Broken

                                                BROKEN

Inside every 70 year old there is a 21 year old who is very surprised.  While I’m not quite at that milestone, recent events have driven the point home.   My legal residence and my place of work are separated by about 270 miles.  On a recent trip between them, my formerly exquisitely reliable 8 year old Dodge Durango started flashing warning lights and pretty soon thereafter stopped working with a gush of steam/smoke leaving me stranded in rural Montana waiting for a tow.  Thank God I was in an area with cell service.  During the 2 hours I had to wait, I began to think about the constellation of events that have happened to my loved ones and me over the past few years that have left me with the same feeling of being stranded.  The first was the news that my 5 year older brother had developed Parkinsonism.  He was the Steady-Eddy of the kids, always with a long term plan and seemingly in control.  Luckily his case is mild and progressing slowly so that he functions normally, still able to ski and work out, but I was shocked that my emotional reaction was that of a 10 year old boy, threatened by an illness of his big (not older) brother.  I took the necessity of my wife’s need for 2 total hips before the age of 60 without much trouble.  Being an Orthopedic surgeon, I gained a sense of meaning from being able to shepherd her through the process, picking the surgeon and the type of device with which she would be living for the next (hopefully) 30 years.  Thankfully she has so far avoided the curse of the doctor’s wife  needing medical treatment.  It was the diagnosis of breast cancer that threw me for a loop.  Even though it was the “good” type of cancer, caught early and treated with local surgery and radiation without chemotherapy, it imparted a sense of mortality that I had not felt before.  The silver lining was that her medical treatment lead me to a new place of employment that has improved our lives.  Much more trivially I needed an arthroscopic procedure to my knee for a torn meniscus that just wore out.

More trivially, but none-the-less still symbolically significant, we have endured a flurry of device failures.  Starting with our fridge/freezer, we faced an expensive replacement, but were able to find a good fix-it guy who saved our bacon with an order of magnitude more affordable solution.  Our master shower, it turned out, had not been properly waterproofed and, while artistically done, had resulted in rotted wood over ten years.  The whole thing had to be removed, new flooring and wall supports put in.  The tile style had been discontinued so we picked another similar style, which, we later found out, had also been discontinued.  Three months later we have just managed to get a tile that we liked that is also under current manufacture.  Over six months of looking at the bare bones of a shower with the detritus of fixtures scattered about the bathroom is getting old.  Next, my wife turned on our stereo system only to have it literally flame out.  I didn’t believe her until I saw the flames, (not only smoke) myself.  Oh yes, and the Durango….we got it fixed (the water pump) only to have the oil pump fail a week later.  It is currently in the Auto ICU seeing if it’s able to be fixed.   The bummer is that dings and dongs over 8 years of hard use have given it a negative trade in value (sort of the way I feel at times).  There is a country western song entitled, “Sounds Like Life to Me” which is apropos to our situation and I know this sounds like a string of First World Problems.  I do not want or expect sympathy for our “travails”.  It’s just that I’m finally acknowledging the surprised 21 year old, who was always planning for the future.  The multiple failures both in health and of our possessions have driven home the fact that the future is now.  I have a new appreciation for Steve Goodman’s lyrics,
“You better get it while you can, you better get it while you can, It’s a mighty short trip from the cradle to the crypt, you better get it while you can.”