You Know You're Old When...

I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but one morning I woke up and I was old!

Now I am reminded of my oldness daily. Or nightly. Like when I reached down to pull the lever and lean back my recliner last night, and hurt something in my shoulder. My back shoulder, to be specific. The part where my right wing would attach if I was an angel. But several people have told me that I'm no angel, so you'll have to use your imagination.

To injure myself reclining is quite embarrassing. More so, even, than the time I broke my neck in my other recliner. It wasn't broken, as in a severed spinal cord, or a chipped vertebrae. Broken as in not working properly, unless by properly, you mean sending a searing pain down my spine, making me nauseous.

Those are times when you are glad you have some prescription pain pills left over from your husband's neck surgery in 2006. Hydrocodone (or fake vicodin, as we call it around here) doesn't have an expiration date, does it? And since those pills were for his neck, they would surely work for my neck. Right? It's always handy to have those drugs cooling their chemical heels in the medicine cabinet for these little emergencies. Kind of like a morning-after pill, but without the promiscuous sex.

This evening I whipped up a supper ripped from the countertop of school holiday potluck dinners. Nothing as elaborate as a corn casserole, my least favorite of all such dishes. Nope. It was sliced ham rolled around cream cheese and a dill pickle spear. Don't worry about the family. They had a normal dinner of buffalo chicken chunks and salad. But I was not in a spicy mood. As I was opening the chip clip on a bag of sunflower seeds to sprinkle on the salad, the dang clip snapped a plastic squeezy part. It shot into my chin and ricocheted into the sink. That's what people get for eating healthy. Injured.

As I consumed my ham/cheese/pickle roll, I suddenly bit down on a hard chunk. Double dang. Ham, cream cheese, and pickle are not crunchy foods. So I knew I was in trouble. I removed the offending debris and set it on my plate. Wouldn't you know it? White. My tongue mounted a search mission to ferret out the offending tooth. But it was unsuccessful. Refusing to ask for help from the broken-tooth search dogs, Captain Tongue declared the mission complete. All teeth were accounted for. I looked again at the mouth debris. It couldn't be a portion of tooth. Too white. Closer inspection revealed the foreign particle to be smooth plastic. From the chip clip. It had fallen onto the cream cheese before rolling, apparently.

Such a simple pleasure for the aged: discovering that you still have all of your teeth after a meal.