Aging Gracefully

I am in a battle of sorts with my wife. Actually, it’s all in good fun, but sometimes things can escalate to full-fledged war. Our conflict is who between the two of us is getting older and showing the signs of aging. Between you and me, my wife is a beauty and has the health and looks of a woman much younger than her chronological age. She’s a “10” in my book, whereas I scale at around a low “three.”

Still, we keep things lively by egging each other on about getting older. The fight is not really fair as she can joke about my getting old all she wants, but if I say something about her getting old I’m in the doghouse alongside our pooch Buddy. Occasionally, though, I can get my verbal jabs in, especially when she opens the door. Lately I’ve been complaining a lot about little things.

I can’t seem to understand why if my wife, daughter and even my mom use a Kleenex, they don’t dispose of it right away. I’ll find these crumpled little balls of tissue all over the house – even within inches of an open garbage can. So as I go around collecting these wads, I grumble. My wife says I’m acting like an old man.

The other week my poor wife somehow strained her lower back. I’m very sympathetic to it, but she jokes about how she feels like an old woman. Well, I made the mistake of joking about it when she asked me to do something because her back hurt. Whatever I said had the phrase “old lady” in it, so I was in hot water. She sent me out of the house, so I decided I would weed our front yard by hand. I waited for her to cool off, so it was about three hours before I stopped weeding. When I stood up I found that my neck was strained and I could barely move. I went back into the house and climbed onto the couch next to her, explaining my new ailment. The next few minutes we sat there in silence both nursing our aching bodies. We looked at each other and started cracking up. Our 14-year-old daughter came out of her room to see her mom and dad acting like a pair of geezers. She whipped out her smartphone and started texting someone, and walked away saying, “You guys are pathetic!”