A week ago, I started this post as a sort of medical report on my cause-unknown anemia but, then, my eighty-first birthday snuck up on me. A couple of weeks ago, I sort of put the cat on the roof with my anemia and then left, so, first, here is an update. The results of my capsule endoscopy generally showed no blood leakage although there were a couple of spots that weren’t covered because the capsule camera had been occluded by residual barium chalk that was still in my lower gut. My heart, lungs, and GI tract seem to be fine – well, as fine as can be expected – so what I really need is a good hematologist. I asked both my GP doctor and my cardiologist for recommendations and they both suggested the same woman from UCSF who is now treating me. Well, not exactly treating, she ordered a series of three iron infusions that are different than the ones I got in the hospital. At the end of the month, I will get a blood test to see what my reaction is, then she will treat me. Right now, the hematologist thinks I do not have a leak because my few red blood cells are small which indicates a red-blood-cell creation problem. I don’t think that is particularly good news.

Actually, I’m not sure there is an answer that is good news. Certainly springing a leak is not good news. but that a leak is not the cause of my anemia is not good news either. Still, I’m OK with that. Physically, I feel weirdly pretty good and emotionally great. As irrational as it may be, I feel like I am basically healthy with a couple of niggling problems that can be fixed. That may be because the iron injections are giving me more energy, or that just may be because I’ve completely lost track of any feeling good baseline. From last summer until I went into the hospital in late Spring, I increasingly had trouble breathing. For the last several weeks, I was on the edge of panic, feeling like I was drowning – not that I have any drowning experience to set a benchmark – so, not feeling like I am drowning is a big improvement. I am aware, however, that, if I had felt this way when I was twenty-five, I’m sure I would not have said I feel pretty good. That is the good news, in my case, at least. For me, the effects of getting old, in general, are buffered by both the loss of body memory and a greater acceptance of reality. I think of body memory as that unconscious feeling in our body that remembers what our body can do, and that changes as we change. A couple of years ago, I remember watching a group of girls in Charlotte’s soccer team, sitting on a grass field in a circle talking. When they were finished, they all just stood up. I don’t think any of them even used their hands to help. They just stood up by straightening their legs. My first thought was, Wow, I could never do that, but, of course, I could, it has just been a very long time and my body has even forgotten that it was not only possible but so easy as to be unconsciously automatic.

Feeling good, or good enough, really, I think comes with age. My years of teenage angst lasted way past my teenage years but, now, they are so far in the past that it is hard to even remember them. I have read that, if you give a person too many choices, it is harder to choose. I know that has happened to me and, often, it is not only harder to choose but I go away making no choice, putting the choice off for another time. Now, I have way fewer choices and it is easier to make them. And, no matter what the result, it never seems as catastrophic as it once did.

My dad died in 1968, at 61, which, at eighty-one, now makes me twenty years older than my dad – Daddy – was when he died. It got me thinking about what I would have missed if I had died at the same age as my dad. The first thought that comes to mind is that I would have missed the Obama Presidency and then, of course, the Trump Presidency. What a contrast, Barrak Obama, the first Black President, aloof and intellectual, and Donald Trump, all Id, the first President to deny he lost the election. I would have missed the first pandemic in a hundred years; my dad was born in December 1906 so he was about eleven when the October 1918 Influenza Pandemic hit. To me, this pandemic has been a big deal but I don’t ever remember my dad – or my mother, for that matter – talking about their pandemic, which I now find strange.

I had a cell phone in the 1980s, but it was a regular phone handset that sat on a box as big as a car battery, and we called them car-phones, but I would have missed the smartphone revolution which started in 2007 with the iPhone (and an Android in 2008). My dad would have loved the car phone, he was a phone fanatic and knew the location of every public payphone from here to Sacramento. Driving somewhere, he would constantly stop and check in with his office, usually several times a trip. Of everything that I would have missed including the pandemic, the smartPhone has most changed my life as well as our day-to-day world.

Maybe twenty years ago, Michele and I were talking about what was called Global Warming then and I said something like, “I won’t see it, I’ll just skate through.” and Michele answered, “Don’t be silly, Global Warming is coming faster than you think; you’ll see it.” Michele was right and, although I hate what we are doing to our poor planet, the only home we’ll ever have, I’m glad that I haven’t missed it.