Gettin' Old Ain't for Sissies

neely

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My cousin sent a poem to me this morning - though I would share. 

A row  of bottles on my shelf
Caused me to analyze  myself.
One yellow pill I have to pop
Goes  to my heart so it won't stop.
A little  white one that I take
Goes to my hands so  they won't shake.
The blue ones that I use a  lot
Tell me I'm happy when I'm  not.
The purple  pill goes to my brain
And tells me that I  have no pain.
The capsules tell me not to  wheeze
Or cough or choke or even  sneeze.
The red  ones, smallest of them all
Go to my blood so  I won't fall.
The orange ones, very big and  bright
Prevent my leg cramps in the  night.
Such an  array of brilliant pills
Helping to cure all  kinds of ills.
But what I'd really like to  know,
Is what tells each one where to  go!
 

DreamerRose

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I had a nice trip down memory lane the other night. I was watching a 2015 rerun of Law and Order: SVU, and there was a very old man in it, a central character. I recognized something about him and after a minute, a voice in the back of my mind said "The Man from UNCLE." No, no, that was the show with Bill Cosby in it. I kept watching, and the thought kept intruding "The Man from UNCLE." So finally I looked it up on IMDB, and sure enough, it was Robert Vaughn, the original Man from UNCLE. And next to Vaughn was David McCallum, who is now on"NCIS," and Leo G. Carroll, who is now on the new show "Doubt."  It was nice to see these actors from so long ago still active and working at their craft.
 

Margret

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That's funny. I was 13 when John Kennedy was shot. I was in my 7th grade history class and I remember teenage girls walking through the halls crying. 
I was a few yrs.younger than you but I remember it vividly.  It made such a strong impression on me that if I went back to my school I could tell you exactly where I was standing in the room.  I was literally in shock! 
I was in third grade.  At lunch, I heard Nelson and Barb arguing about whether "he" had been shot in the noggin or the bean.  I asked who they were talking about and they said "The president."  I told them that it wasn't funny, and they should stop lying.

There was a television in our classroom, because PBS had been running language class programs and we were all "taking" Spanish.  (The show was really lame.  The teacher tried to pretend he could actually see the students and would admonish "the boys in the back of the room" to be quiet and stop goofing off, stuff like that.)  So after lunch we were all supposed to get back to working on little plays we were supposed to present to the P.T.A., but instead Mrs. Russell had the television on.  (I still have no idea how Nelson and Barb found out about it earlier than everyone else.)  We sat there, totally involved, as they talked about the president being shot, and the rush to the hospital, and "no word yet" on whether he was dead or alive, and then the fire alarm went off and we all groaned.  We filed out of the school, and there was the principal in front of the main entrance.  He stopped us from continuing to the football field (standard practice, to get the students away from danger) and had us form up around the flagpole and led us in prayers for the president.  (Parochial school.)  Our classroom was right next to the entrance, and it was a surprisingly warm day for November in Denver, so the windows were open.  One of the teachers stood next to our open window and listened to the news on our T.V., and told us when it was official that the president was dead.  That week's color guard formed up, lowered the flag, raised it to the top of the flagstaff again, and then officially lowered it to half staff.

The school was next door to the hospital where many of our parents worked, including my mother, so we were told that if anyone wanted to go to the hospital to find their parents, school was over for the day, and other parents would be called to come pick up their kids.

Two or three days later, I was sitting with my parents watching the news, and they showed Lee Harvey Oswald being shot.  I thought at first that he was making faces to entertain the children, and I laughed at him.  It seemed like an incredibly nice thing for a man who'd been accused of killing the president to do.

Margret
 
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1CatOverTheLine

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Originally Posted by Margret  

I remember further back than that, in fact.  One night in the middle of the night (probably more like 9:00 or so, but it seemed like the middle of the night to me), shortly after my youngest brother was born, my father came into my bedroom and woke me up, and told me to get dressed very quietly so as not to wake my mother, and to put on my snow suit and boots; we were going into the back yard.  Then he showed me the stars, the constellations, how to find the north star, and finally he said "Do you see that star that seems to be moving, while all the others are staying still?  That's called Sputnik.  It's the very first man made satellite."  October, 1957.  He wanted me to be able to tell my children and grandchildren that I was present at the very beginning of the space age.

