R. Leib's Blog: Dream State - Posts Tagged "aging"

It is layered like a planet. The inner core is the person I feel I have always been. Memories of early childhood are faint now, so it is the persona that developed during my teen years that seems to be the essential me. With each year, I expected to feel older, wiser, more sophisticated, in some ways a different person, but there is still that teenage boy in there. Sure, my body is weaker. I heal much slower. My hair is a patchwork of gray and white. My hearing and sight are frustratingly impaired. My vocabulary has increased and then declined. I have committed to memory and have forgotten whole encyclopedias of facts and ideas. Experiences have layered themselves upon me in scars and regrets forming a mantle of complexity. All this is covered with the crust of manners that other people see. But these are all strata over the child that still dreams and empathizes and finds puns amusing.

As I have gotten older, I endured a wide variety of time's insults to my body and mind. Many of them were anticipated. Others were not. Most I have taken in stride, amazed that I lasted this long.

I always thought of myself as being six feet tall, as measured in my youth and noted on my driver's license. Recently, I found out that I have shrunk two inches. Of all the things that aging has done to me, for some reason this one most of all makes me feel violated.