I'm in better shape than I thought

I had the odd experience yesterday of suddenly feeling remarkably young and healthy. I decided recently to go looking for a new primary care physician and, as long as I was doctor shopping, to seek out a geriatrician. After all, I'm a geezer now. It made sense to go looking for a physician who specializes in taking care of old people. People can try to put a positive spin on aging, make ridiculous statements like 60 is the new 50, and talk like they're going to live forever, but the reality is that once you hit your 60s you can no longer claim to be "middle-aged." You're old.

And you start feeling old. You wake up some days with assorted aches and pains and you haven't even done anything yet. You get nervous when you have to get up on a step stool to get something off a high shelf because the idea of falling is getting scarier and scarier. You can feel yourself sliding into that broken hip demographic. It's hitting you more and more than you're not just old, you're elderly. And then you walk into the waiting room at the geriatrician's office.

Holy wah, I'm young again. No walker, no cane, no oxygen bottle in tow, no one hovering by my side making sure I don't fall over . . . suddenly I am apparently the healthiest person in the room. It felt . . . odd.

As for why I went seeking a new PCP, among other things the doctor I had been seeing had mentioned that she's not happy with the weather here on the tundra. I got the distinct impression that as soon as her contract with the local clinic is up, she was going to disappear over the horizon to a warmer climate. I was due for an annual check-up so decided it was a good time to make the switch. I've got to drive farther, but I think it's going to be worth it.

The doctor, incidentally, affirmed I am in good shape in general, although (no surprise) I should establish a formal exercise routine. I figure that if I've gotten to the age I am now without incorporating a formal exercise routine into my daily schedule, it's not likely to happen in the future, but you never know.

Welcome to Geezerville

It's official. We're old. The S.O.'s "Welcome to Medicare" brochure was in the mail yesterday. I'm not sure why it should feel like a surprise, because from about age 50 on there's one reminder after another that time is moving on, starting with the invitation to join AARP, then the senior citizen discount being offered without you asking for it, and, most depressing of all, looking in the mirror and seeing your grandmother (or grandfather) staring back at you.

Weekend reading

I started another Laurie R. King book last night, The Moor. It's part of King's Mary Russell series and feature Sherlock Holmes in the years after he retired and became a rural beekeeper. Mary Russell is a young woman in her mid-teens when she first meets Holmes. Holmes, of course, is a heck of a lot older, although, as King makes clear, not elderly. She suggests that Holmes was actually much younger than Conan Doyle's accounts of his exploits made him appear, probably because she recognized that if she made him too old in her own books it would be hard to keep him believable. A middle-aged man might be plausible as a hero; someone's who slid over the geezer line into "you kids get off my lawn" territory is not.

I think the first one I read in the series was The Beekeeper's Apprentice. I was dubious -- I've read a number of books where authors attempted to use the Sherlock Holmes character and didn't do a particularly good job with the effort. In the end, King did well enough that I went looking for other books by her, including another series set in modern day San Francisco, but I still have some reservations about the whole Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes thing. The plot lines are interesting, the characters are fleshed out enough to feel like real people, the historical backdrop is obviously thoroughly researched . . . but there's that whole May-December romance thing.

It isn't that I don't believe a woman, particularly a young woman, could exist who could actually think circles around Holmes and be as intellectually detached as him -- a meeting of like minds, so to speak. I can understand two seemingly very dissimilar people discovering that they're actually perfectly matched. I'm just thoroughly creeped out at the moment by the age thing.

Of course, I may be noticing it more than I usually do when reading a Mary Russell mystery because I just finished The Wives of Henry VIII. Reading descriptions of Henry Tudor in hot pursuit of a nubile bride, someone who could give him sons, is enough to evoke shudders in any reader. Antonia Fraser quotes from documents (letters, diaries, and even official legal records) that make it clear that by the time Henry was married to wife #4 --Ann of Cleves -- the only way he could perform was to be with a woman so young she barely qualified as an adult. An amazing amount of documentation exists giving explicit details of the king's sex life, or lack thereof. By the time he's in his 40s he's pretty adamant about expecting a girlish virgin in the bed, and Ann didn't fit the model. She wasn't petite, her breasts weren't perky, and she was pushing 30, something that hadn't bothered him in the abstract while the negotiations for the marriage were in progress, but obviously hit home once she arrived in England.

Followed reading about Henry's messed up love life with watching the news and seeing John McCain having applesauce accidents in supermarkets, and older men are looking very creepy indeed.