Three: when somebody describes what you can’t do anymore, check whether it’s really about you.
At your age it’s better for you to stay home and rest.
The flight is so long and you get tired so easily now.
I believed those sentences for about ninety minutes on Thanksgiving morning. I’m seventy-three years old and I stood in a kitchen and genuinely wondered whether I had been getting tired, whether I’d been slowing down and not noticed, whether maybe they’d seen something in me that I couldn’t see myself.
And then I found a printout in a plastic bin and learned that the real sentence was a fifth ticket is twenty-three hundred dollars and we are four months behind.
That’s how it almost always works, and I want every single person over sixty-five reading this to hear me:
