| Image via wheatstoneministries.com |
I’ve recently become enamored with the steam room at the gym. Consequently, I’ve been putting in a lot of quality time with elderly folk these days. Those oldsters do love to work up a good sweat, don’t they? Steam room time is my “thinking time,” however (that makes me sound really mollycoddled, I know), so I generally avoid conversation with the other steam-bathers. But I do eavesdrop plenty, and have become my own Jane Goodall to a different sort of gorillas in the mist. There’s a couple old codgers I see in there regularly — I like to imagine they’ve been pals since the third grade — that sit in the exact same spot every time. One day they come in to find a few young women already in their spot, so Statler and Waldorf (probably their names) reluctantly shuffle over to a place on the bench about two feet further down. They don’t say anything, but I can tell from his glances that Statler doesn’t think much of the loud woman doing yoga poses. By the time the women finally leave 10 minutes later, Waldorf has Statler totally captivated by his story about saving $10 on a snow blower repair. “Now hang on, Statler,” Waldorf abruptly announces. “Before I get too far along in my story, let’s you and me move to our regular spot now that those ladies are gone.” They scoot two feet over to their usual seat, which is not noticeably different from any other, and Waldorf resumes his story. Sometimes the old-timers gossip about the dating scene among widows and widowers, and it always sounds like something you’d hear at a junior high lunch table until you hear a comment like, “He’s only 76, so why the hey shouldn’t he ask her for a date?” But when they’re not gossiping or talking about snow blowers, they’re hearkening back to the good ol’ days. One day this red-faced, potato-shaped fellow mentions that after the war, he wound up on academic probation at school until he found a wife that could keep him in line. “Off sowing those wild oats, huh?” asks another guy, eyebrows raised. “You better believe it!” roars the storyteller. Here it comes, I think — we’re about to hear about some pretty serious shenanigans. “You see, I had a friend that worked at the BYU Creamery that got free tubs of ice cream,” he says with a wink. “We used to get a handful of spoons and eat through a whole tub in one afternoon!” His small audience loves this. He has them right where he wants them. “And you know what else? The bowling alley used to give us free games for setting up pins, so sometimes we’d skip out on class and set pins for five or six hours. That’s a whole weekend’s worth of bowling right there!” That does it — those old rascals bust right up, having never heard such a thing in all their years. A few more jokes, a few more belly laughs, and off they go to watch Wheel of Fortune with their sweet, frail, hunched-over spouses. Surely tomorrow the steam room gang will come armed with more devil-may-care tales and rumors. Something about all this makes me think the best years of my life are still four decades away. It’s like watching little boys play Legos on the living room floor — not a knock on the intelligence or maturity of the AARP crowd, mind you, but an admiration for their total contentment with the cards life has dealt them. Getting older is scary, but it’s reassuring to see how darned happy those guys are yukking it up in the sauna. They can keep their ear hair, though. I won't be growing any of that. |
