Is it May already? or Shakespeare was right

"Growing old ain't what it's cracked up to be," Barb's mom used to say, rest her soul. "But it is, that's the problem," Barb and I sometimes say today.

At this point we can appreciate what she meant, though--especially me. I've got ten years seniority on Barb. Our grown sons have their busy lives, families and careers to keep them getting up quickly when they get knocked down.. Our grandchildren probably have the most going for them and bounce back from elemenetary and middle school pressures and upheavals the fastest of our family generations. They also tend to "get over it" the fastest, forgive, forget, and move on with amazing resiliency.

But I am the oldest of us by about ten years, and retired, and my moxie isn't always so quick to come back. Barb is still a working elementary school media specialist and keeps up her fitness most of the time with diets, workouts, and the daily bustle of her job. but this year has put "new wrinkles on my brow", figuratively and maybe literally. I can't tell that my wife, my children, or my grandchildren seem any worse for wear, but any of them might feel otherwise; they're living in their "ages" as I am in mine. We've all dealt with our situations with what we had to work with.

Robert Herrick said of life, "the best age is the first, when youth and blood are warmer/not the last, when "worse and worst times still succeed the former." He had his own motives, of course, in "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" ("Gather ye rosebuds while ye may'", remember?) But Shakespeare said of life's stages we are left upon life's seventh stage, "...sans teeth, sans hair, sans eyes, sans everything...." I haven't reached that stage yet, thank Goodness, but I can certainly relate to those who have.