Grow Old Along With Me, The Best Is Yet To Be

The odd part of working out with my trainer is the understanding, like it or not, that I am actually deteriorating.  The trainer would not for a minute buy that statement, he is outrageously cheerful and optimistic at all times, not just about me and my physical well being but life in general.  He has confessed obliquely to a youth spent in the worst war-like gangs of the Bronx, so I suppose everything is on an upward course as far as he is concerned. He is in perfect shape, handsome, happy, the same age as my older son, a divorced man with a rolodex of babes to call on, not unlike my son, come to think of it.  He is forever complimenting me on my performance in our training sessions. But I can tell perfectly well that I am in fact going down hill.  Yes, I am recovering from open heart surgery, look years younger everyone says, know myself that the blood flowing so newly vigorously through my arteries is giving me pep and intellectual thrust.  But there it is: I am growing increasingly old and feeble.  Old and feeble, what dreadful words!  Old, yes, I know the new idea is that we are only as old as we think, or is it feel?  Well, let's see.  For one, I am so terribly unstable.  I am going to New York on Friday and the recent photos in the Times of the crowded subway platforms makes me realize that I cannot go down into that with my cane, nor can I easily go through Times Square by myself to a performance of a play.  The crowds and their back packs or the baby carriages produce an obstacle to safe walking that is a calamity.  I think of Beckett's play Happy Days I simply cannot muster up Winnie's cheer, much more prefer thinking of Yaweh telling Moses that for the mistake of striking the stone instead of talking to it he would be denied ever to cross over into the Promised Land.  Isn't that sort of the truth about life and better to know it than sit in sand yammering away as one slowly sinks deeper and deeper?  I have never been fond of Beckett: too many gloomy home truths that we all know only too well.  Waiting For Godot, I've seen all the great productions,for instance, the original one with Bert Lahr, and then John Wood, and Robin Williams and Steve Martin, and so on and so forth.  Beckett resists interpretation, and he is right.  The play is an exercise in waiting, and as such, a moment of existence made special, that never ending pointless being on hold for nothing.  I find the play obvious.  I guess I'll go with Bette Davis in "Now Voyager" when she asks "Let's not ask for the moon. We already have the stars"