By Myles Ludwig
Need a new set of knees, a barely used stent to widen that two-lane blacktop to your heart into a six-lane turnpike complete with HOV lane, a turbo-charger for your conservative Golden Companion, or hot Pride Pursuit XL4 ATR scooter?
How about a front wheel for your’99 Chevy Walker? Handgrips with neon plastic steamers for your high-speed Rollator or a new fluorescent green tennis ball to top your radio antennae in the Costco parking lot?
Amarillo, Texas has its Cadillac Ranch; the deserts of Arizona, New Mexico and California have their airplane graveyards (where planes go when they die). Vast hulks of metal that cost millions to build, now grounded in obsolescence, taken out to the boneyard to be shot in the head like Old Yeller … waiting for the day they will be hacked open like sheet-metal piñatas to get at the valuable guts within,” as Japan ruinologist Michael John Grist described these public storage cemeteries of the former supersonic. In Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, rusting ships are ripped apart by barefooted worker bees. The old Highway of Death out of Kuwait is littered with the mangled corpses of Iraqi military vehicles, a future waiting for Afghanistan. And Florida has its own junkyard of medically prescribed mobility aids.
When the archeologists of the future explore the middens of South Florida, these are the artifacts they’re likely to uncover. Imagine how they will interpret our civilization.
Why is this on my mind?
Because I have passed the point of needing reading glasses, the first indication that our parts are wearing out, an admission of entropy in the human complex of system. Teeth are next. I’ve lived through the Atomic Age, the Space Age, and the Information Age, and now stand on the threshold of the portal to the Age of Fragility.
For the past few years, I have been riding on a slow train that stops only at the waiting rooms of orthopedic specialists, physical therapists, imaging centers, primary care physicians and various medical gurus, shamans, palm readers and psychics. I have learned how to machete my way through the jungle of Medicare, hacking at the vines of supplemental insurance and chopping the trunks of various plans, which ones include Silver Sneakers and which ones don’t. I have learned the trick of using my cane to punch the button that swings open the handicap accessible doors as if I had cried out “Open Sesame.”
I am not a happy passenger on this train.
But I have begun to take pride in my handicap parking-accessible placard, to wave to others who share the same privilege, just as I used to do when I was one of the few Americans driving a racy foreign sports car or a small-is-better Beetle. I now inspect the cars parked in those limited spaces (never enough for the new reality) with a suspicious eye and smart-ass phone at the ready, eager to report a violation.
I have not traded my hiking boots for mobility boots, but I have trouble getting out of my car, walking up stairs. I admit to being frightened by looming escalators and elevators. Once taken for granted, these time-saving, energy conserving aids are now threatening and represent the real possibility of danger. I worry about my hips. I never thought about them before, except whether I was using them correctly in the merengue. It’s early in the onset of this “condition,” but it’s becoming more and more clear to me now that my golden years have less market value than Velcro.
A senior discount, appreciated at first, has become a badge of courage — or shame.
And the same thing is going on with my friends. Skype chats and face-to-face conversations are peppered with physician recommendations, stories of biopsies, remissions, recuperation, scans, discussions of the pros and cons of chiropractors vs. acupuncturists, whether it’s worth going through a “procedure,” which everyone knows is euphemism for being splayed open, and a long and agonizing rehab (not one of those 90-day wonder celeb rehabs) or living with the pain and facing the fact that I no longer have a shot at a quarterback slot on an NFL team.
Tests, lab results, rays of various wavelengths, regrets, wrong turns, bloodstream, high/low pressures, blockage, low-glycemic, gluten-free, plant-based diets (President Clinton has now put his past behind him and become as famous for his food intake as Jennifer Hudson) — these have become part of our daily conversation. Good grief, are self-lubricating catheters next?
We devour news of breakthroughs in pharmacology, worry about the potency of Internet-advertised Canadian drugs, count the pennies of our Social Security, refuse to face the fear the bucks will run out before the really bad stuff arrives, hope for the hurry-up of stem cell research. We think about reverse mortgages, digestive systems, categorize every ache and pain. We hate the TV commercials that tell us they might prolong our lives or end them as a side effect.
I will refrain from quoting Bette Davis’s well-known axiom, but I can tell you that you’ve got to be at least Boston Strong to survive this condition. Century Village is beginning to look like a good idea.
We have become our parents.
Myles Ludwig is a media savant living in Lake Worth.