July 26, 2017 Article

The Old Coot is going to the dogs.

By Merlin Lessler

This is one of those articles that necessitates a warning label, a “Don’t try this at home kids” kind of thing. Be warned – the following is not a vetted scientific thesis, it’s the rambling, semi-informed opinion of an old coot. (Now my lawyer can breathe a sigh of relief)

So, you found a tick on your leg. Panic sets in. LYME DISEASE! We all know, or have heard of someone who has been stricken by this mysterious disease, first identified in Lyme, Connecticut (thus the name) when a cluster of young kids came down with arthritis in 1975. Not all tick bites get you the bobby prize; it’s a lottery. Maybe it will; maybe it won’t. The first time you find a tick on yourself you rush to the doctor or a walk-in clinic, “I found a tick on my leg!”    This is where you have to be prepared. TO LIE! Because, the first thing the doctor will ask is, “How long was the tick on you?” If you give any indication that is was attached for less than 24 hours, you’re going to be sent off with a recommendation to come back for a dose of antibiotics if you develop a bull’s eye rash or experience flu symptoms. Unfortunately, those two indicators don’t always show up, yet you still get the disease.   

If you are a dog with a tick bite, you get the antibiotic treatment right away. So I hear. A dog can’t answer the, “How long was it there,” question; it just wags its tail. The dog doctor mentality is along the lines of, “What can it hurt; why take a chance? Give the pup the antibiotic.” Not so, for humans; the protocol is just the opposite. “Let’s take a chance; we don’t want to overprescribe antibiotics. Studies show that most of the time it takes 24 hours for a tick bite to result in Lyme disease.” MOST OF THE TIME! Ask any person suffering the long-term debilitating effects of Lyme disease what they think of a protocol that plays the odds and takes a chance with your wellbeing. They will say, “I’d rather be treated like a dog!”

Oh, by the way, if you are a dog, you can get a Lyme disease vaccination. It’s not perfect, only 80% effective, and it requires a few booster shots. But, if you can’t bark; you can’t get it. (I’m practicing my dog imitation). The only pharmaceutical company that sold the vaccine pulled it off the market in 2002. Another company was about to offer it, but decided not to, because the Lyme vaccine got caught up in the wave of anti-vaccinations that was churning through society at the time and didn’t want to get entangled in class action lawsuits. It would cause problems for a pharmaceutical company today if they offered it.

Us humans are left wishing we could lead a dog’s life. We don’t get the medical protocol we deserve; we get prevention advice: wear long pants and tuck them in your socks, put on long-sleeved shirts, wear gloves and a hat, spray yourself with bug spray containing Deets and check yourself for ticks whenever you come in from outdoors. Old coots like me, get a real chuckle about this advice. It sounds as complicated and as uncomfortable as getting prepared to enter a bio-hazardous area. Check for ticks the size of a poppy seed? And, do it every time you come in from outdoors? We can’t bend and stretch or see well enough to do that. And, it’s impossible to hire someone who can. There’s not a single listing in the yellow pages for tick checkers.

We’ve created bureaucracies in our modern society to protect us from ourselves, but they don’t always operate with common sense. It will be years, if ever, before a Lyme disease vaccine is offered again. If they’d only ask an old coot, any old coot, he’d bark and then tell them what to do.

Comments? Complaints? Send to mlessler7@gmail.com

July 19, 2017 Article

The Old Coot Elbows His Way Through Life.

By Merlin Lessler

I was swimming laps at the high school pool the other day and experienced yet another affirmation of the aging process; my left elbow started killing me. HOW SORE WAS IT? It was so sore, I could only pull it through the water at one-quarter speed. When you do that, and your other arm is working fine, you swim in a circular pattern, not a straight line. I’d take three strokes with each arm and then bang into the side wall. Three strokes, bang; three strokes, bang. It was a nice cadence, but not very effective when your objective is to get from one end of the pool to the other without hurting yourself. I eventually backed off with my right arm and was able to swim a lap in sort of a straight line. But, it took me four times longer than normal to swim from one end of the pool to the other.   

