Poems

No Coots Like Old Coots

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We know that older fellows can get a little grumpy. Even guys who have been perfectly good company for most of their lives can bend towards gruffness in later years, and now some researchers have identified the tipping point at age 70.

That’s when it really starts to go downhill.

The headline from Oregon State’s news service took a glass-half-full approach, choosing to emphasize the uplifting and hassle-free late-60’s over the spiraling-downward-into-the-abyss 70’s. The progression, however, is clear.

No one knows why the data shows such a sharp decline in cheerfulness and sociability after 70, but there it is. And it’s left to those of us on this side of the divide to try to explain it, because those over-70 coots don’t give a damn whether we figure out how brain biology works or not.

“Who the Hell cares?  I didn’t live this long just to waste my time explaining crap to you!”

Perhaps more rigorous study and solid scientific proof of this cognitive change could help the exasperated elderly mediate some of their tirades.  But it’s hard to take in new information when you are already seething, so let’s step back a bit and reduce the journey from sweet to sullen to a simple, lilting rhyme!

 

At Fifty Nine – Feeling Fine.
At Six and Zero – Still a Hero.
At Sixty One – Loads of Sun.
At Sixty Two – Yabba Dabba Doo!
At Sixty Three – Bright with Glee!
At Sixty Four – Ready for More.
At Sixty Five – Vibrant, Alive.
At Sixty Six – Full of Tricks.
At Sixty Seven – Oceans Eleven!
At Sixty Eight – Still Kinda Great.
At Sixty Nine – No, Really. Fine.
At Seven and Zero – Becoming Nero.
At Seventy One – Not Much Fun.
At Seventy Two – I’m Watching You!
At Seventy Three – You Talking to ME?
At Seventy Four – Always Sore.
At Seventy Five – A Hornet’s Hive.
At Seventy Six –  Literally Kicks.
At Seventy Seven – Won’t Leaven.
At Seventy Eight – Evil Incarnate.
At Seventy Nine – I’m tired of rhymes!

 

Where’s your tipping point?

 

 

78 thoughts on “No Coots Like Old Coots”

  2. THE Britcom on cootiness is now playing at 10:30 most M-Th evenings. “One Foot in the Grave.” Loved in England

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    1. And, of course, the new season of Doc Martin started last night. All us old coots are envious of his grump.

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      2. I like his “grump”. Does that mean I’m an old coot too? …I’m OK with that.

        I don’t see it often but we enjoy the show.

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  3. Rise and Shine Grumpy, Aging Baboons!

    Get off the bus, Gus
    Make a new plan, Stan–Oops, that is Paul Simon.

    It is 10:40am here in Bergen–Clyde it appears 3a.m. is your hour these days and nights! I am traveling with a 70 year old who is not crabby unless he is ill. Often, as I interact with colleagues who work in gerontology or hospice, I wonder if the crabby mood has to do with inactivity and boredom. (Between activities we have taken days of rest in which we watched Norwegian TV. Said TV stations broadcast old USA crime and medical dramas. And Bonanza, translated into Norwegian subtitles. Too much of that would make me crabby!) I do observe that older people live beyond the opinions others might form of them, which appears to me to be healthy and well-deserved.

    We have been out hiking the hills and seeing the non-fjord Norwegian Coast, including the oil town of Stavanger. We have experienced great beauty and interesting people here on the West Coast of Norway. The Norway Emigration Center which searches for the lost Norwegians of the world is located in Stavanger. I left with them the names and birthdates of my ancestors born in Norway, who emigrated to Wisconsin and Iowa. I would love to find the descendants of the 9 brothers who stayed in Telemark. In the KODE Art Museum in Bergen I found a portrait named “Telemark Farmer” who looked just like my Uncle Lee Hoel, that great Norwegian-American-Iowan.

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    1. Pure joy for you to be there. Keep telling, please.
      Yes, on a good night, 3 a.m. and then 6 a.m. too.
      My grump is all pain and stress driven.
      I try hard not to grump on here.

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    2. So enjoying hearing about your travels. Wonder if Norwegian Bonanza can be found on YouTube.

