Numbering our Days

What I should do is pay with a credit card. That's what the world does these days, uses plastic for just about everything. I'd handle transactions more quickly and avoid what happens all too regularly lately, become a bumbling old fool who can't work his fingers like he used to.

A Number One, a Whopper meal. I was an hour and a half from home, I was hungry and hurried, and I hadn't yet eaten anything for supper. It was already after eight. Run in, grab a Whopper, sit there, chow down, and get on home--that's the plan. If I was younger, I could eat the blessed thing while driving, but what I love about Whoppers is all that juicy stuff, half a salad on a bun. Some wet chunk would have most certainly ended up on my shirt. I ate in.

Cost $7 and change, something like that. My wallet's full of bills. I pull it out my wallet. It's full of bills. I try to shuffle through quickly (I'm in line), but my fingers stumble, turn to clay. What I need is a five and a couple of singles, but what I come up with is a twenty and three ones. I drop the three to the counter top, jam the twenty back in (it won't go easily), and once again flit through options. It takes me forever to find the five back, but I get it, hand it to him. pick up the ones and do the same.

The guy's the boss. You can tell. He's maybe thirty, got tattoos up and down both arms. And he's practiced at patronizing. I know because I gave the too many ones. "Here you go, sir," he says, giving one back. "Sometimes they stick to each other, don't they?"

I'm a foot and a half from the grave. 

And it hurt badly because yesterday wasn't a good day to be aging. I didn't intend to watch the hearings, told my wife I wasn't going to, but ended up catching arduous glimpses every once in a while. 

What did I see? I couldn't help thinking it was a horrible day for Joe Biden--and maybe Bernie Sanders too. What was distressing was that Robert Mueller, a man who took a bullet for his country and has served it bravely and selflessly throughout his life, was an graying old man. He could not keep up. It took him forever to figure out what cards to play. His fumbling through that 450-page report of his made clear that a man his age could not play in a league with all those quick and mouthy pols on both sides of the aisle. 

There he sat, fumbling and bumbling. "Can you repeat the question?" became a mantra, a chorus. He had trouble hearing, trouble remembering, trouble understanding, and trouble responding. He seemed to an anxious world to be a man whose time had come and gone. 

It was painful to witness because Robert Mueller didn't deserve being treated the way he was. 

An old friend sent me an email last night. We couldn't be farther apart politically, but he anguished with me about what we'd both seen. I'm 71. He's 70. Mueller is, he said, "a fellow veteran and statesmen who was frail, used and abused. Today was a disgrace."
 
Yesterday, a better man than either of us or anyone in that room was scourged through agonizing hours of questioning by men and women vastly more interested in what he could say than they were in him. He got bamboozled, as old folks do. He stood there at the counter and couldn't operate his wallet. 

Some years ago already, I walked into the student union on campus and started up the long, wide stairway toward my wife's office. Just then a kid came down the stairs, his feet flying down the steps in an artful fashion that reminded me of what I could do once myself. I recognized in his elegant stairway dancing that such footwork was a couple decades behind me.

I'm just a kid when it comes to aging. My father-in-law doesn't really know it himself, but he passed his 100th birthday last month. What he used to tell us, more often than he knew maybe is that "it isn't fun"--aging, that is. 

Regardless of what you think of Donald Trump, what was difficult to witness on TV screens all day long is the toll of age, an old man painfully muddling along, powerless to stay with the program. 

Robert Mueller is everything Donald Trump isn't.

My friend is right.  It was sad, a disgrace.