A sore elbow is a serious condition for an old coot. We rely on our elbows. It’s a mechanism we use all the time, usually to get the attention of a poor soul standing next to us when we want to make a comment about someone or something. First, you feel the elbow; then you get the derogatory remark. It’s hissed out of the side of the old coot’s mouth, “Look at that young fool over there; his eyebrow is pierced!” You take a step to the left, to avoid another elbow but it doesn’t work; he moves with you. Then you get it again. This time you’re ready for it; you tense up to save yourself from a sore rib cage. He then says, “Look at him now; he’s getting into the car with that gorgeous babe!” You want to say, “Of course he is, you old coot. He’s “with it” and you don’t even get it.” But, you hold yourself back, deciding it’s better to keep your mouth shut and get away from him before the elbow starts up again. 

                       

The “old coot” elbow is developed over a long period of time. It starts when an old coot gets married and he and his wife have a child. The wife feels “it” for the first time when she gets home from the hospital. She drifts off into a deep sleep, the first one in months, now that she can sleep on her stomach. She’s in dreamland, lying on a tropical beach with a hotel staff seeing to her every whim. WHAM! She’s startled back to consciousness by a triple elbow to the ribs. “What?” She cries. The lump next to her in bed says, “The baby is crying.” Somehow, she manages to get up and drag herself over to the crib. The “elbow” has been born. She’ll eventually learn that it has a large vocabulary. For now, it just says, “The baby is crying!” Soon enough, it will say, “Josh threw up,” or, “Somebody’s at the door.” The “elbow” will dominate their relationship.

At cocktail parties, it will be used as an escape mechanism. She’ll feel the elbow in her ribs, followed by a whispered, “There’s Helen and Jim; let’s sneak into the other room so they don’t talk our ears off. Besides, I owe Jim fifty bucks” Eventually, she’ll develop an “elbow” of her own. It will be more than a match for his; the female version comes to a sharper point, one that can fracture a rib if the user gets over excited. It too, is used at cocktail parties, as in, “Did you see that awful dress Midge is wearing?” If hubby doesn’t acknowledge the comment fast enough, he’ll get a second helping. This only happens once or twice. After that, he never fails to respond immediately.

After twenty-five years of marriage, the “elbow” loses its effectiveness. Both parties develop thick calluses on their rib cages. If an intruder breaks into the house and she elbows him, to say, “I heard a noise downstairs; go and check it out,” nothing happens. The old coot goes right on snoring, dreaming he’s accepting the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He struts across the stage in a dazzling white tux, like a Hollywood star at the Oscars. In real life, if he ever got any kind of an award, the picture would be quite different. He’d limp and shuffle across the stage in a dark blue suit. The static electricity in his pant legs would have them clinging to his white athletic socks, a good three inches above a pair of mismatched shoes, one brown, one black. A size “42-L” tag would dangle from his sleeve, the one he missed when removing the rest of the Sear’s stickers because his elbow was too sore to reach it.

Complaints? Comments? Send to mlessler7@gmail.com

July 12, 2017 Article

The old Coot tries to clean up his image.

By Merlin Lessler

What a nut job! I’m sure that’s what strangers think when they drive by me as I walk through town and I wave to them.  Or, on the other hand, “What a snob,” when friends wave from their cars and I don’t wave back. Both are right; Nut Job, Snob, but, it’s not me; it’s them, or rather, their cars. They all look alike, all SUVs look alike, all sedans look alike. Different makes of automobiles are hardly distinguishable. I can’t tell a Ford from a Mercedes. Not in a quick glance anyhow. In the good old days (here comes the old coot in me) when cars had a distinctive shape, color scheme (2 and 3 tones if you can imagine that) and the glass was clear; you could identify the car and more important, you could see who was inside. And, correctly wave, or not.

