The Good Old Days

I miss the days when my friends and I would all jump into the car and head out to known and unknown places, all very exciting and carefree.  I miss hanging out every Friday and Saturday nights, going to concerts or just hanging out at Mister Donut.  I also miss going out to Lake Michigan and sitting on the rocks by myself and meditating about life.  I knew there had to be more, but what it was, I didn't know.  We would do whatever it was young people did and enjoyed every minute of it, not thinking much about the future or what some things would do to our bodies or have an affect on them in the future.  We just never cared.  Now, of course, I wish I had.  I was very hard on my body, in more than one way, and now I'm paying the price.  However, if someone had come up to me in those days and told me to take better care of my body, I would have told them to "blow it out your ear," or something equally as repulsive.  I never liked someone telling me what to do.  I think now, after the many conversations my dad and I have had, I must have inherited all of those wonderful traits from him.

So sometimes it's hard to sit here and watch while the world goes physically by.  We take some things, such as walking, for granted.  When you can no longer walk or no longer walk without a great deal of pain, it's then that you realize what you once took for granted.  You never think about it - you just get up and walk.  And if there's one thing I really want to do and have so for some time, is to walk.  I just want to walk by myself and not be in pain. 

What brought this on is the fact that some friends and I want to plan a vacation together.  We were tossing up different ideas and one of the concerns was "Can Sharon get her scooter or wheelchair in and out of cabs?" and "Who will push her if she doesn't take her scooter?" among others.  So we decided to take a cruise, which sounds like fun, I've never done that before, even though my choices were sightseeing in Hawaii, New York or Bermuda.  But in those cases, it would probably be difficult for me to get around.  I think my friends were thinking a cruise would be easier for me overall and it probably would be.

When I told my parents what my friends and I were deciding on doing, the first, not the second, but the first thing my mom said was, "Well, you know all you do on a cruise is eat, eat, eat - that's all you do, morning, noon and night, (blah, blah blah)."  I said, "Ma, there's a whole lot more to do on cruises, I've seen brochures."  But she insisted that eating was the primary goal on every cruise.  Okay.  Whatever.  She is so obsessed about eating and weight that she actually asked one of the nurses at the doctor's office yesterday to weigh her.  He had to stop what he was doing, help her out of her wheelchair, and announced to the whole waiting room that she is 114 pounds.  You could see a little twinkle in her eyes and then she told me in a serious tone, "Don't tell your father."  In her twisted sense of body image, she thinks the less she weighs, the healthier she is, when in reality, at her age, she needs to gain weight -- and the doctor told her so.  I think sometimes she thinks she looks younger than she really is, but she has so many wrinkles, spots and sagging skin that it hardly makes her a candidate for a beauty pageant. 

I think she would have liked that.  I think she would have liked for people to fuss over her and say what a beauty she was, and how thin she was!  And I think that goes back to her childhood.  My aunt, her only sibling, was a cute girl and probably fussed over by my grandmother, where my mom had striking features and would have been considered pretty, but she was tall and lanky, and my aunt was short and petite.  I have a feeling my grandfather gave her the attention she craved as a child, but he died when she was very young, and she was left with a heart that was never the same.  I saw the anger and resentment she had toward my grandmother when she was alive.  Now, she in fact reminds me of my grandmother, a small, little body in a wheelchair and not making a lot of sense most of the time.  Not angry any more, though - just seemingly content with fond memories.  I hope when I get old, I'm like that too.  I don't want to remember all the bad stuff - I only want good memories.  Even if that makes me look lame, I don't care.  I want to be at peace and content and know I lived a full life with few regrets and lots of memories.