Growing old before my far-sighted eyes

One of the criticisms of New Year’s resolutions is that most are unattainable. They aren’t reasonable. They’re hopelessly out of reach.

Take one of mine, for example. It’s either my last resolution of 2011 or my first of 2012 – take your pick. Resolution: Stay up until midnight to see in the New Year. That should be broken in exactly one week, leaving me either 0 for 1 for 2012 or 0 for 10 for 2011.

But this isn’t about New Year’s resolutions. It’s about another year and growing older, or maybe more accurately, another year and waving goodbye again to my long-ago youth.

I’m not saying that I will stay up until midnight next Sunday to welcome the New Year – something I started doing routinely for a good while since the age of 12 – but if I do, it likely will either be a fluke, an accident or an emergency.

My gosh, what has happened to us baby boomers? I remember a time in my mid-20s on a New Year’s Eve when three other friends and I stood on Bourbon Street in New Orleans and in a warm winter mist took turns pouring champagne on our wet heads the day before the Sugar Bowl. Man, I never felt so alive.

Less than 10 years later, on a New Year’s Eve, my wife and I rented “Hook” to watch with our son. It would be a nice cozy way to join Dustin Hoffman on the tube and see in the New Year. See? I fell asleep on the couch under an afghan. My wife nodded off in the easy chair. I woke up at 11:45 p.m., and the only one who had been awake the whole time was our 4-year-old.

And that was 18 years ago. This New Year’s Eve, I may chase a can of V-8 with some Metamucil at 9 p.m. and call it good. What’s the point of staying up to the wee hours since I’ve outlasted Guy Lombardo and pretty much Dick Clark.

It’s tough to admit now that 2012 approacheth, but I’ve got creeping old-man mindset disease. I’m turning into a caricature before my very far-sighted eyes.

One Sunday afternoon this fall some kids had the audacity to cut across the edge of our yard since we live on a corner. I was meandering in the driveway and most years I would have not even noticed, or uttered a “How are y’all doing?”

This time, it was all I could do not to yell out the classic old-coot cliché, “You kids get out of my yard!” It’s like those three were Dennis the Menace and his buddies and I was Mr. Wilson.

It’s times like this that make us 50-somethings feel old. It wasn’t that long ago when the wife was out of town that I was going to take the two boys to eat. Let’s get a balanced meal, let’s have a variety of choices, let’s go to Furr’s Cafeteria. I love Furr’s.

When I pulled into the parking lot, a floorboard full of rattlesnakes couldn’t have gotten those two out of the car. No how, no way. We’re arguing. I’m checking my watch knowing we could miss the early-bird special if we don’t hurry, but I finally relented and we fast-fooded it somewhere.

“You tried to take them to Furr’s?” Sandy asked somewhat incredulously.

Never mind. One of the plusses of Furr’s is it doesn’t have a menu, so I don’t have to pull back to read what to eat or fumble around for my eighth pair of reading glasses to read the not-so-fine print.

That’s another thing about aging. You can’t see any more. Even with contacts, it was like overnight, I couldn’t see the print in a book, couldn’t read a computer screen, couldn’t read anything. The print in a phone book might as well have been a gnat’s navel. I couldn’t see it.

So, of course, here come the reading glasses. Maybe you’ve been there. But glasses are scattered throughout the house. And the old line about “I need glasses to find my glasses” has an unfortunate ring of truth to it.

Yes, 2012 should be physically interesting, that is if the world doesn’t end as the Mayan calendar suggests it might. Then, again, if it does, who cares?

Will it matter all that much as hellfire and damnation descends upon us that I have hair coming out of my ear that now has a slight curl? That I can’t see anything within 10 feet? That what were once crow’s feet at the corner of my eyes now look like dried-up river beds?

No, it won’t. And really it shouldn’t matter even if the world continues beyond 2012. Can’t fight City Hall or Father Time, so might as well just accept it.

So I’ve decided to grow old gracefully, and that means no wearing brown socks to the New Year’s Day’s Resolution Run.

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