Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 28, 1994 TAG: 9403290002
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joe Kennedy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
With the rest of us, it's the eyes. And the hair. And the energy. And the endurance. And the svelte, athletic-looking waist. And the taut skin around the face.
And a Bean catalog of other qualities we took for granted in the days when we were too young, or too dumb, to know they wouldn't last forever.
``I've always been so proud of my eyesight, and sort of vain about it,'' a friend of mine said the other day. In the past year or so, he began to notice a fuzziness when he read. When his arms became too short to move the page far enough away, he surrendered to eyeglasses. They work fine, as long as he remembers to take them with him. The day we spoke, he had left them home, making his note-taking at a morning meeting a hit-or-miss proposition.
A guy in his late 40s told me he gets injured more easily than he used to playing racquetball and other sports, and recovers more slowly. He's had bouts of back trouble. But he knew he was middle-aged when he realized he'd lost interest in ogling the young models in Sports Illustrated's annual swimsuit issue. They reminded him of his daughters, he said.
A third friend told me a whole series of things clued him in to the end of his youth, among them the barber's asking if he should trim the hair in his ears, younger people's calling him ``sir'' and his own willingness to participate in conversations about diets and operations - subjects he used to tease his mother for dwelling on.
It's happening, folks. We're getting up there. The signs are everywhere.
``Most people tell me they feel differently,'' says Lu Grove, an internal medicine specialist at Lewis-Gale Clinic in Salem. ``They're not as energetic.''
This is especially true of people who don't exercise, and who gain weight, smoke or drink too much for their own good.
The key to staving it off, says Paul Dallas, a physician at Roanoke Memorial Hospital, is to stay active. That doesn't mean killing ourselves by running in ultramarathons or rowing our boats to England. Walking, gardening, stretching exercises - all of these, combined with healthy eating habits and avoidance of tobacco and alcohol, can help us build muscle, increase endurance and decrease our cardiac risk factors.
Life wasn't supposed to be this hard. When we were growing up in the '50s and '60s, we thought we'd stay young forever. Sure, we had parents who hit their 40s and turned into nap-taking, TV-watching kumquats, but that was their choice, wasn't it?
We were going to jog into our graves - until our joints gave out. We were going to retain our shapely physiques - until gravity did its work. We were going to dance all night - until the government put something in the water that robbed us of our stamina and sent us straight to bed. That's my theory.
Sometimes, people tell Grove they can't do what they used to do. He asks, ``Why do you think you should be able to?'' - especially if they've abused their bodies. Fitness seems like a craze, but he figures no more than 10 to 15 percent of his patients get regular cardiovascular exercise.
Do you mind if I sit down?
Not only that, he says, but the glorious mist of suburban affluence in which many of us were reared has given way to harder work, longer hours and more stress, often for both parents in a family, not just one. Or for the single parent, who doesn't have a partner's regular help.
Add to this some topics for another day, like how to save for college tuitions, how to cope with the deaths of friends and acquaintances and how to accept that yes, somebody else is going to be chairman of the company, and no, you'll never have a hit record, and you've got a recipe for prolonged disillusionment, at the very least.
From what I've seen and heard, the best medicine is regular medical checkups and a firm decision to throw yourself into more immediate things - like coaching kids' sports or working on community projects - while still taking time to exercise.
Even then, we can't escape the signs. A few summers ago, I went with the choir of a little church in Catawba to a hymn sing at a church in New Castle. There were about 10 of us, ranging in age from the early 20s to about 80. We listened to some other groups and then we sang some of the good old songs, all together and in different configurations.
At one point, a young woman and I paired up to sing ``Just a Closer Walk with Thee.'' It was fun. People seemed to appreciate it, and I felt pretty vivid, if you know what I mean - until after the program, when one of our longtime church members climbed in the van for the ride home.
``I want to tell you this before I forget,'' she said, turning to me. ``I was talking to a friend of mine and she was telling me how much she enjoyed our singing, and she especially wanted to know who were the father and daughter who sang `Just a Closer Walk with Thee.'''
Father and daughter? People laughed so hard I thought the van would tip over.
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