And so...

And so…

I was born in 1950, halfway through the century. I recall as a child wondering if I would see the turn of the century in year 2000, and so I did.

When I turned 60, someone told me I was entering “the youth of old age.” And that felt good, because it had the word “youth” in it. Now I will soon turn 69. If the sixties are the youth of old age, are the 70’s the middle age of old age? Will there be a midlife crisis associated with that?

Only time will tell.

Hard to believe that I grew up in a home without sewerage. We had an outhouse at our Baltimore County home. We had indoor bathrooms until I was 8, but my father bought a house that we moved to when I was 8 that was surrounded by woods and located along an arm of the Chesapeake Bay called Middle River. We could swim and water ski in the summer, ice skate in the winter, and play in the woods. But the trade-off was having an outhouse. Since my father had grown up in the hills of West Virginia, he did not see anything strange about living with an outhouse.

A big truck came along several times a year and pumped the contents out of the outhouse. The worst thing about it, to me, was the spiders that were inevitably hanging around there. The outhouse was located only about 10 or 12 steps from our door, but going out there in rain, in ice and snow, in the putrid heat of summer, was not pleasant. And so I grew up trying to drink as little liquid as possible so that I would not have to go any more than necessary. Not surprisingly, I was diagnosed as being dehydrated many years later. I think I was in my 40’s when the connection became clear to me. At that point in time, I finally started drinking more water. Luckily, I never suffered any serious health issues due to my dehydration. I started to have some serious head-spins that scared me into thinking that surely I had a brain tumor or something like that. But drinking more liquids quickly alleviated the problem.