Margret
Sputnik's probably my earliest "current events" memory, aside from General Eisenhower's re-election campaign (and that only because my Father swore about mentioned it roughly every three minutes for several years).  I can't watch Jeff Goldblum dashing down that hallway in The Right Stuff, and then shouting, "it's called Sputnik !) without remembering looking up into the night sky at the onset of Autumn, with the wind sweeping away the world as out Parents knew it.

.

.
 

ginny

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I was only 3 years old when JFK was murdered, so I am blissfully ignorant of that horrible day.  But I'm still old enough to qualify for "old".  I'll be 58 at the end of this year.  

I do have some aches and pains here and there.  Right now it's my right middle and 4th finger.  They both feel like their being stuck with a hot poker when I wake up in the morning and try to move them.  Lord it hurts!  I have to work it out and keep moving it all day long.  

I suspect that this fairly new pain is due to the massive sugar benge I've been on for the last few months.  Caution thrown to the wind, even though I KNOW that sugar is highly inflammatory.  Just this past weekend I restarted the paleo diet (a less restrictive version) once again.  When I was on it before, I lost MANY aches and pains, especially in my joints.  My right leg wouldn't bend without pain,  After a few months of no grain and very minimal "approved" sugars (which was way less than I was getting before) those pains simply went away. I also lost my gut.  It flattened out faster than I was losing weight.  The reason for that was grain is also inflammatory, causes gas, leaky gut, intense food cravings. (That's why they give it to cows and chickens...to make them gain weight.)

I lost 22 pounds in about 8 weeks time and was never hungry.  Paleo is high fat/med protein/low carb, so it's a very satiable diet.  Intense cravings for food will completely go away.  

So please consider your diet as part of the culprit for various aches and pains and memory losses, and not just put it down to aging.  I'm hoping my fingers improve greatly over the next few weeks after going sugar-free and increasing my general nutrition, especially leafy greens.  I can already tell I have so much more energy than before and it's only been 6 days.   

Oh and one more thing.  I no longer wake up in the night choking on stomach acid, nor do I have any heartburn.  Bathroom habits are improving greatly too.  
 
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neely

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Two or three days later, I was sitting with my parents watching the news, and they showed Lee Harvey Oswald being shot.  I thought at first that he was making faces to entertain the children, and I laughed at him.  It seemed like an incredibly nice thing for a man who'd been accused of killing the president to do.
I remember the eminent picture of John Jr., fondly referred to as John John, saluting his father's casket.  One of the saddest and most heart wrenching events for any child to witness.
 It is embedded in my memory. 
 

DreamerRose

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That salute was set up by Jackie. She pushed her son forward and told him to salute at the right moment. You can see this on the full tape. It reduces the poignancy for me.
 

1CatOverTheLine

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That salute was set up by Jackie. She pushed her son forward and told him to salute at the right moment. You can see this on the full tape. It reduces the poignancy for me.
I dunno - it seems to me that she simply prompts him at the right moment.  I'd call it more a sign of good Parenting and respect than anything else.  It doesn't look like he was, "pushed," to my old eyes.

 
 
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ginny

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I dunno - it seems to me that she simply prompts him at the right moment.  I'd call it more a sign of good Parenting and respect than anything else.  It doesn't look like he was, "pushed," to my old eyes.

 
It hurts to look at Jackie's face.  You can tell she's devastated.  I think John Jr. and I were the same age.  
 

Willowy

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That salute was set up by Jackie. She pushed her son forward and told him to salute at the right moment. You can see this on the full tape. It reduces the poignancy for me.
IDK. How many not-quite-3-year-olds would do that themselves? I guess I always figured an adult told him to do it.

The earliest national tragedy I remember was the Challenger explosion. I was 7. We still lived off-base at the time so we didn't have American TV. My mom took us to the playground and a little girl told us about it. My mom didn't believe her because she was known for story-telling, but what kind of kid makes up a story about that? So we went to the Ladies' Lounge and watched TV there and it was true. So I suppose I'm awfully young for this thread :tongue2:.
 
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ginny

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IDK. How many not-quite-3-year-olds would do that themselves? I suppose I always figured an adult told him to do it.

The earliest national tragedy I remember was the Challenger explosion. We still lived off-base at the time so we didn't have American TV. My mom took us to the playground and a little girl told us about it. My mom didn't believe her because she was known for story-telling, but what kind of kid makes up a story about that? So we went to the Ladies' Lounge and watched TV there and it was true. So I suppose I'm awfully young for this thread
.
You're never too young to change your eating habits and lifestyle to avoid the health challenges we are talking about.  But time will teach you this, if you choose not to learn now.  
 
