I did not need to see my face.
Fatigue dwelt in me always, now. Oh—(barring such incidents in a single one of these tired cells as neoplasm, of course)—I would have exhibited my inordinate energy, my vitality, my apparent arrestation of age for another ten years or twenty or thirty—I might have been an agile old man, supple and good at games (with suitable allowance for the years) whose eyes never clouded, whose hair never fell, diving off tall dolphins to amuse my grandchildren and dancing gracefully with Ricky to the applause of other septagenarians and the infinite boredom of teen-agers. But I was old already—scribbled with the nasty information of years, apprised of slinking hurts, debilities, transient toxicities and nauseas that would increase and increase and increase—or would have done so except for that one, rambunctious cell.
Who wants to be old?
What man, in his so-called prime, fails to note his coming scenery—the bandaged varicosities, the braces, the cut bunions, the scarification and bloodless horn, the smells and tastes of himself, the thickening spectacles, the hearing aids, the pills and petit prostheses, the gouty overpall, the migraine and vertigo, rheum, sour burp, dyspnoeia, heart-kick, cracking, and the myriad painful impediments of urination, defecation, respiration, transpiration, the organic wheeze, the gradual invasion of death?
He wants to be old who accepts it.
But we, the people of the United States of America, have rejected it in toto: there must be some way to keep grandpa a gamin and mom nubile; meantime, let us pretend there is a way.
Millions for senescence and not one cent for sense.
So, okay, I said, it is happening to me with the short and sweet just around the corner and a good thing too, perhaps.
Or a bad thing.
A thing, I realized, of no import.