To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage, that began without harm, scatters into debris on the shore, and a friend from school drops cold on a rocky strand. If a new love carries us past middle age, our wife will die at her strongest and most beautiful. New women come and go. All go. The pretty lover who announces that she is temporary is temporary. The bold woman, middle-aged against our old age, sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand. Another friend of decades estranges himself in words that pollute thirty years. Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge and affirm that it is fitting and delicious to lose everything.
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Heh, we grouchy old men do have some tales and memories. A number of women, one at a time, somehow woke up parts of me I didn't know existed. But for them, I might still be who I was before they came along. Perhaps old men, and old women, don't look forward much to coming attractions, like we once did. I tend to wake up mornings wondering why I'm still here? The Mother Ship used to abduct me and then grow tired of me and bring me back, until they figured out it wasn't worth their trouble. The Smithsonian then captured me and stuck me in a room with other grandfossils for what seemed like aeons. Then, I got lucky and sweet-talked and ruckused them into letting me out during the daytime to roam around. Lumbering toward the White House, where I'd seen on CNN and FOX were only slightly edible creatures called politicians, I snuck behind a large bush and gnawed off my right hind leg to which the zoo keepers had fastened a tracker. I've been roaming loose ever since, keeping an ever watchful eye over my hindquarters for bounty hunters.
O my gosh