Family Squeeze (9 page)

Authors: Phil Callaway

BOOK: Family Squeeze

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Dogs lead a nice life
.
You never see a dog with a wristwatch
.

G
EORGE
C
ARLIN

I
t’s a funny thing, this getting older. Okay, maybe not so funny. But interesting. It’s an adventure unlike anything we’ve experienced before. For one thing, our bodies aren’t what they used to be. We have to stretch before playing checkers now. We get winded looking at staircases. To make matters worse, those same bodies have simply stopped taking directions. In fact, they’ve gone on strike. “Feed me,” they whimper, “and I will think of serving you again. Feed me large hampers full of cholesterol-stuffed ham and red meat.”

Since the age of three I have played ice hockey. But lately when I play, my mind screams at me, saying, “Go get the puck, you fool! It’s right there in front of you!” Meanwhile, my body hollers, “I bet Ed’s Diner will be open after the game. They serve those nachos with that cheese-flavored lard! Besides, there is a younger guy who wants the puck worse than me. Let him have it!” And my mind, which doesn’t hear so well anymore, repeats the words, “Let him have it”—and my body, which rarely follows directions, finally decides to. So I shish-kebab the younger guy with my hockey stick.

The forgetfulness problem is an interesting one too. Recently, at a
large gathering, I introduced myself to the same person twice within the space of three minutes.

“But we just met,” he said, this younger guy with a razor-sharp mind.

“Aha,” I replied, “I was testing you.”

Perhaps you’ve done something similar. You meet someone you haven’t seen since high school and want to introduce him to your spouse. You say, “Honey, this is, um…a dear friend of mine from…uh…high school. We were in, uh…a class together. I sat next to him three years in a row… Yes, we were best friends… He was best man at our wedding…and, uh… Do either of you need more punch?”

There are three things we need to remember when it comes to forgetfulness:

1. Our minds are like sponges, but they also leak.

2. The part that doesn’t leak isn’t of much use.

As early as ninth grade, our brains begin to accumulate junk—years and years of completely useless information—which includes jokes told during recess and the lyrics to seventies songs. Almost every day people ask me important questions about history, about the Christian life—sometimes on radio or national television—and though I am trying to access file folders stored in my brain since youth, all I can think of is a lyric swirling round and round, a lyric I am not making up:

Drop kick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life…

Straight through the heart of them righteous uprights.

Country songs are to blame for the mass migration of most of my thoughts at vital moments. I cannot count the times I have racked my brain for an important nugget of information, such as where a particular Bible verse is found, where I parked my car, or whether I brought my wife with me to the mall, only to find lurking there a song I first heard in the
eighth grade, something like “Folsom Prison Blues” or anything by Tammy Wynette. Just this morning I woke up to discover that “Counting Flowers on the Wall” by the Statler Brothers was going round and round as I shaved. I had not thought of the song for at least twenty-four years.

Smoking cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo

Now don’t tell me, I’ve nothing to do.

Perfectly good brain cells were wasted on these things, and if I could go back to high school (and there are teachers who insist I should), I would keep the radio off and study more important things, like how to remember the guy’s name who sat beside me those three years in a row.

They say that fifty is the new forty, that thanks to modern science and medicine and things like liposuction, we are taking much longer to look our age now. And they are probably right. This chart, however, which is based on a study I considered conducting, shows that the decades are distinctly dissimilar (a completely useless and redundant word I learned in high school and can’t forget):

In your forties	In your fifties	In your sixties
You have The Eagles Greatest Hits on cassette, LP record, eight-track, CD, MP3, your laptop, and your iPod.	You can remember the advent of the Sharp all-transistor desktop calculator, which weighed in at fifty-five pounds and cost $2,500.	You tell your grandchildren you saw Beethoven in concert and have his autograph but can’t remember where it is.
Hair turns gray.	Hair goes underground and starts coming out your nose.	Hair? I had hair?
You can remember where you were when you heard that Elvis Presley died (1 was roofing a house with black shingles).	You can remember and hum at least three Elvis songs and have several on gramophone records.	Pelvis? Yes, sit down and I’ll tell you what happened the first time I broke my pelvis.
You crack jokes about older people and doctors and rubber gloves.	Rubber glove jokes aren’t funny to you now. You wince at the sound of snapping rubber.	You try to remember doctors’ appointments and jokes about doctors and rubber gloves.
You stand tall for your daughter’s wedding.	You keep a chart to measure the height of your daughter’s children whenever they visit.	You shrink half an inch and add a little weight.
Your eyesight is pretty good, though you are beginning to hold restaurant menus with your feet.	You can’t tell the difference between 60 mph and 80 mph road signs, but the police officer won’t believe you.	You remind the officer of his grandparents, and he lets you go.
You see a girl across the room, but for the life of you cannot remember her name.	You ask someone nearby, “What’s her name?”	The girl turns out to be your spouse.

