MUSINGS ON MORTALITY by Tony Lopresti

Bruised Ego

My name is Tony Lopresti and today my ego took a hit.

I walked home briskly from an appointment by way of our local supermarket in my Upper West Side neighborhood of Manhattan. The warmth of the spring day brought a kick to my step. I wore a wide smile.

On a narrow sidewalk about a block and a half from my home, near a lovely sandstone Episcopal church with magnificent Tiffany stained glass windows, my tote bag of groceries on my shoulder, I approached two tall young men in conversation. Both wore hoodies. The one closest to me had his hoodie up and his back to me. The other wore his hoodie down, facing his friend.

The guy with his hoodie up began slowly backpedaling, veering more and more into my path. I angled my walk toward the curb to go around him. If we both kept the same pace, a tree would have forced me to step off the curb into the street in order to avoid running into him.

The guy with his hoodie down noticed me and tried to gesture with his eyes to his friend to stop or move. His friend didn’t understand. So the guy with the hoodie down whispered – not so sottovoce – “Hey, dude, watch out for the old man.”

The guy wearing his hoodie up stopped, turned, saw me and stepped aside so I could pass.

“Watch out for the old man…” Ouch.

I exercise, although the intensity of that has taken a bit of a hit since I got Covid – three times. The second time left me with Long Covid of the intestines. Yes, that’s a thing. No, it’s not pretty.

So I’ve sought, through my exercising, to build myself back up. But each bout of Covid, especially the second one, set me back again. Since 2020 I’ve been on a cycle of rebuilding, then Covid, then rebuilding. I’m not back to where I was. Not yet …

But will I ever get back? Despite my exercising, my body seems to sag a bit more each day. The muscle around my torso, under the skin, looks to be turning into cottage cheese.

I can exercise. I can stay fit. I can work to stay healthy. I can eat right.

And still, I am becoming an old man. It’s noticeable to others. “Hey, dude. Watch out for the old man.”

People tell me I look good. Perhaps they are leaving out the second half of that sentence: “… for your age.”

After Red Auerbach, famed coach of the professional basketball team, the Boston Celtics, turned sixty-five, a reporter asked him how it felt to reach that age. Auerbach smiled and said, “Well, it’s better than the alternative.”

Age will do what it does until we reach “the alternative”. If we’re lucky, if we have a good genetic makeup, the effects of age will happen slowly. An extra wrinkle here, a sag there. An unanticipated joint pain. An unfamiliar stiffness when rising from a chair. Strange little abdominal sensations after a nice meal. A shocking loss of breath at the top of a flight of stairs. Small signs that youth is long gone. That middle age is far in the rearview mirror.

Younger people offer seats on the subway – they were brought up well – and sometimes you accept. You see your reflection as you pass a storefront window and you notice a bit of a stoop. You straighten yourself up right away.

You get home after ten and it seems late. Once, ten was when you started to go out.

You look in the mirror and you see your parents.

A 1970s comedy troupe had a funny sketch about a doctor describing a terrible disease, the only cure for which, he said, is death.

Life for me certainly is not a terrible disease. But eventually, it’ll kill me.

Watch out for the old man.