Part II
There are less calamitous ways of recognizing the passage of time. A man knows he’s a senior when he comes home late at night, and his wife is no longer suspicious. Or, he is with a group of various ages, and younger ones are debating about undertaking a project. One moans “I don’t know if I should do it.” Another says “Go ahead, you’re young only once.” The senior blurts out “When was that?”
The most alarming indication of age, however, is the day he opens the little black book and discovers that all of the telephone numbers in it belong to doctors. Doctors and seniors have a symbiotic relationship. They need each other. It’s like the bee and the flower. The bee lives on the nectar from the flower, and the flower needs the bee to scatter pollen so it can reproduce. It resembles the song of two generations ago: “Love and Marriage, Love and Marriage, They Go Together Like a Horse and Carriage. Dad Was Told by Mother You Can’t Have One Without the Other.”
Almost everyone agrees that modern medicine has done much for seniors. The increased longevity of today is due mainly to the work of medical science. I have had contact with all kinds of doctors and with generally satisfactory results. Recently, I was counting the various kinds of specialists I’ve seen over the years and believe the number would be eligible for the Guinness Book of Records. And then a the widow of a cousin in Arizona told me that in his illness they had 35 doctors. Well, at least they received bills from 35 doctors!
I’m so used to regular doctors’ appointments that the first day of a month upon turning the appointments page to see what is written in those little boxes and not seeing an appointment with some kind of doctor or dentist, I begin to feel odd, a little woozy and then rush headlong to the telephone yellow pages to the section titled “Physicians.” Do you realize that there are 72 such pages in the Dallas directory? A few of them are devoted to just one specialty, the kind that will modernize your face and restore its high school look. I then follow the advice of the telephone company commercial of years ago to “let your fingers do the walking.” Mine trample over those pages in search of a suitable doctor and often develop finger fatigue, even a sprain!
Tags: aging gracefully, E arte de vender con éxito, El envejecer con garbo, El humorismo, humor, La alegría de la tercera edad, La mente.El músculo, La mezcla (asociarse con gente), La tercera edad, laugh for health, Los Placeres de la Tercera Edad, Nunca lució o pareció mejor, seniors and doctors, three stages of life
