February 3, 2016 Article

The Old Coot moves in the slow lane.

By Merlin Lessler

A reader from Nichols called me a while back. A nice call, not one of those, “That thing you wrote about riding a bicycle facing traffic was stupid!” This guy was OK with what I had written and called to offer a suggestion for an article. He’d just come from the UHS, walk in facility on the Vestal Parkway across from SUNY Binghamton. His nose was red, crooked and puffy. Not from an illness, from walking into the automatic door. It opened too slowly. I immediately identified with his mishap. I have door problems too: buildings with six sets of double doors where only one door is unlocked, buildings with an outer and an inner door and you are confronted with a social dilemma (do you thank the person in front of you who held each door open or do you wait until after you get through the 2^nd door. Two thank-you’s or one? That’s the dilemma).  And, automatic doors of course; they open too slowly or too fast and worse of all, they make you think that all public doors will automatically open and you get banged up when you walk into one that doesn’t.

A slow opening, auto-door, like the one he encountered at UHS is a perfect example of why getting around gets trickier and trickier as you age. They are not as bad as revolving doors, which should have a warning posted on them saying, “No seniors allowed.” But back to the reader from Nichols problem, slow opening automatic doors. It’s an issue that can go either way. The opening speed is based on an architect’s assessment of how fast the people using it can walk. The designer has to pick between someone with a stride like Wilt the Stilt, or someone who creeps along with tiny baby steps, like Tim Conway when he played an old man on the Carol Burnett show. The UHS architect opted for the Tim Conway stride and my reader from Nichols ended up smashing his nose.

If you’re scratching your head at this point, wondering why someone would walk smack into one of these slow opening doors, you don’t understand old coots. Slow or fast, we aren’t paying attention; we’re fumbling in our wallets or pockets in a panic, to make sure we have our insurance cards and the list of questions we want to ask the doctor. And, even though we checked when we left the house and again when we got out of the car, we still check again when we get to the door and become distracted. I don’t know why we bother with the questions. The doctor gives us the same answer for every one, “You have to expect that at your age.”

I went to the UHS facility where the Nichols guy got his nose job, to see how slow the door really was. Unfortunately, it was perfectly timed for me. I didn’t realize how much my stride had slowed down until then. I doubt if I could beat Tim Conway in a race. I guess I should expect that at my age.