FROM HERE WE IGNITE From here, we transform your future through innovation and collaboration. We spark your passion and fuel your imagination through life-changing experiences and opportunities. Ignite your future at the University of <strong>Southern</strong> <strong>Indiana</strong>. 10 • <strong>Sept</strong>/<strong>Oct</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • <strong>Southern</strong> <strong>Indiana</strong> <strong>Living</strong> Your Future Is Here. USI.edu/ignite
Share Stories and Write New Ones A Note to Baby Boomers One way to feel younger is to hang out with people older. Hey, I’ll take it. Older people need someone who will listen about their sore knees, their cable bills, their hearing aid batteries, grandkids who text instead of call and lifelong friends whose funerals were last week. I listened for a living. I can listen with the best of them. If only I was as good at stopping the toilet from running. I settle into a stage in which young feels a fading memory but old still seems more foe than friend. So when not fighting, I nod. I sympathize. My day comes, I realize, when still more of me wears out. Already I polish my own collection of stop-thepresses grievances should some sap a generation behind me be up, yes, to hearing about it. Not only is the future a four-letter word. Today can boggle, as well. I will plug in my next car alongside the toaster? Do I get that channel? Do I want to? Did I really pay $80 for a steak? Is peeing every other hour normal? Listening? Grab hold of aging, we hear. Stare it down. Stay active, keep moving. Remain informed, be useful. Don’t act our ages. Don’t die before death. All fair and all easier said than done. Every week or two this past spring, the wind blew like <strong>Southern</strong> <strong>Indiana</strong> is a barrier island. Biggerthan-big limbs fell at our place. My house is among this area’s oldest. No surprise, then, so are too many of the trees. Like writers and the elderly company they keep, trees do not live forever, storms or no storms. I cannot expect otherwise. Like there is no point in wishing my father, or his father, or someone else near and dear had taught me how to cope with trees that, with a whoosh, go horizontal. Handiness swims nowhere near the Moss gene pool. In other words, I could today buy a chainsaw. Then tomorrow I could buy a prosthetic hand. Instead, a friend heeded my plea and, without so much as a sweat, sawed big pieces into ones little enough for the street department to haul away. Such is heroism as I define it these days. No action in Washington, or <strong>Indiana</strong>polis, matters more than common courtesies we can give and receive and occasionally actually do. So if listening to whines and whims of people a decade or two my senior is all it takes, I’m game. Just keep your politics to yourself. Our local public library needs board-of-directors members, like do a nearby cemetery and a park. I can do stuff like that – more than decently – so I do stuff like that. Requiring only one bottle of shampoo per year is not my only strength. A neighbor shares his vegetable garden with us. That, too, is good, in more ways than one. A childhood pal occasionally has the old gang over for grilled goodies and strolls down memory lane. I enjoy not only every bite but every story. It’s funny, though, those gettogethers. We end up talking about what’s ahead. We prove that fun is not finite; more is there for the taking. One guy, whom I never would have guessed would leave our hometown, just returned from Portugal. Tell me more about these group tours you take, my host asked me. Time’s a wasting. Before we know it, I reply, we will be old as in too old. So go. Do. I know some terrific dog watchers. You don’t even need to bring me back a T-shirt. Actually, I’m more into coffee mugs. Food sticks between my teeth. Why? Teeth spread out over time. Losing weight is more difficult, staying awake is more difficult, seeing and hearing and digesting and remembering all ran out of warranty. No action in Washington, or <strong>Indiana</strong>polis, matters more than common courtesies we can give and receive and occasionally actually do. So if listening to whines and whims of people a decade or two my senior is all it takes, I’m game. Will my toenails stop growing when I no longer can reach them? Don’t answer that. That inevitable litany aside, though, I increasingly convince myself to appreciate what remains to appreciate. I finally get the hang of retirement. I do not necessarily need to know what day of the week it is. I can run errands on my schedule, not on my employer’s. I can count on one finger the number of times I have worn a necktie this year. Plus, health-care costs are, well, less unaffordable. Whoever came up with Medicare is right up there with Willie Mays. I improve at facing facts, easier to see with the reading glasses scattered at my place. My Giants are winning without me on the mound. A not-all-that-young woman at the gym calls me “sir.” My local high school supposedly came up all-but-empty in its search for a new basketball coach. Yet I was not asked to come to the sidelines rescue. And to think I know a couple of dandy out-ofbounds plays. I feel more good than bad. I can climb stairs and distinguish a noun from a verb. I haven’t vomited in like 20 years and that’s got to count for something, right? If listening to older people hate on getting older is my lot in life, I welcome the opportunity. Maybe I will learn something or teach something.• After 25 years, Dale Moss retired as <strong>Indiana</strong> columnist for The Courier-Journal. He now writes weekly for the News and Tribune. Dale and his wife Jean live in Jeffersonville in a house that has been in his family since the Civil War. Dale’s e- mail is dale.moss@twc.com <strong>Southern</strong> <strong>Indiana</strong> <strong>Living</strong> • <strong>Sept</strong>/<strong>Oct</strong> <strong>2022</strong> • 11
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