So, here I am, walking around in a world where half the time I wave at cars I think might be driven by someone I know, but they aren’t. And, get labeled, that “Nut Job” in Owego who waves to cars. The other half of the time, I don’t wave when I should. When I take a stroll up Davis Hill (struggle and gasp my way up is a more accurate description) cars wiz by so fast I never get a good glimpse in the window, so I wave to every car. It’s a self-defense gesture, a thank-you for not hitting me. After I’ve climbed for a few minutes, I don’t wave to anyone; I’m too tired to raise my arm.  

We need a rule, a societal norm, that says a person driving a car, who sees someone they know walking on the sidewalk should give the horn a toot to say hello, not just a wave. Then, old coots like me, and regular people too, can wave back. We still may not know who we’re waving to, but at least we won’t feel quite so stupid, waving when we shouldn’t, not waving when we should.

If you adopt this suggestion, despite the fact it’s coming from an old coot and not Ms. Manners or Emily Post, you might want to practice tooting. It’s not easy to produce a friendly sounding honk. That air bag squished into the middle of your steering wheel makes it hard to produce a polite, “Toot”. Quite often, you get no result at all, panic, and slam on the horn, producing a loud, angry blast. It startles the recipient, not at all the friendly, “Hi there,” you were shooting for. Here’s the deal. You toot, I’ll wave. Even if it’s a mistaken identity. I won’t be a snob anymore and I won’t be that nut job that waves at all the cars. It’s enough of a burden just being an old coot.

Comments? Complaints? Send to mlessler7@gmail.com

July 5, 2017 Article

The Old Coot still doesn’t get it.

By Merlin Lessler

It started earlier, but I didn’t realize it until I was in my thirties, the aging process. It was the day I showed some kids in my back yard, probably at one of my daughter’s birthday parties, how I could do a running flip. I’d done it a “million” times when I was a kid. The running part went well – the flip part, not so hot. I landed on my seat, not my feet. I’d lost some agility over the years. My only thought, two weeks later when the ache had vanished, “I’ll get better.” (at doing the flip. At restoring my ability to do a flip). “I just need to turn back the clock a little,” I told myself, blind to the obvious truth, the aging process is a one-way street.

It kept happening; every decade brought new flops to the forefront. I had taken up jogging when I was in my twenties, slacked off and then picked it back up in my mid-thirties. It took two months before I could go around the block without stopping and gasping for breath that time round. More proof that the aging process was quietly at work. Eventually, I got the rhythm and was doing four miles every other day. “I’m going to do this forever! It’s so freeing! Well into my nineties,” I professed. My arrogance was limitless, like I could take getting into my nineties for granted. Then came my forties. I left behind the six-minute mile I did once a year on the high school track and ushered in the “why is my back aching so much” and the “sore knee” era. Followed by a few other conditions as my physicality digressed from a forty-year-old frame to a fifty. I was sure I’d get better, still believing the aging process was a curable malady.

My fifties started OK. “What’s the big deal?” By 54 I knew the answer to that question. I was forced to trade in the jogging sneakers for walking shoes, and add swimming and bike riding to make up for it. “I can take this routine into my nineties,” I told myself. “And, pick up jogging again, as soon as I get better!

Wham, Bang! In what seemed like fifteen minutes, there were 60 candles on my birthday cake.  The old coot was born. He was a tad wiser than that arrogant 30, 40 and 50-year-old self. Wiser, but still delusional. Every once in a while, I’d try jogging. It seemed easy the first week, and then my aging frame brutally reminded me why I’d given it up, hurting as much as that running front flip/flop disaster three decades earlier. Did I gain any wisdom? Not much. I still thought, “I’ll get better.

Introduction: Sometimes an introduction doesn’t fit at the beginning of an essay. Sometimes it belongs in the middle, or in this case, at the end, after I’ve finish my rant and wonder, “What is the point?” I guess this time, it’s my compulsion to report what lies ahead, for readers who, like me, never expected to get old. Or, I’m trying to give voice to myself and my fellow old coots who are youth, energy, flexibility, balance, health and memory challenged. To report that we aren’t asking for special treatment, just not to be marginalized and discarded out of hand. We’re not all there, that’s true, but we think we’ll get better. Let us live with the delusion.

Comments. Complaints. Send to mlessler7@gmail.com