Last night I convinced my husband to watch Thirty Day Princess with Sylvia Sidney and Cary Grant (1932). As I age, I find it comforting to know that are a couple of dozen movies made before I was born. It makes me feel young. Though Sylvia Sidney looked so much like Drew Barrymore it was a bit confusing, and it was set in a depression - this depression or another? It gets so disorienting, the way history repeats itself but with a new cast. My parents were children when this movie was made, and they've been dead now about 24 years. My youngest kid doesn't have any memories of them, as she was three when they died. I realize that could happen to me, too, as my first grandchild is 21 months, and if we disappeared now she would never know us, though at the moment she thinks we're fun. You gotta love grandchildren - they think you're interesting and want to spend time with you - unlike the rest of the world. I also have a foster grandchild who is 4 1/2. She will, I believe, remember me. But her father died when she was 15 months old, so she will not remember him, and he was such an amazing, loving, funny young man. Life is not fair. Not at all. Do we ever get reconciled to it? I doubt it.

Memories are precious, and they slip through our fingers like sand. There is no container sturdy enough to hold them, and they float around drifting in and out of the atmosphere searching for homes. I think us older folk try to hold on a minute when they float by. We're like the volunteers in the baby ward of a hospital - holding the little fellow tenderly so he can know he's welcomed in this world - messengers for all the emotions and wishes and dreams of our race.

What else can we do - us old folks? I believe we are the masters of the incidental encounter with a stranger. That moment when you share an interaction with the lady in the volvo waiting room tapping her foot as she waits for her car to be ready. She turns out to be from southern India and you've been there eight years ago and it's a small world and there you go. Life has happened in the midst of old Newsweeks and car brochures. A body clearing it's throat becomes a woman who lives in the next town and makes her own puris. Without us - the old people who notice humanity and have time to spare - life would be a lot of dead air.

We wink at children a lot. Their mothers aren't noticing, being on the cell phone and holding the kid's collar with the other hand, and the kid wants to be SEEN. The wink tells her - yes, it's a drag to be held back from running through the store like a banchee and what's the point of a perfectly good slippery floor, if you can't try sliding across it? We're old enough to know the best use of our feet at that moment would be something that delightfully reckless, and if we were her mother we would take off her shoes and let her skate for the olympics. If we were her grandparent, we would pull up the rugs in our front hall and let her rip.

The thing about aging is the table conversation at home revolves around an inventory of aches and pains. As my doctor says - welcome to old age. Yeah, I know, he's pretty sarcastic, but at least he believes in yoga. Recently, every morning my husband sits down at the table, turns towards his right and twists something, yells, lifts out of his chair and says he hurt his back. This has become a ritual. He's always surprised, and I haven't any sympathy left in me. He blames it on our chairs, but I'm not likely to serve him breakfast in a barcalounger, which we don't own anyway. Now, his doctor has given him handouts of exercises to do, and he has those rubbery things that stretch something, and hand weights, etc. He has had all this information for going on 15 years. But he still gets surprised. That's what old age is all about. The surprise of it. How did we get to be this old, we ask each other. I thought I'd be dead by now, my husband said the other day. Me, too, I replied. We are not adequately prepared. We don't have enough saved. We have no ideas about what to do at retirement. Which for my husband is next June. I mean, first there was 1984, then 2001, and now there is a black president, and we weren't even supposed to be alive for the digital age. I'm beginning to think - AMAZING THOUGHT - maybe I'll live to see a woman as president. It just gets weirder and weirder.

Yesterday, I neglected an important aspect of my medicinal routine - the non-prescription drugs. In my case, currently, there is the seretonin (hair), eye vitamins (I have a degenerative eye disease, as does everyone else over 50), the calcium with vitamin D, and vitamin C. I've given up on the multi-vits and Bcomplex and a few other fads. It's like having 4 meals a day, but one of them causes you to burp a lot and feel strangely full.

One of the most challenging aspects of aging is that one's friends are also aging, too. And how do I keep track of dietary needs, deafness, terrifying passenger rides in vehicles manned by impulsive manics with cataracts, strange hair colors that I know I shouldn't comment on, and a bizarre emeshing with dogs and cats that used to be pets, but now one must send get well cards to and condolences when one "passes". All my friends have transitioned from interesting and maybe quirky to eccentric or downright psychotic. I'm sure this applies to me as well, but I can't see the forest for the trees. Not with these eyes.

