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Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY One sign of aging is rambling talk If you are in the senior citizens age bracket, 65 or older, you have probably noticed how rapidly you are becoming just another old lady or old geezer. If you ever thought about the subject of aging before you entered into that age range, you probably wished you could avoid the inevitable � the slowing of the gait, the loss of short-term memory, the increase in the number of prescriptions you must take. But no matter how hard you try to remain youthful, you are fighting a battle you can�t win. Your greatest enemy is, of all things, gravity. When you are young, the muscles and sinews of the body do their work in keeping everything together and operating. As you grow older, these parts of the body lose their elasticity, and the battle against losing your youthfulness begins. I am rapidly losing that battle. As things begin to sag, I find that I have also begun doing things that I had earlier promised myself that I would not do. One of these is being "garrulous," which is defined by Webster�s Dictionary as "being given to pointless, rambling or tedious talking." It happened most recently several months ago during a visit to a new doctor�s office. That is, he was new to me. He had before him a form doctors use when questioning new patients about their medical history. I found myself running off at the mouth, telling him about things which had little to do with my medical history. I couldn�t seem to shut up. Another symptom of old age is that a person slowly begins to inflate things that happened in the past. It is like the old story about a man who asked another for the time. The second didn�t give him the time � he just proceeded to tell him how to build a clock. I don�t know why I or anyone else should do that, but it is pretty common. Some of us have been expanding our stories for some time, probably to make ourselves look good. Figuratively speaking, the mountains we have climbed or the races we have run become much tougher as we retell our stories and attempt to make ourselves look good. Actually, such actions come under the heading of lying. I really realized that recently when we were out visiting some friends, and I brought up my experience with tobacco. I began smoking occasionally in 1942 when I was 19, and by the time I joined the Marines the following year, I was hooked. Cigars and cigarettes were available at low prices at PXs at the Recruit Depot in San Diego, and at three other training bases where I served. When I went overseas, a lot of cigarettes were free, packed in K and C rations. My story about tobacco concerns how I smoked like a chimney for 15 years up until 1957, when I stopped cold. I told this couple that I had smoked as many at three packs of cigarettes plus some little cigars in a day. The way I quit was to depend on salt water taffy instead of a smoke. Little cubes of taffy are individually wrapped, and all of the hand motions in getting the candy out of my coat pocket and unwrapped sort of duplicated the motions of opening a pack and fishing out a cigarette or a small cigar. Anyway, I never fell off the wagon; smoking was gone. However, I did gain 10 pounds. After we came home from that recent night out, Nora gently called my attention to a small problem with a detail in my story of escaping from tobacco�s clutches. More than 43 years before, when she first heard me tell the story, I had said I was smoking almost two packs a day. Over the years, the number of packs grew to almost three, and the one or two small cigars a day became several. "Come on, Hank," she said. She was right. I knew deep down that my story was a bit out of kilter. When I was younger, I used to overhear old men spinning stories around a table in a coffee shop and wondered if their tales were true. Now that I am older, I know that inflating a story is probably a normal trait for some of the elderly, but I hope I stick to the facts. It makes life easier. (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2000 Mail Tribune, Inc.