Out with the old

I’ve had a nasty cold and didn’t have the strength to do much of anything for a week. I started feeling better yesterday, so I went to the driving range to see if I can still manage to hit a golf ball. So far, so good. Today I did a short walk. If all goes well, I’ll swim tomorrow, and that should signal everything is back to normal. Golf on Monday.

It sucks to be sick, but I was thinking how nice it was to be retired and just give into it rather than drag my ass to work and poison all my co-workers. On the other hand, maybe you do get over it quicker when you push yourself out the door.

While my wrists are much better, my ankles stiffened up. Do body parts take turns rebelling as you age? Maybe they talk to each other, like household appliances that crap out at the same time. First the toaster goes, then the clothes dryer and then it’s everybody in the pool!

I attribute the unpleasant ankle business to an 18-hole walk through a mud bog of a golf course just before I got sick. I seem to recall my partner saying, “Isn’t it hard to push that cart through the mud?” I said, “Not at all. Piece of cake.”

Famous last words. On the bright side, I’ve had stiff ankles before, and I learned a neat trick. Do the alphabet with your foot a couple of times a day. It really helps.

Even though I didn’t feel well, I attempted to make soup from fabulous roast beef leftover from Christmas. The soup was bad. Dale and I did a taste test today and agreed to pitch it. I hate to waste food, particularly that roast beef, but I also hate to eat nasty stuff, so I think we made the right call.

That left us deep in discussion about what to have for dinner tonight. I said, if I’m cooking, it needs to be something I won’t fuck up, because I feel bad about that soup. We were mentally going through items in the fridge and realized we had iceberg lettuce and tomatoes. Cheddar. Corn tortillas. Why, all we’d have to do is get some ground meat, and we could have tacos!

Dale said, “You’ve never fucked up tacos.”

He says the sweetest things. Tacos it is. I consider them healthy. Lean meat, a little cheese, veggies, what could be so wrong?

Since I’m up and about, I decided to clean the second refrigerator. I found a Lambic beer from 2007, which means we’ve moved it six times. I seem to recall a phase in Texas when I was going to make some sort of stew with it and never did.

Dale and I are almost always on completely different pages when it comes to getting rid of stuff. I purge, he hoards. I used to check with him before throwing something away, but it’s 2020. I’m older and bolder. Time to make a command decision, and I decided today the beer was past its prime.

I imagined the response if I had asked. I can totally see Dale looking at it and saying, “2007? Oh, come on, that was when Bush was president, and we thought it couldn’t get any worse. I’m sure the beer is fine.”

The beer was sealed with a cork, which I popped over the sink in case the bottle blew up. Nothing horrible happened, but it smelled funky. I told Dale after-the-fact, and he looked surprised. Maybe a little hurt.

I said, gently, “That’s a long time to keep a beer.”

And he said, and I quote, “No shit.”

Old beer goes bad, and old people change. Sometimes for the better.