Funny, I don’t feel old

Somebody asked me my age the other day while I was volunteering at the Healthy Harvest Box “pack-in”. I actually had to stop and figure it out.

You see, I don’t think about my age every day. And when forced to—such as on those awful occasions when a young person addresses me as Sir, or those other slightly more encouraging times when a clerk will offer me the pensioners’ discount—I realize that I’m still thinking like a young man.

Actually, my mind set is probably stuck in the teens, but never mind that. The point is, we should all stay young in our minds and hearts—shouldn’t we? I mean, to put a positive shine on a usually negative spin that does help one to cope with such things as the arthritis pain, and all those other pesky little nemeses (okay, gremlins) that visit upon us and try to slow us down. Anything to keep them from becoming a nemesis!

That means, for one thing, that we should be doing mental exercises all the time. The usual ones all help: Reading mysteries and trying to figure out whodunit before the author reveals the truth; doing crossword puzzles—or any other kind of puzzle we can lay our hands on.

Another recommended trick is to exercise the memory. Every day. Call up your family’s list of phone numbers, then check them. Pick a poem and memorize it. Find someone—perhaps your care companion—to share it with. In any case, poetry is bound to bring you joy by its own merits.

That exercises the old brain muscle, keeps it alert, keeps us young, same as physical exercises do.

Well, we all know this, don’t we? But do we do it? That is the question.

Here’s one my older brother used to do as he drove down the highway. He would read the license plate of an oncoming car (they were mostly all numbers when he was young) and manipulate them. He would add the digits, subtract them, multiply them and divide them, even reduce them to a single digit—all before the next license plate appeared before him.

As for me, I had trouble adding. When I was in high school, I bought into that stupid myth about math being difficult and actually repeated that equally stupid mantra: “I hate math.” To be redundant, how stupid! Anyway, I worked for the Co-op Store then, but because I was so slow at adding, the boss and head clerk were loath to let me wait on customers. When they did, Mary, the head clerk, always checked my bill total.

This, believe it or not, was before the calculator, and we didn’t even have an adding machine. The cash till rang up the dollars and cents the an old typewriter works—digit by digit—and it had no idea how to add either. We wrote out all orders in little order books then and added the numbers in our heads.

So I went home and spent some time jotting down columns of figures and adding them, then checking my answers. To do a head clerk check, I added them again. I wasn’t satisfied that I’d got it right until I got the same answer three times.

Once I got good at figuring two columns—that was adding up the double column once and adding down to check—I went to three columns. When I could add those up all at once instead of a column at a time, I moved on to the full four columns of dollars and cents.

Then came the day when we were swamped with business and the area hermit came in for his six-month supply. The boss and Mary were fully booked with customers. I served him. I added up page after page of figures.

Mary checked them. She took longer than I had to add them in the first place. Then she checked them again. Then all commerce came to a halt while she had the boss himself tote up the figures.

I was correct.

I can’t tell you how much that did for my self-esteem.

So now it’s your turn. Find something to make your brain dance.

People will love the smile it will put on your face.

--H. W. Bryce