Stubborn Kind of Fellow

About now, the late, great, Marvin Gaye is looking down from heaven, shaking his head and muttering, “…what do you suppose that goofy white boy is doing, messing around with one of the best songs I ever wrote?” With all due respect to Marvin Gaye from one of his biggest fans, and a guy from the same generation, I’m just borrowing it for a minute to make a point. Old and stubborn are two words frequently thrown around just before the “cognitive decline” conversation starts. “Cognitive decline” is the buzz word of 2024, overused and over appreciated. When an old fart like me can’t immediately recall the name of a person I met for 30 seconds, or the gist of a two-minute conversation that occurred twenty years ago, it might just be (excuse the harshness of this) that neither the person, nor the conversation, was all that important or interesting. Couple that with the fact that I’m searching a 76-year data bank of people, conversations and incidents, and it may take me a minute or two to dig that out of the mental archives. It’s a medical fact that we decline mentally and physically, but there’s no reason to weaponize it and make it a deciding factor in a person’s worth or ability. Like everything else in life, there’s a trade-off with aging-sure, we need to use the handrails, we need to accept physical limitations, and we’re not as much fun as we used to be. On the positive side, some people excepted, we’ve become more relaxed, more philosophical, curious, forgiving and have developed a more laissez fair attitude about the world in general. We view a “senior moment” struggling to remember a fact from long ago with humor. We understand we’re closer to the end than the beginning, and the chase for fame, fortune and lifestyle is past. We’ve done our penitence for the things we’ve done wrong and walked away from a competitive lifestyle. We’re boring, we occupy our time with things and people that make us happy. As for the jokes about old farts and cognitive decline, we tell more of them than you do. It’s kind of like a friend of ours said when we ran into him at breakfast the other morning- “…fuck it, it’s not my problem, anymore…always good to talk to you…I gotta’ run…me and my bad back have a date with a bucket of golf balls out at the driving range…”