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Mamanyt1953

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Know what I miss?  Rowan and Martin's Laugh In.  I LOVED that show!
 

Margret

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Two or three days later, I was sitting with my parents watching the news, and they showed Lee Harvey Oswald being shot.  I thought at first that he was making faces to entertain the children, and I laughed at him.  It seemed like an incredibly nice thing for a man who'd been accused of killing the president to do.
I remember the eminent picture of John Jr., fondly referred to as John John, saluting his father's casket.  One of the saddest and most heart wrenching events for any child to witness.
 It is embedded in my memory. 
That salute was set up by Jackie. She pushed her son forward and told him to salute at the right moment. You can see this on the full tape. It reduces the poignancy for me.
The Kennedys were a political family through and through.  Jackie married into that, and she did her duty.  After her husband's death, that meant doing what she could to preserve his legacy, and to support L.B.J..  That picture of her on the back of the limo, retrieving part of her husband's brain, that was genuine, not premeditated in any way -- how could it have been?  And yet, what she had was not what I would call a conventional marriage; Jack's affairs were an open secret.

Did she love her husband?  It's hard to say.  Certainly she reacted then like a woman in love, but it's also clear that her marriage was her job, and the job didn't end until after the funeral.

John Jr. was caught in the middle, as the children of the powerful always are.  To him, as to most children, I'm sure that his parents were just his parents.  But he was also being raised in that extremely political family, as his father had been before him.  In one way or another, he was expected to go into politics himself, and he did, by going into both the law and journalism.  Caroline was older, but the spotlight wasn't on her, because she was a girl.  Girls couldn't be politicians -- they were expected to grow up to be political wives.

John John was just days short of his third birthday when his father was killed.  Three year olds don't think in terms of military salutes.  It's hard to tell just what they understand about the things that are going on around them -- I'm sure John John had been told that his father was dead, or that his father wasn't coming back, but this was almost certainly his first experience of death, so what did he think that meant?  I don't know.  When I think back to my very few memories from that age, not one of them has anything to do with death.  I think I was 10 or 11 years old before I lost my first pet.

There is something inherently poignant about a three year old caught in that situation -- going to his father's funeral, all of the pomp associated with a funeral of state, all of the reporters and cameras -- being prompted to step forward and salute is minor in all of that, and it gave him a definite role to fulfill as part of the ceremony.  This is not a bad thing; a need for ceremony seems to somehow be wired into the human brain.  It may have given him some comfort in the years to come, I hope.  Certainly he seems to have grown up with a sense of responsibility, and an understanding of his own mind, which is probably as much as we can expect for any child.

Margret
 

DreamerRose

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I suppose I reflect the attitudes of most ordinary people in Washington at the time who viewed Jackie with some skepticism. She was gone a lot, spent a lot of money on clothes, and when she was there, did things like appropriating national monuments for parties that shocked a lot of people. So much of what she did seemed like show for an audience.
 

DreamerRose

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I also want to say that Jack's affairs weren't well known at the time. There wasn't a whisper in the newspapers or gossip columns, but then, no one knew Jackie smoked, either. I once asked Carl Bernstein at a book signing if he knew anything about it, and he said he had asked Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post and a rather close friend of the Kennedys, and Ben said he had never been aware of anything going on between Jack and other women.
 

arouetta

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The earliest national tragedy I remember was the Challenger explosion. I was 7. We still lived off-base at the time so we didn't have American TV. My mom took us to the playground and a little girl told us about it. My mom didn't believe her because she was known for story-telling, but what kind of kid makes up a story about that? So we went to the Ladies' Lounge and watched TV there and it was true. So I suppose I'm awfully young for this thread :tongue2:.
I'm young like you. I was right around 13. The only reason I don't remember it is because I was on the West Coast and was still sleeping. Probably for the best; I'm on the East Coast now and people talk about how all classrooms had the TV on because of the school teacher so they saw it live.

I seem to be good at missing tragedies. All I remember of Mt Saint Helens is a day that had yellow snow falling and everyone making a big deal about the snow (the "snow" was volcanic ash from the eruption). I was in a hospital yelling at a patient advocate when 9-11 happened, so not near a radio. I was asleep during the Columbia crash. And I had the TV tuned to a children's cartoon channel when the Oklahoma bombing happened, so they didn't interrupt with the news.
 
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