old man - stories about me and others.

        Old Age by Dave Jaffe




     Marilyn is a woman who's always friendly. She grew up near Deep Cove on Vancouver's North Shore. She lived there as a child and a teenager in hard scrabble poverty. But her early life didn't warp her. Marilyn toiled for years in the Vacouver Public Library system. Now she's retired and enjoys her hard earned leisure.
    I bumped into her in a local library recently and she was still her cheerful self. During our conversation, I told her that I'm now 70 and am now an old man.
      "Oh 70 is the new 50," Marilyn said who herself just turned 50. She assured me that I had many years left to live. I think Marilyn and many others like her who think this way are wrong. Age 70 isn't the new 50; it's more like the new 67. In other words, I've got two or three more years to live now, than I would have had, if I'd turned 70 in 1992. But even so death looms ahead of me.
     Meanwhile my body's aging and my mind is slowing down.
    Most of the rest of this blog is about old age, my old age and the aging years of others. I hope you enjoy it. But I must warn you. It's not always going to be  a cheerful trip down memory lane.