Category: Senior Citizens

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Things I ask myself now, at 69, before getting on the floor:

1.) Is what I am going to do on the floor worth the effort to get off the floor when I am done?

2.) Is there anything near that I can use to leverage myself off of the floor when I am need to stand up?

3.) Can this wait until there are more things on the floor that I need in order to maximize my floor experience? Honestly, why pick up an errant spoon when you can wait for the knife and fork to fall later.

4.) Can this wait until a more youthful friend (say late 50’s) shows up and I can casually ask them to help me like I just noticed it now?

5.) Will anyone really notice if I don’t do what needs to be done of the floor? A good kick towards the couch will hide anything you don’t really need to immediately retrieve.

6.) Is there a pillow within grabbing distance so if I have to stay longer on the floor than necessary I can, at least, be comfortable?

7.) Do I have my cell phone in case I find myself unable to get off of the floor?

8.) Do I have enough clothes on so that nobody, particularly me, is embarrassed if I need to call someone to get me off the floor?

9.) Should I leave the door unlocked so the person who is rescuing me has easy access to my apartment?

10) Why is it that everything I need right now is on the floor?

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A senior moment that keeps recurring in my life is misplacing things. I lose my glasses the most. My eye sight is actually pretty good which enables me to ramble around the house without them. So, unless I have a pressing need for them, like watching television, I go without them.

I try to put them in the same place every night before I go to bed. The problem comes when I take them off earlier in the day for some seemingly benign act like rubbing my itchy eyes and forgetting to put them back on. At this point, they are lost. I go looking for them but without my glasses. This sometimes proves an impediment to finding them because instead of seeing the room clearly, there is a bit of blur obscuring everything.

In the past, I would just get my spare pair of glasses and wear them until I found them.

This worked pretty well until recently. I bought a new pair of glasses. The day I bought my glasses I was overwhelmed with the number of choices I had — there were hundreds of potential frames. This paralyses me. The more choices I have, the more difficult it is for me to come to a decision. So, I thought, well Tom you liked your present frames, just get a pair of frames that looks like the old ones you have. Genius, right? I got the exact same frame.

As we all know, the road to Hell is paid with good intentions, it has actually made it worse for my search for glasses.

Since I misplace my glasses on almost a daily basis, I constantly am putting on my spare pair. When the old pair and the new pair looked different, I could easily determine which pair of glasses I should be wearing when I stumbled across them. I would put on the new pair and return the old pair to my cram packed junk drawer until I need them again.

Now, so I just put on my old glasses which work until I stumble across my new ones. This would work if I also kept better track of my old glasses but I don’t. So, much to my chagrin, I will misplace my glasses and when I go to the junk drawer, the spare pare is missing. Which means instead of wearing my new pair, I was already wearing my spare pair and now, instead of looking for one pair of glasses, I am looking for two pairs of glasses.

Worse still, I don’t know which is my old pair and my new pair when I do find a pair of glasses because I didn’t think to check if there was anything that would differentiate the two pairs, I don’t know which pair I am holding — the old pair or the new pair.

As I am reading this back, I am thinking why am I writing about such a trivial matter. Then I think, wait a minute, this is important. As a Senior Citizen, this is how I spend a large portion of my day — looking for shit I can’t find.