Just recently turning the page on our annual calendars we find ourselves, once again, struggling for a reason to live until December 31, 2025.
This perennial move often takes on a life of its own because of what I call “special” people. Not to be confused with special people who take the short bus to school, the special people to which I refer are those who are quick to offer advice – “special advice.”
With the advent of the new year, folks far and wide use this changing of the calendar year as a monumental operation.
We used to manually write checks for remittance for utilities, gifts, car payments, and so on. Since the regular use of computers and cell phones, those paper checks are slowly going the way of the dinosaurs. The inherent problem with checks is that the date had to be filled-in manually.
The change into a new year brought along nearly a half-dozen paper checks sporting the wrong year thereby being “VOIDED.” Although not the monumental crisis some check writers would make it out to be, my sainted wife had a tried and true method to prevent such horror from occurring.
It’s New Year’s Eve; imagine the clock ticking down from 11:59 PM on television. Band leader Guy Lombardo along with his musical group, The Royal Canadians, playing Auld Lang Syne were jiving. The camera shot on television panned across the dance floor, and all were wearing festive cardboard hats; Guy gleefully swinging his conductor’s baton as though he was attempting to spear olives in a giant jar.
Comely women wearing sequined gowns, their male companions dressed in equally handsome tuxedos, thousands of balloons with attendees awaiting their release from netting attached to the ballroom ceiling, all quivering due to the din of the stirring music, until we reach the final seconds of this year.
TEN! NINE! EIGHT! SEVEN! SIX! FIVE! FOUR! THREE! TWO! ONE! Followed by an enthusiastic HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! screamed through the TV speaker. It was finally time to wish your significant other a “Happy New Year.”
Anxiously looking forward to a celebratory kiss, along with a stemmed glass of champagne, the TV revelers signaled it was time for some personal pleasantries at home. Suddenly, I noticed my sainted wife was AWOL from the festivities at hand. This only occurred once a year. Where could she be?
At the kitchen table pre-writing the year into the date line of her checkbook, of course. Such efficiency and commitment is rare. Yea!
Which is where this story begins.
Along with celebrating and massive cleanup from the prior night, desperately searching for just one more sip of flat champagne left in a bottle comes the flood of experts who use their sneaky tactics to “help” people like me out.
It seems as though those experts likely didn’t imbibe with Guy on television or at home with anyone other than themselves.
While weeping in their non-alcoholic champagne, they contrived some new way to irritate me, along with the balance of Americans, who suffer from an ailment: Leave me alone – I don’t care! syndrome.
In case you never heard those words before, they actually mean: Leave me alone – I don’t care!
I’m really old, old enough to remember when the Dead Sea was merely sick. Throughout my formative years, I spent decades with Guy Lombardo as well as countless nutritionists, doctors, nurse practitioners, clergy, crazy women, and politicians, all of whom have my good health and well being in their preaching. By the way, if you’re one of the aforementioned professionals reading this, thanks.
So it was with interest that read an article in The New York Post about a group of people who spent New Year’s Eve together to see how annoying they could appear in numbers. This, was the annual, expected news article on resolutions.
‘Annoying’ doesn’t begin to describe the information this gaggle of wannabe celebrities spewed throughout this article.
Photos of ultra-fit well-groomed twenty-and thirty-somethings graced the e-pages of The Post for this well-meaning article, “Can you pass the old man test?”
Some years ago when I was roughly 4-years old, I found myself with a new skill: tying my own shoes. It was a big deal for me because my Mother used to do that for me. But I learned a new talent which propelled me into tying all sorts of things to make my life better.
Eventually, I transformed my once exceptional shoe lace tying skill into a phase of style and comfort when I bought a pair of cordovan penny loafers. At the time they were all the rage. Wearing khaki slacks, a pressed button-down collared cotton shirt, along with my loafers, I became lost in a type of urban camouflage.
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| Stupid way to don your shoes if you don't own a chair |
The key here is that loafers do not have laces and require no tying abilities to wear them. It wasn’t so much the tying part as it was the sleek look that shoes without laces didn’t provide.
But physical trainers from the Old Man Test are, well, arrogant. They seem to think I wear non-laced shoes because I’m unable to tie my own shoes; they are wrong. But it’s the way they expect old farts like me to tie my shoes that chafes me.
I’m expected to lift my leg of choice, and whilst still in the air – balancing on my other leg – I am supposed to be able to tie a knot in the lace of my lifted leg. Closely resembling a stork, if I am unable to secure my laces in such a manner, I am deemed an Old Man.
Here’s some really good information for anyone – ANYONE: if you fall over because you’re standing on one leg, and subsequently fall over, you’ll likely wake up inside an ambulance. Questions about how you arrived here will get harder from this point while in the hospital.
Therefore, knowing better than to lift either leg up high enough to perform any function on my foot, I decided this was merely an exercise in futility. The tests only got better with more reading.
Akin to roadside sobriety tests, this series of ‘I dare you tests’ seemed to evoke a mockery of anyone unable to mimic the actions of these young pukes who like experienced some sort of gratification out of goading senior citizens into performing life-threatening challenges.
And so it goes. More strangers giddy about helping me and other old relics navigating our way through life are suddenly running rampant on the interweb. While I certainly appreciate the advice, I’ll stick to sitting down to don my footwear in lieu of splitting my skull open to prove a point.
To that I challenge those influencers to both get a real job and keep it for more than a gnat’s attention span. As for me: Leave me alone – I don’t care!
