Midnight Mutterings | Olding

||| MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS. by JACKIE BATES |||

Nope: not ‘aging.’ There’s enough discussion, advice, and definition arguing about aging. However, for the rare one of us who isn’t already hoping to never hear the word ‘aging’ again, I had hoped to find a succinct definition from the web. I failed to find such a definition, but did read that aging begins in middle age and continues with a (hopeful here) gradual loss of strength and youthful physical appearance as well as sensory abilities primarily, sight and hearing, but sometimes including taste and smell. And, um, well, memory, which isn’t sensory. Aging apparently continues until death.

The internet is rife with advice about slowing the aging process as well as the physical changes in appearance. There is no shortage of ideas about how to look younger, sport a slimmer body, and organize oneself to never lose one’s keys or the shortest route to the the kitchen in the house where one has lived for three plus decades. Filler for your wrinkles, color for your hair and Botox if you don’t mind needles in your face. It seems to be all about pretending to the extent of one’s budget that one is not aging. Or at least one is putting up the good fight.

I’m assuming the end point of aging is death, but it may well be mental decline to the extent one cannot look after oneself in the most basic ways.

Well, I’m tired of aging, of fighting age until hope gives out in the face of reality. What I am is Old, and what I’d like to learn now is how to be Old without pretense of holding onto Youth who took her leave decades ago, and hasn’t given a single thought to returning. Ever.

So, what I am studying is how to be Olding with a bit of grace and some joy in the process.

It seems a reasonable goal to me, but when I turn to the web, the source of all information, I find nothing about ‘Olding’ other that it is a reasonably common surname and thus there are a number of buildings, programs, and organizations honoring the name Olding.

Of course it’s a shock, being old. I was basically given no warning. For years, even decades, I was the youngest, or at least among the youngest in any situation. In my natal family I was the last of four progeny. The youngest of the  cousins. As an early reader, I was a Bluebird even though I have always preferred crows, and would have been a proud Crow, had there been such a group. I even got to play clarinet in the school band in second grade although the requirement was grade four. I was a terrible clarinetist, and had no business in any band. I was never a good student, rarely turned in homework, I didn’t exceed in math with it’s dependence on having a clue what was on the board (besides my name in the ‘no homework today’ list).

Nothing changed until when I flunked the eye test and my fourth grade teacher suggested a visit to an eye specialist. (A suggestion that my mother felt was unworthy of pursuit, that I simply wasn’t making the effort, that my older siblings had no vision problems. I couldn’t argue with that until my friend Lynn got glasses which she let me look through, only to see that trees had leaves, were not just green blobs. With that momentous discovery I begin petitioning for glasses, which eventually came my way, though not without family strife and unfortunate repercussions. (It’s odd about myopia: I could often recognize people because of their eye color or they way they walked when their faces were a blur.)

I didn’t stay around long enough to graduate high school, and if there were GED’s available, I didn’t hear about any such thing. Which meant I graduated college a couple of weeks after I turned 21, and immediately departed for New York City where I was again, the youngest person where I worked.

And now, suddenly, it seems, I am usually the oldest person in any room or group, sometimes by far. There must have been a time when I was the right age for my situation, but if there was, I didn’t recognize or appreciate it.

And now I’m Olding, Aging is behind me. When I lose my way, it’s not because I’m senile (which I may well be). It’s because I have always had a rotten sense of direction, which I understand is common in nearsighted children without corrected vision. More on that later.

I have always preferred cats to dogs, but I owe my survival to dogs. Every day, when I lived in the middle of that seventy acres of trees, I went boldly into the woods every day, having no idea which direction the house was. And every day, the dogs came to find me and led me back to the house just before dark. I didn’t know I was lost, and I don’t think anyone in the family had any idea that I didn’t know the way home. I still get lost, usually geographically, which is one reason I like living on Orcas Island. It’s harder to get lost here as eventually I run into water, which gives me a hint. And I can read a map, which means I can, and have, ventured across the country more than once. Yes, I have been lost in the woods on Orcas. And no dogs came to my rescue. But if I were to get lost now in downtown Eastsound, which would be rarer than downtown Seattle without a map, I’m pretty sure my loss of bearings would be attributed to my age rather than my lifelong absence of a sense of direction. So it’s one more thing to think about while I’m Olding. I should hide my old flaws even as I develop new ones. For example, it might take me a bit longer to recall your name. (Or even my own.) I do hope there is a blog on the internet about Olding soon. Or I might have to start one. After I find out how one goes about publishing a blog, that is. I’d have to ask someone who is Younging.

And one last note: Recently, I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the offices of learned Ophthalmologists, and even a quite charming and eccentric neuro-ophthalmologist (although I’d never known of such a speciality.) And, oddly, a pediatric ophthalmologist. All of this was the result of some still unexplained double vision which went away on its own after some very expensive months and medical tests which revealed nothing.

(Probably just Olding and one more crappy gift from Aging.) But in the course of all that medical attention, I learned something remarkable which I’m choosing to pass on to you. Especially if you have contact with young children. And most especially if you became myopic in childhood So many young children have apparently good vision in their preschool years (not that anyone is actually checking) go on to develop nearsightedness. Often around eight or nine, someone notices or there’s a little eye test at school, and the kid get glasses, gets teased a bit or a lot, gets contact lenses in the years of steady progression until age 15 or16, until Aging requires cataract surgery, in which a lens which corrects nearsightedness is  surgically inserted. Otherwise there is no reversing myopia once it develops and progresses.

But that story is changing now, in medicine, in children’s lives, and I’m thrilled to see it. To begin with, children who spend a lot of time outside, have the experience of looking closely and far away, which they can’t do inside. That may help prevent some children from developing myopia (nearsightedness). To begin with, it’s important to understand that the child’s eye grows along with everything else. Myopics have elongated eyes, and they tend to grow longer between the ages of 7 and 14-16. During that time, a lot of ‘close work’ as in school seems to to increase the length of the child’s eye. (In my case, being an early reader probably didn’t do my eyes a favor as I read all the time, particularly in low light. Then at age eleven, I spent a month in hospital (hepatitis) reading all the time and never once going outside for a whole month. When I left the hospital, my distant vision was much worse and I was severely myopic.

Here’s a VERY long article about current research in childhood myopia. Even I ended up skimming and then not finishing it.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK607613/

And here’s a too short article about the same thing which is clear but wildly simplistic about a complicated subject. I completely disagree about consulting an optometrist. Definitely take you child to an ophthalmologist who works a lot with children. A pediatric ophthalmologist would be best, but they are as scarce as hen’s teeth. What you are looking for is prevention. Not just a prescription for glasses.

Now I have to go to sleep so I’ll be fresh for Olding on the morrow.