Eat Your Spinach

In my dotage I discover that I have acquired somewhat of an aversion to vegetables.  Parenthetically, I was interested to read in Mary Roach's new book Gulp, which contains everything you always wanted and also did not want to know about the digestive system, that vegetables are much harder to digest than meats.  In any case, last summer the husband of a youngish couple visiting us replied to my negative remarks about vegetables: "Charlie, you're in your eighties, you don't have to eat anything you don't want to eat ever again."  It seemed so liberating as he said it.  But a year has passed and I am still digging into my greens, my carrots, oh, all those things, because why?  because I am supposed to eat vegetables every day.  When we rise from dinner or any other meal, we tend to take the dishes to the sink, and any food worthy saving to the refrigerator.  When I get up in the morning, I go to the kitchen which is adjacent to my bedroom to turn on the coffee machine, and then return to make my bed.  That's what you're supposed to do.  I do not salt my food, I try to drink five or six glasses of water a day.  I brush my teeth carefully twice and day, and use a feathered toothpick on them all the time.  Why can't I leave the dishes on the table until way later in the evening, or even until the next morning?  I had a friend in a high level administrative position at a university and when I visited, his wife threw an elaborate dinner party for me, and after we ate she announced there would be coffee and liquers around the fire, and after ushering the crowd from the room shut the door, saying quietly to me: "Those dishes can just sit where they are until tomorrow."  We are getting ready for a trip to London on Sunday, for which I have been trying to organize us in the last two months.  I can tell you now the hour and the place of every lunch and dinner date; I have the printout receipts of every theatrical event we've booked into with notations of time and place, ditto for the museum exhibitions which required timed admission tickets.  There is a list of every telephone number we might need whilst in the United Kingdom.  We are dining before going on to the theater with a woman who is my coeval, and as a recent widow will deserve our meeting at her home and accompanying her into downtown.  The logistics are, if not formidable, at least certainly present in my mind, from the car and driver we will need to book beforehand to the two buses we will take to get her and us back to her house afterward (children of the Great Depression like us would have a very difficult time using black cabs both directions), and so far I have not worked out how to get us two back to our hotel, just hoping that the bus going in that direction from her place is still running late in the evening.  I can't tell if this oh so much tighter and grimmer attempt to take a firm grip on life derives from the increasing nervousness that the vulnerability of old age excites, or is it that I really don't drink that much anymore, and thus for the first time in my life am far, far more conscious of the hurdles or ditches one must jump than I used to be in the halcyon days of the extended cocktail hour once or twice a day or whenever, when we all were certainly not drunk, but certainly feeling no pain, and really not running a to-do list endlessly through our brains.