan is, Never trust anyone over 80, so I trust what Al has to say.

In the Vietnam War years, the slogan was, Never trust anyone over 30. Just goes to show how much perspective changes.

Several co-workers are my age, 52. I occasionally quiz them about aging issues to see if all this weird stuff happening to me — going deaf, getting ugly, needing a skill saw to cut nose hair — is unique.

The answer? Hardly.

For example, survival used to require a compass and a good map. Now it requires calendars. Loads of them. Whether electronic or on paper, the calendars remind us where to go and when to get there.

Otherwise, we’d be clueless.

We also develop a more urgent need for key bowls. Comedian Lisa Landry does a bit about the importance of key bowls, and how she occasionally hides the key bowl on her husband, just for fun.

In our 50s we forget things. We even forget the name of our own dog and what we sent him to the refrigerator to fetch.

The subconscious also seems to go as a person gets older. Or maybe it’s just getting priorities in order — work when you work, play when you work.

This past week I had been assigned to write two editorials. In the past I would have sweated them out in my subconscious throughout a weekend and more or less had them written when I sat down at the word processor Monday.

But much to my amazement, my subconscious was on holiday, all weekend long.

The point is, no matter how functioning changes as you get older, get up, dress up and show up. Good things might happen, especially if you remember to wear socks.

And if you keep the preservatives in the key bowl.

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