Good Health and Spirits

I wrote a draft of this post last winter when I was having my shoulder remodeled, but it applies again as now I go shopping for a new left hip. I'd rather have a new car, but I've gotten addicted to walking on two legs and want to keep on doing it. I bought a right hip four years ago, and it's running perfectly, so I thought I'd get another one to match.

Every new specialist's office is another chance to reveal your medical history, and it's turned into a different game for me in the last few years. The form starts you off with a soft question:

Do you characterize your health as __excellent __good __ fair __poor ?

Good, of course. Can't you tell? Maybe not totally excellent, but certainly good. I haven't had the flu or a bad cold for years.

Then the questions get specific: When were you hospitalized, when did you have surgery, which of the following dread diseases and /or symptoms have you had? Oh, just shut up already! I was fine until you started to pry and nag, and now you make me look as though I were barely alive. I'm still me and not some kind of invalid on all sorts of medication with a card in my wallet. Well, maybe I take some pills and it's easier to keep them organized in a plastic box with SMTWFS on the top, and maybe I wrote down a list of meds to carry with me so I could answer nosy questions from doctors and nurses ... rats, do you suppose I'm really old and infirm?

Nope. That's the old lady I catch glaring at me from the store window's reflection when I look up without thinking. She's a mess, her face all lined and grumpy. Sometimes she sneaks into the bathroom mirror, too, but I can usually chase her away by holding my head just right and opening my eyes wide. (Or by leaving the light off and not putting on my glasses.)

The woman I feel like is the woman my mother told me about when she was nearly seventy. "I just want you to remember that inside this old woman is an eighteen-year-old!" I think that inside I'm more like thirty, and my spirit doesn't yet have the varicose veins and droopy eyelids that show on the outside. My spirit is smooth-skinned and quick-footed, and can run and dance and wear short skirts and drink a glass of wine without a nap afterward.

But the spirit is living in a body that's ready to go to sleep (there was that glass of wine with supper). So good night.

(P.S. This got published twice -- not really, but when I published the draft that had been sitting around, it came in with last February's date and disappeared instantly into the archive. Writing and learning.)