This is a follow-up to my essay celebrating the 6^th birthday of my great-granddaughter. I’m fortunate that I discovered my entire family in Myanmar. They have given me a purpose and a reason for being. That is the upside; the downside is that I’ll be 82 in less than two weeks. That is a sobering reality. Additionally, I danced with death twice already on my journey down my yellow brick road.

Unless you have done the dance, you know that your clock is ticking. However, successful dancers know their clock is ticking and can feel it in their gut. So, what am I doing about hearing my clock ticking louder and louder?

Social Security provides a Life Expectancy Calculator. Each year, about this time, I check what Social Security’s actuarial life table indicates. They claim that a male born on January 20, 1943, will live an average of another 7.8 years. That means that I’ll live until just shy of my 90th birthday. They are very careful about their longevity table. Not all males born on January 20, 1943, will live another 7.8 years. Some will die sooner and others later.

My belief is that I am in the latter group. Therefore, I recalculated the data using 1942. That means that a year from now, I’ll get to the age of 90.2. To push my experiment further, I will use 1941. Social Security determines that I will be 90.7 when I croak. As I and everyone else in the world get older, the fewer years, months, and days we have.

I don’t want to be some old gentleman.

I don’t want to look like that old guy in a couple of years. So, what am I doing to live a longer and healthy life? I eat a pretty well-rounded selection of food. I’m still trying to lose another dozen pounds, which would get me down to 175.

I exercise every day for 30 minutes and do 100 crunches. I bet I didn’t miss more than 5-days in 2024 on my elliptical trainer. Since last August, I have been going to Southlake YMCA’s saunas at least 4 or 5 times weekly. I’m up to 30 minutes in the sauna and then 10 or 15 minutes in the whirlpool sauna.

I have an appointment with my primary care physician, Dr. Marchand, next week. His father was my cardiologist for years until he retired. Dr. Marchand will go over my various blood tests. I’ll ask him if he has any additional suggestions about the saunas. He was the one who told me to use them last summer.

Additionally, I’ve been reading about the aging process, especially with one’s brain. This is something scary about your brain as you age: it shrinks 5% after 40. An even scarier fact is that after 70, the frontal lobe and hippocampus shrink even faster. Our brains start to function like an old computer. Talk about morbidity.

Harvard sends me emails every other day. They must think that I used to attend classes there. One of the most recent articles was about super-agers. Super-agers have been tested with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

These super-agers brains are similar to those at 25. There is one caveat, super-agers get much of their mental ability from their parents.

I have no idea about whether being a super-ager runs in my family. However, after I recovered from a fall off a ladder, hitting my head on a concrete retaining wall, I wound up in the ICU of a local hospital.

My head injury was a subdural hematoma, which is bleeding in the brain. The neurosurgeon removed a bagel-sized part of my skull so that the blood had a large area in which to expand. After a number of weeks without that part of my skull, it was replaced. I recovered from the traumatic brain injury very well. Several months later, I had an appointment with the neurosurgeon. He mentioned that I had a young brain. Next week, I will ask Dr. Marchand whether a young-looking brain and the super-agers are related.

I realize that I am very fortunate to be alive. However, I am caught between happy to be still living and realizing that my clock is ticking louder and louder. I live on the horns of that dilemma between being fortunate and aging. That is what drives me. My family here in the States is educated and doing well in life. However, my family in Southeast Asia lives in a country controlled by a military coup fighting to stay in power. My oldest granddaughter is living in Thailand as a refugee from Myanmar.

I have written many essays about having to memorize poetry or prose while in high school. I absolutely detested memorizing a hundred lines each semester. However, after high school, a day doesn’t go by that I don’t recall parts of poems that I memorized over sex decades ago. Will Allen Dromgoole wrote a poem I memorized in 12th grade for Mrs. Davis. I still can recite the entire poem today.

While in high school, I liked the poem. In my twilight years, I have become the old man in the poem. I will do whatever I can for my family half a world away. That is my motivation for living. My children, granddaughters, and great-granddaughter are special people and dearly loved.