Monday, December 05, 2005

When did we get old?

I had dinner with some other thirty-something friends last night and almost the whole evening's conversation centered around our annoying chronic health problems. I mean, the knees, the guts, the back, the mysterious dizziness, the computer-strained wrists, the trouble sleeping/ trouble waking up... And of course after our nutritious meal we all scattered to our cozy rented corners of the East Bay by 9:30 pm. When did we get old?

And remember that show "Thirty Something"? That was an old people's show!

The one member of our party who was particularly self-conscious about her aches and pains and "oldness" was also, I have to add, the one who earlier in the day went wide-eyed sidling up to a moo-cow and her calf with a handful of dry grass. Cows. It's calming just to watch them. We decided on our hike that day that the horrors we listen to on the news should be interspersed with a minute or two of footage of cows grazing, just to recalibrate back to center between beheadings and rapes and global pandemics.

Is this why people put wooden cut-outs of cows on their lawns? The aesthetics of calm?