Geezer gains

When my Granddad was in his 80s, I’d see him don a flannel shirt as he prepared to walk down the hill to the mailbox.

This was only notable because it was mid-August and the real feel outside was probably 108 degrees.

Sometimes I think about that when I’m at work in the summertime with my hoodie up in a well air-conditioned office, and I tell my staff, “I’ll be right back. I’m going outside to warm up.”

The steps are slow — much like my grandfather’s flannelled August amble down the driveway — but I am very much making geezer gains.

At 45, shades of the old man within are showing. I’ve written before about physical aging. This is different.

It manifests itself in the fact that AC makes me uncomfortable. Or in the weirdly chipper text I recently received that said, “Cologuard: Welcome! We are excited to help you screen for colon cancer.”

It hits me when I need time every morning for my body to loosen for another long, physically taxing day of mostly sitting.

I start to feel better around breakfast, which consists of a bowl of oatmeal.

That’s followed by the separation and ingestion of a constellation of tablets, caplets and capsules of medicines and vitamins.

As we stood around the kitchen alternating popping pills with swallowing mouthfuls of water during a recent getaway, my wife suggested we need a pill organizer and I laughed but also secretly hoped that’s what I get for Father’s Day. That or a nice bottle of gin, which I’ve started consuming as if I was formerly a regular at a speakeasy in 1923.

Then, we took a long walk in a neighborhood, Ocean Pines, that is mostly populated by retirees, which we are closer in age to being than the grandkids we see riding bikes during our visits to my parents’ house there.

Speaking of that house, my folks allow us to stay there several times a year. It is close to the beach. It is filled with joyous memories and several televisions that have become the most pressing conversation topic when I talk to my father, who is 75.

The transition to wifi-based streaming in the high-definition present has been daunting for him. We’ve come a long ways since “Howdy Doody” entertained him in black and white. Today, my parents have many network series and much 24-hour news to consume on TV, and they must be able to watch or at least hear those TVs from every room in the house.

And whenever I get off the phone with my father after another 20-minute session in which I explain a Kindle Fire Stick, I think back about 25 years to when he would crack jokes about my Granddad’s obsession with collecting TVs, which has now become my dad’s most earnest hobby.

And then I think about what it might be like in 25 years, when I’m 70. I think about the amount and quality of screens/digital brain implants I’ll be able to buy and discuss, also at length, with my son, as I try to find the Orioles game on MASN — only to have him tell me that MASN is now on a super-dooper premium broadcast tier that will drive my monthly streaming bill even farther north of the $10,000 I’m draining his inheritance on.

And after he tells me that, I’ll probably curse the team’s ownership for, like, the 10,000th instance in my fandom and say something hateful about the times we live in, like any good grumpy old man.

And if I still have my long-term memory at that point, I might think back to when and why I started expressing such nastiness in the 2020s, when I was a 40-something adult who started to rapidly make geezer gains.

Back to when I’d hear my 14-year-old son warn his mother that his old man was “being grumpy” again.

Things bother me way more now than ever. Specific things. Like the bird’s nest of uncombed hair atop my son’s head that he refuses to address. Like the golfer’s elbow that I have been dealing with even though I have never golfed a day in my life.

General things, too. Like people.

Even though I’m generally a grump about other humans, I’ve found that I randomly end up in conversation with them, whether I’m the perpetrator or not. It’s something I’ve seen the old men in my family do, and now apparently it’s already my turn.

My wife and I were at a bar last winter when a couple came in and stood next to me, talking loudly about an awful car-shopping experience. I turned to my left and interjected some pertinent comment or advice. At least I thought it was.

Once they shuffled on, my wife shook her head.

“You’re turning into your father,” she said.

If those people thought I was rude, though, I don’t care. That’s one great thing about turning into an old man.

I was heading into Safeway recently when a fellow old man — he had 30 years on me — asked about the plastic bags I was carrying in to recycle. This guy was a total stranger, yet we’re walking and chatting like pals and the next thing you know he’s indirectly explaining his beliefs on global warming.

Which is to say, he didn’t believe in it.

Takes all kinds, I guess. That’s a saying I only heard old people say, but now I say it.

Josh, did you know that people believe Taylor Swift’s relationship with Travis Kelce is a ploy to get Joe Biden re-elected?

Takes all kinds.

I spontaneously used another old line recently that you never hear today because everyone thinks they’re so smart thanks to Google and/or The Joe Rogan Experience. But it was a typical response from someone like my late grandma. Sometimes, if you asked her a question, she’d respond, “I haven’t the slightest I-dea.”

Grandma would even say it like you’d think an old person would say it, overemphasizing the I in idea.

I might start doing that, too, just to honor her as I transition to geezerdom.

Josh, how in the hell do you have golfer’s elbow despite never playing golf? How are you wearing a hoodie in midsummer? Why in tarnation are the Orioles so hard to find on TV? What is with these teenage boys’ stupid hair styles? Why is it so comfortable now for you to sit with your legs tightly crossed?

I haven’t the slightest I-dea.

But I do know that no one — regardless of how old they are — is excited to get help screening for colon cancer.

Joshua R. Smith is the News-Post sports editor. His Real Life column appears occasionally but probably not monthly anymore because he lives the boring life of an old man.