Musings Of A Muddled Male

By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male

Am I Old Already?

      I was thinking that it was only yesterday that I was in high school swaggering around wearing a D.A and lookin’ cool.  Wearing a D.A., for those of you not of my era, meant that one’s hair was saturated in Brylcreem and combed back on both sides to meet at the middle in the rear so that the back of the head looked like the south end of a duck waddling north.  I would still be wearing my hair that way except that Ann, my wife, put her foot down immediately following our wedding vows and told me that I was forbidden to blow my nose in any hanky that she was expected to wash, and no greasy head was allowed to stain the pillow cases on her bed.  I don’t know if my mother was just kinder than Ann, or if she just assumed that greasy pillow cases and a used hanky were the price for having someone around to shovel snow. 

      I began worrying about having grown older when I received an invitation this past week to my 60^th high school reunion and realized that we will be a bunch of old people sitting around trying to talk about the good old days that we can’t remember.  I have already started studying my library of old high school yearbooks hoping that I will be able to remember names, but I suspect that my problem will be that I will be able remember names but not recognize faces.  I began to worry about recognition this morning as I was shaving and the face staring back from the mirror didn’t match anyone in my yearbook. 

      Have you noticed that as we grow older things that used to be supple and soft tend now to be leathery and brittle, or that men who once had a full head of hair now have bald spots but hair growing out of their ears.  I recognize that growing old has its challenges.  The thing I fear most about my reunion, however, is that Ronald “G” is still tough and mean, and I still won’t be able to outrun him.  If I could, I just might go to my reunion sporting Brylcreem, a D.A., and packing a hanky to show them that I am still lookin’ cool.  To translate that into teenager speak, “to show them I am still, like, lookin’ totally awesome, dude.”  The only thing holding me back is my fear of Ronald, plus the thought of Ann taking me down to the Garden City Car Wash to clean me and my hanky off with the high pressure hose before she lets us back into the house.