As I was showering this afternoon, some bizarre thoughts entered my mind.  It is fairly clear to me now that as we advance into old age, a role reversal becomes more apparent.
Let us take the example of major league baseball players who are performing at a plateau of considerable excellence.  When that excellence begins to fade, the manager or owner summons the ball player to the front office and informs him that he will be demoted to the minor leagues.  If he is lucky, he will wind up in the class AAA league, which is the best of the minor league system.  If he is unlucky, he will be assigned to a lower level league.  Old age is very much like the system that we use in baseball.  Once we have proved that we can no longer function at the higher level, accommodations have to be made and, in baseball parlance, we are “sent down” to the minor leagues.
There is nothing that can really be done about this phenomenon.  When the legs, the arms or the eyes give out, we are lucky to simply hold onto what we have, giving up aspirations to go higher.
Now so much for the baseball analogy.  We must now turn to other analogies having to do with advancing years.  My thoughts today turn to the layaway plan used by department stores.  The housewife who sees a comforter or blanket for which she does not have the full price may invoke the layaway plan.  That plan in effect allows her to make a preliminary purchase.  That comforter or blanket will be paid for by whatever the widow is able to scrape together from her Social Security check.  When the last payment is made on the comforter or blanket, the aged customer will go to the “Will Call Department” behind which stands a gentleman with a green eyeshade.  He will open the window and say, “What do you want?”  The customer will say, “I have come to claim my comforter.”
The man with the green eyeshade will say to the customer, “You are advanced in years and you will never use this comforter to its full extent.”  At that point, the man in the green eyeshade will slam the window down, catching the fingers of the aged customer.
Those of us in the advanced age department should have gotten used to this treatment long ago.  But that is not the case.  It is like a grade-school operation.  Let us suppose that you are in the fifth grade and every day you eat your vegetables and do your homework.  Upon graduation day, the principal will tell you that you are demoted to the fourth grade.  Old age is an exercise in not going forward.  But to quote Guy Clark, a country song writer, there “ain’t a damn thing you can do about it.”  So we do our exercises, eat plenty of vegetables, and don’t drink, but on graduation day the principal will say, “You’re a year older; therefore you must retreat a step.”
As long as this system prevails, old agers will have to content themselves with merely holding their own.  I have long since reached this conclusion but no matter what the logic is, when I exercise I try to outdo my last performance.  Like the advancing years, it is like a series of plateaus.  Much like the major league ball player, when the limits of one plateau have been reached, we are demoted to the next plateau down.
That is the way the system works, and it has been going on since prehistoric times.  But oldsters such as myself can do little about it.  We will have to accept Guy Clark’s advice when he says, “There ain’t a damn thing you can do about it.”  I wish that the reverse were true.  But the facts are that no matter how hard we try, when old age takes a bite out of your leg, about all you can do is to hold it tight and hope for the best.  And do not worry about the fellow in the green eyeshade who slammed the window down on the hand of his customer.  That, my friend, is the way the system works.
 
E. E. CARR
January 5, 2012
Essay 624
 
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This one is pretty sad, honestly, but I thought it was particularly well-written.
On my end, in the past week or so that this blog has been active, I’ve as of today read every essay that Pop has written in 2012. At this rate I’m going to get way way way ahead of my publishing schedule, and then I’ll have to reread them all when it comes time to post them here.
There are worse things.