When I Was Forty-five - A Not So Good Year

09/12/2007

1989 was a great year, but this is no time for a nostalgic trip…so I’ll take one, anyway!

I was in New York City working with my boss and making sales calls on the Purchasing Bureau of the New York City Board of Education.  I sell school furniture, along with a host of other institutional furniture products to other markets.  Basically, the first four words of the last sentence define what I really do; the last twelve words is what my company wants me to do along with the first part, but the truth is… The truth will set you free.

It had been a long day.  I was worn out from doing my utmost to impress people with the fact that I knew what I was doing, even though they looked as if they were not impressed, nor thought I had any idea of what I knew what I was doing.  My boss and I checked into the Marriott Hotel near LaGuardia Airport.  I walked into my room, chucked my bag on the bed and took off my suit jacket.  As I swung my jacket onto the bed, I caught sight of my full profile in the mirror that hung on the wall next to the TV.  I was forty-five years old, but the reflection in the mirror was of the abused body of someone much older.  Blubber was hanging over my belt all the way around.  At that moment the curtain when up on a realization and I began my mid-life crisis, something had to be done.  I was in my mid-forties.  My hair was thinning on an almost daily basis.  I was wearing a size 46 suit with a waistline of forty inches.  I was repugnant.  I made me ill.

So, what does one do when one is fed up with the way one looks and the way one feels?  I was at the bottom and had landed with a thud.  Sure, I noticed many times how badly I looked and how nothing I wore looked good on me, but this was the first time I took a good hard look.  This was my measure of myself.  I began a diet-exercise program the very next week.  I got into shape – obsessively.

Within eight months I had trimmed over fifty-five pounds from my body.  I could do more than fifty pushups. I could do one hundred sit ups. I could jog for over an hour and be hardly winded.  My waistline dropped to a scant thirty-six inches.  Suits and jackets dropped to size 42.  I was in shape, and my mid-life crisis was in full swing, and I didn’t have a clue.

Well, these days my mid-life is behind me by many years.  In my last post I wrote about aging and changes within.  Last night I caught sight of my profile.  I am sixty-three.  My waistline is 40 inches.  My new suit shows the size as forty-six.  The number of hairs on my head equals the number growing in my ears.  I am sitting in my family room out here on The Farm, happy as hell and wondering if I really give a hoot about a couple of inches in my middle.  I can still do a pushup, but the sit up makes my back hurt.  And, as for jogging, screw it.  Life is good.

And that is all I have to say about that…