Preview of Your Coming Attractions

When I retired after 40 years of writing columns for the San Jose Mercury News, I figured I'd said about all I could say. Wrong. I've realized that at age 76, I'm about 10 years older than the oldest baby boomers, who are now turning 66. My very average body has had a lot of experiences in those 10 years. I've learned a lot that could be helpful to people just starting on that same path -- what to do, what to avoid, what to keep an eye on.. Consider me your canary-in-the-coalmine for the boomer generation. Tune in regularly for the heads-up advice.

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Back Online -- Slowly


     Sorry that this post is so late, but the hard drive on my ancient computer crashed and I’ve had to buy a new machine (an IMac, if you’re curious, a big improvement over the old PC).
     And, while all this was going on, my back went out. This has been happening every so often over the past 50 years or so, starting with a slipped disc while I was in the Army. Can’t even call it a war wound. We weren’t fighting anybody at the time, which is the only way I’d want to be in military service.
     Anyway, I was having back spasms while my old computer was having disk spasms. Fortunately for the latter case, I’d backed up all my important data onto an external hard drive before the fall, and thus transferring it to the new Mac was a relative piece of cake.
     Recovering from my internal back spasms, though, proved to be another story. In previous years, it only took me a couple of days to bounce back. The older I got, the longer the recuperation period. And this last episode took more than two weeks to work itself out of my system.
      Which, I guess, is the subject of this posting. It’s a warning about something you’re probably already suspecting – it takes us longer and longer, the more we age, to shake off insults to our body. There’s nothing much that you can do about it, except accept it. And, maybe, wish you were like a computer that could easily be updated. We’ll wait for medical science to get going on that one

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