“Do you know your balls get smaller as you get older ?” the old fellow told me.

“I just thought your ears got bigger,” I replied by way of an answer. Or maybe just to change the subject. Jesus, how do I get myself in these situations ?

Maybe it’s because they’re all around me. Old guys, I mean. I just read this morning that twenty percent of the population will be sixty five years old or older within the next five years. Even our sports stars are gettin’ there. I mean, Tom Brady is forty-four and unless he lets his wife boss him around and make his decision for him, he’ll probably be back engineering second half miraculous comebacks again next season. And don’t you think Green Bay Packers’ quarterback Aaron Rodgers, the NFL’s Most Valuable Player two years in a row now, looks like the guy you used to hang out in the pool hall with back in the 1970s? The kids I taught when I started teaching back in 1981 are all approaching their mid-fifties now. Probably some of them look more like a Cabbage Patch Kid themselves now than any of the dolls which were such a faddish craze in their day back then. No offense intended, although I know I do that often enough. I try to avoid mirrors myself as much as possible.

But let’s get back to my opening line. I guess that if the fate of women is to have to go through menopause then I suppose the male alternative is acceptable. I mean, it doesn’t wake me up in the middle of the night with hot flashes. And even though my aging carcass can’t do as much as I used to , my days are full enough. I mean, just counting the number of vitamins I pop every day is really time consuming.

To circle back to the beginning, maybe my testicles won’t turn tiny. After all, one has to consider the source of that information. I saw the same old guy outside Tim Horton’s a couple of weeks ago. We were both drinking our coffee outside even if the temperature was tipping the thermometer at -26 Celsius. Tim’s couldn’t let us stay inside. Even though we both might be double-vaxxed, double-masked and wearing a hazmat suit our very presence was considered contaminating.

“How are you doing these days,” I asked him between slurps. I avoided the moniker, ‘old fellow.’ Pot calling the kettle black and all that.

“Did you know I fought in Vietnam?” he asked.

“No,” I answered. He had a Quebecois accent, so I followed up with what I thought was a logical question. “Did you go as a volunteer or did you get American citizenship?”

“I was born in the mountains of Sweden,” he answered. I didn’t know there were mountains in Sweden, but I didn’t want to be a buzzkill. But I’ve listened to a lot of Swedish hockey players being interviewed on tv, and none of them spoke with a Quebecois accent.

“Where were you stationed over there? Ping Pong, Sing Song? Sorry, other than Hanoi and what they used to call Saigon my knowledge of Vietnamese geography is severely limited.” I felt a little levity was required. I’d also had a lot of time on my hands throughout the past two years and I couldn’t even remember the number of lockdowns we had endured. I think I have to take off my shoes to count them all. It was only noon and I make it a practice not to have my first beer before 5 p.m. Turns out we had a good talk and I hardly believed a word he said.

No different than all the media stories I listen to all day.

But as anyone who knows me well can attest, don’t get me started.

I might never know when I might stop.