One surprising thing is how our kids seem to think we have as much energy as when we were forty. They keep encouraging us to do trips that would have us hospitalized and think we can actually carry the Christmas decorations up and down from the basement. Well, technically we can, but the pain afterwards, the pain. Last time we flew to Morocco to see one of our far flung kids, my right thigh fell asleep on the plane and still has not awoken. And taking care of our grandaughter has us running around until we finally get her asleep, then collapsing ourselves at her bedtime. I must say, I always lose weight when she visits, but I'm a nervous wreck, because I KNOW I do not have the reflexes of her parents, and must compensate by focusing solely on her and trying always to have a hand to keep her from falling or be in front so she falls on me. She had one bad fall at the playground a few months ago, and when my daughter picked us up in the car after doing her errands, she was so busy reassuring me (I was bawling my head off) that we both forgot about the child in question. I'm too delicate for these bumps of life. I used to be tough, now I'm mush.

Old Age Day by Day - Day One

It is difficult to choose which day to begin with, as I believe I realized I was old in the middle of the process, somewhwere between denial and horror. Yes, I saw this creepy being in the mirro, but I have a small mirror and I can't get close ot it due to the sink and I never wear my glasses when I look in it, so it wasn't really disturbing. I knew I was turning into a n apple shape the size of the Rockefeller Plaza globe, but there are ways to camoflage the lack of a wist: long black cardigans, raincoats year round, and clothes so big you look lost in them. i'm so short that i still fit into the large juniors and petites, so I told myself I was still a callow youth. Being forced into plus size might have awakened me sooner.

then there was the dermatogist. We became intimate friends. I was in her office so often I began giving advice about her daughter. Things grew on me. Really strange craters and hillocks and topographical countries. I realized if I was ever in need of having my body identified, there were so many markers I was in no fear of an unmarked grave. Things got burned off, scraped off, dug out, biopsied. Sometimes I could sense my dermatologist was excited when she dug something out, but I tried not to think what that meant - a talk at a conference with my slab of skin on a screen? Eventually, I had a basel cell carcinoma on my leg, which was the least worrisome form, but she'd nicked a nerve and on a visit to see our daughter in Manhattan, I was in acute pain for all the miles we wandered above and below ground looking for the right subway, or figuring out what streets were missing on the tourist map. Greenwich Village, by the way, is as convoluted as those corn mazes at Halloween. I once stayed in my daughter's flat to help my son through a surgery and though they were a block and a half apart, I turned the wrong way at the corner every morning for a week. Somehow I could get back easier, because there was a video store on the corner and I always knew I'd gone too far and backed up.

Where was I? Oh, yes. The age thing. There's also the medicine. THough taking it seems by the label warnings far more dangerous than getting a heart attack or stroke, I am now on a statin, a betablocker, an omega fish oil pill the size of a football, and my thyroid drug. When I get symptoms now, I don't know if it's the drug or a dread disease, and frankly, I don't want to know. I have an old age health book next to the bed, and I self-diagnose, and will continue my habit of not sharing any symtoms with my doctor until I am screaming in agony. Because what is he going to do? Add another drug to the cocktail. As it is I have to rest on a daybed in the bathroom as I'm swallowing my meds. I can't stand up that long.

Now, I'm not saying aging is all bad. there are the grandchildren, senior discounts, the possibility that your adult kid will pay for dinner (though that's iffy and I always go to the bank first), and the fact that makeup now makes you look like a corpse, so a swipe of lipstick is all you need. I never liked the grooming thin, and was terrible at it. I never dyed my hair, and now, if I did, I would look like Nancy Reagan. Enough said. So the gray in my salt and pepper blob (kind of like a bob only messier), is distinguished. Well, they say that aobut men, so why not women?

SO this blog will be a day by day report from the trenches, and you other soldiers out there will, I hope, empathize or at least realize you'll never walk alone (Sound of Music with the big nun singing in a suspiciously deep voice). WHen you age your voices goes down an octiave for every decade.