Some consider another birthday to be a
millstone
. I consider it a
milestone
, a reminder of the fact that we are one year closer to Home.

Perhaps one of the greatest benefits of reaching middle age is that I can look back through the years with a little wisdom. When I do, I realize that I seldom remember what I was told, but I seldom forget what I experienced. And what I have experienced is this: Through all of the bends and the twists of life, God has not abandoned me for a single solitary second. All I have seen through the years teaches me to believe Him for all I have not seen. It’s something I hope you and I never forget.

And I hope you are still sharp enough to notice that I had no third point about forgetfulness.

Midlife crisis is that time when you realize that
your children and your clothes are about the same age
.

B
ILL
T
AMMEUS

The years run too short and the days too fast
.
The things you lean on are things that don’t last
.

A
L
S
TEWART
, “T
IME
P
ASSAGES”

T
he thing about reaching middle age is that if you have any brains left at all, you start to realize you’re running out of time. Time to do things you vowed you’d do back when you were twenty-four. And so, one Saturday, you find yourself behind a sixteen thousand-horsepower ski boat being steered by a former high school friend named Attila, hanging on to a towrope, trying to avoid fishing boats and beads of water that smack you in the eyes like buckshot.

“What in the world am I doing?” you’re screaming, and Attila thinks you want him to speed up.

Every few weeks I get together with five other middle-aged guys for something we call the Circle of Six. It’s an eating group, really, though we founded it with grander plans. The group has been growing (pun intended)
for a dozen years now, thanks to some incredible cheesecake of our own making, and as we hit the middle years, I noticed that some of us are engaging in activities we wouldn’t have dreamed of back when we still had our minds.

For instance, one of the guys (I won’t name names, but I will tell you that Ron Nickel receives this guy’s credit card statements) bought a high-powered motorcycle, then sold it when he came within a whisker of crashing. Another took up hang gliding and limped to our meeting a few weeks ago, holding his lower back and making sounds somewhat akin to those of an overworked mule. (Again, I wouldn’t dream of telling you his name, but for the sake of this book, we’ll call him Vance Neudorf.)

We got to sitting around the fire, the six of us, talking of things we intended to do when we were younger but haven’t because we’ve been held back by time. Or our loving wives. Or our insurance agents.

“I’d like to cycle across the country,” said one of us. Everyone nodded.

“Garden with my wife,” said another. Everyone gasped.

One even confessed that he’d like to learn the ukulele and give concerts. I won’t tell you who it was, but everyone laughed.

Then came stories of parents who had grand plans for an adventuresome retirement, who salted away money for travel only to discover that they’d run out of health once they got there; they’d run out of time.

As I watch my parents age in the suite next door, I am reminded of time’s rapid passage. I guess we spend our early years wishing time would hurry up, our middle years trying to find more of it, and our latter years wondering where in the world it went. We get so busy with the blur of schedules and the stuff of earth that we neglect the celebration of today.

Time is one versatile guy. He flies. He heals all wounds. Time can be wasted. Time will tell. Time marches on. Time runs out. Everywhere in the Western world are reminders of time. We have clocks on our wrists and our cell phones, our stereos and dashboards, our street signs
and buildings. We dangle clocks around our necks, in our pockets, and in every room of the house. One day archaeologists will dig up our stuff and say, “Hey, they must have worshiped these things. Stand back, this one’s still ticking.”

I’m told that the average seventy-year-old has spent twenty years working and twenty-three years sound asleep. He has spent seven years eating and drinking, six years in a car, four years sick, two years dressing himself, and about twenty-nine days slathering on mosquito repellent.

Some people are very organized when it comes to time. They write down lists of things they will do with their day. That way, they don’t have to spend time remembering things; they can spend their time looking for the paper they wrote the list on.

To avoid the avalanche of time, middle-agers:

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