Looking back on 80 years

Today, the big 8-0 will come knocking on my door. As much as I hate to let it in, there's not much I can do about it. Eight decades! I find it difficult to believe. Where did they go? I'm not complaining, mind you - well, maybe just a little bit.

Fortunately, despite an early bout with polio and a 35-year battle with Crohn's disease, I've managed to reach the milestone in a somewhat less than catastrophic state. I'm still mobile and fairly active. I can't say the same about some of my friends, a few of whom are 90 or above.

None of us walk straight anymore, leaning at various angles in order to maintain our balance. Occasionally, you might see me walking alongside a friend who limps on his right leg. Because I limp on my left, we must be quite a sight rockin' and rollin' down the sidewalk together.

We generally don't talk much about our physical problems for two reasons: There's always somebody worse off than we are, and once we begin there's no end. We may be short on time, but we're long on medical records.

Normally, I don't think about my age until someone reminds me of it. I try to avoid birthday conversations with ex-engineers. They may be nice guys, but they take pride in being annoyingly exact about everything. When one heard that my birthday was coming up, he whipped out a pen and paper, which he started filling with figures. He triumphantly announced that by today, I will have lived more than two billion seconds! If that wasn't disheartening enough (depending on how one looks at it), he declared that my heart will have beaten about three billion times! Oy! With friends like that...

But growing older has its positive sides, too, such as the wonderful legacy we've created in the form of thriving families with healthy grandchildren. There's nothing more positive than that. And just think of what my generation has witnessed! Some of our guys were born before World War I ended, and they were young kids when women attained the right to vote! We were alive when Hitler freed from prison in 1924 and when Lindbergh made his solo flight across the Atlantic. We lived through Prohibition and saw pictures of 40,000 Klansmen marching in Washington. We heard President Franklin D. Roosevelt tell the nation, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." We were playing street games during the Great Depression, and, on a lighter note, we read about Mae West's being found guilty of indecency. We remember the beginning of World War II and the atomic bomb that ended it. There were Roosevelt's three-plus terms as president. We saw the Cold War and the Berlin blockade, Korea, Vietnam, and the Arab-Israeli wars. The electronic revolution changed the world and enabled man to travel in space, walk on the moon, land robotic explorers on Mars, take stunning photos of Saturn, and so much more!

My sons introduced me to computers after hearing that I was writing articles on the complimentary typewriter in Kinko's Cherry Hill store. I thought I was too old to master a computer, but like many other seniors, I was soon spending part of each day tapping away on the keyboard. It's wonderful. Any additions, subtractions or other alterations are made without the assistance of erasers or my trusty bottles of Wite-Out, which were immediately rendered obsolete and relegated to the wastebasket. Computers are age-friendly and completely unbiased: They don't care how old you are. In fact, learning to use a computer makes you feel younger. They may not be a cure-all for old age, but they keep your mind active.

One of my friends says the secret of aging gracefully is to keep searching for a doctor who tells you what you want to hear. Maybe so, but in this age of specialization, it would involve too much traveling - a doctor for your heart, one for your stomach, another for your feet, and so on.

When we moved from Philadelphia in 1956 to bucolic Voorhees Township, the first thing we looked for was a good family doctor within easy reach. Fate drew us to Joseph Berger, a young physician who was just beginning to build up a practice on Estaugh Avenue in Berlin. We went to him for everything, from allergies and chest pains to all of those baddies that affect children. You name it, he treated it. My 43-year-old son still visits him occasionally.

It's true that the medical profession, like everything else in life today, has become much more complicated, but I still look back fondly on the days when we knew exactly where to go for what ailed us: to our small-town doctor. It was one-stop medical shopping at its best.