Looking back at 2025

 

You can see, I'm sure, the problem. It's vanity, I know, but were I to walk around in public with these monster shoes holding up my horribly big feet, they could not only pass for boats, but for entire piers. Ugly?--absolutely, an admission of age too. I'm confident were we to take a hike through the nearest old folks home--there's one or two  plenty close, by the way--we'd find a dozens of these leviathans on rugs in front of TVs. Can you imagine some college kid wearing these? And remember, I'm confessing something here--I'd need size 16. Huge, not boats, battleships.

But I'm sick of shoes that don't fit, or, maybe it's better to say, shoes that make my feet ache. I've got no idea if these could bring some comfort, but they're marked to do just that, not to be impress any of the guests at the opera, but to keep down complaints from my feet.

And that's a nice thought. My feet haven't smiled for years, and their aching is not getting any better. That's why I'm shopping this morning of Old Years Eve--not because I'm lookin' for pizazz--I'm just after comfort.

Old Years Eve is an officially approved day to look back, even though, at my age, it seems that I look back far more frequently than ahead; there's more subject matter back there than there is out front. I can honestly say that I didn't think much about old age until I started wearing a knee brace a year and a half ago, assuming that if I did it would somehow miraculously stop my knees from caving for no good reason.

Turns out faulty knees were a symptom of what was happening neurologically throughout my body, a condition, when professionally assessed, led to a diagnosis of spinal stenosis, a condition I'd never heard of until it determined to go to war with my body. There's a walker right beside me here, and two canes hanging from a coat rack at the back door. I don't go anywhere without, at least, one of them, a cane or the walker. I'm a public service message for the cripples among us, and, if I can and will believe every doctor and/or specialist I've seen, I ain't getting over it anytime soon.

So, from the vantage point of this Old Years Eve, what's to assess that's behind me during the year of our Lord 2025 isn't a bowl of roses. Lord knows hundreds, thousands, millions of humanoids find themselves in far worse straits, so what right do I have to complain, right?

Be happy the wheelchair is in plastic storage in the garage, long abandoned. Be thankful for a half-dozen physical therapists who not only direct my body's recovery but must have been told sometime in their degree programs that the very best therapy they can deliver may well be telling the patient that he or she is doing great.

I don't care, I love it. "Yeah, well, Jim," they'll tell me, "you did well today, don't you think?"

For all those sweet PTs, I'm greatly thankful this December 31st. For the three PTs at Heartland Home, who had the toughest job; for the half-dozen or so at Orange City Hospital; and now for the three or four here at Pro-Edge, thanks so much for putting me through the paces and then telling me, even through my pouting pride, that I'm doing just fine. 

"Just fine" is just wonderful.