      Not finding it, but I see James Arness was a Minnesota Norwegian — squirrel!!!

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    3. theres something you dont see in print everyday… the great nowegian american iowan. another example of a great norwegian american iowan doesnt jump immediatly to mind.

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    1. perfect holly thanks. hey holly if youre free book club is at my house tomorrow. you are welcome if theres a hole in you calendar. the only person not invited is dale. we need to have him remain an enigma.

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      1. Tim, maybe I’ll join Blevens’ Book Club once I retire. I just finished a fantastic concert with 120 4th and 5th graders, and at age 60 I shall need to rest for a few days in order to continue to teach music at the level to which my students are accustomed. I love my job, but wow. That’s a lot of kids. Another year or 2 at least.
        Oh, by the way… rest means work in the yard all day (what joy!) in anticipation of a week of rain and wind. Jim Ed never liked wind and I am now agreeing with him.
        I also washed some sheets and towels and hung them out to dry. And brought them in and put the sheets back on the bed. Heaven.
        I also sang at an Earth Week celebration in Northfield with some 3rd graders this evening. So yeah, restful day……

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  5. Good morning. I’m 72 and more than half way to 73. Don’t mess with me when I make it to 73. I have my ups and downs. My whole life has been a roller coaster. My hope is that “it’s getting a little better all the time” as in the Beatles song. Of course the next line in that song is “it can’t get much worse”

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  6. Interesting.
    I guess I am just lucky in that the people I know who are over 70 just don’t fit this pattern (and I know a lot).

    Or maybe, since a lot of them have also crossed into the 80s, they are over the whole “70s thing”.

    Have to agree with Jacque- staying active and connected is key. I always tell my octegenarian friends they get to do as they please and not answer to anyone. They’ve earned it.

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  7. As a purely sociological mission, for the benefit of the trail, and because I have no painless place to sit at home until 10 a.m., I am studying old cootdom, that is Paneras. What is interesting is that M to F early morning at Panera belongs to the 60 year olds. On Saturday it belongs to the 80 year olds. Why is that? Hmmmmm?

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    1. so do you join in on any of these breakfast clubs to fix the problems of the world or do you sit alone and watch the round tables resolve the issues of the day. ? is the m-f group the same every day or does monday have one group and tuesday another? is the saturday 80’s gang the same each week except for the ones who die between meetings? how about a list of vignettes of am panera scenes. we got such a late start yesterday. the lists were short changed

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      1. There is a group on m-f, almost all there every day.
        I know no one here, so I sit and read, and journal.
        No idea about Sat; rarely come on Sat. Now the m-f group is here, but came an hour later.
        This is a rather dull place all in all.

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        1. i think you should head up a cantankerous coots group that meets to discuss the world through a set of sarcastic eyes.

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  8. 70’s a tipping point? they are all tipping points. think of 21 31 41 51
    twenty one belly up to the bar son
    thirty one in lifes prime right hun?
    forty one responsibilities fun
    fifty one youths just about done
    sixty one went by so fast its dumb
    seventy one climb on give er one last run
    eighty one hang on while you drool some
    ninty one living alone in decades past is a memory to be though upon
    one hundred and one. one long blur of the century rerun
    one hundred eleven doenst rhyme and almost nobody ever makes it to one hundred and eleven anyway

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    1. I believe “One Hundred Eleven” rhymes with “heaven”, which is where most people celebrate this birthday.

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  9. This aging thing is clearly something we all experience uniquely. I’ve said it before so I might as well repeat that my sex life began at 59, which was a nice compensation for things I had already lost.

    I was sailing jauntily through the 60s, feeling a wee bit smug the way you do when your very old car runs like it did a decade ago. And then at 68 I suddenly found out that my engine was dodgy from piston wear, the transmission was crapping out and I suffered a lot of deep body rust. Worse, the warranty expired sometime in Dubya’s term.

    False pride and pretensions have now been shamed into silence, and now I’m not often unhappy about where I am because at least I am somewhere still, moving badly but finding plenty to laugh about.

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  10. Sort of OT . Waiting to see Buzz Aldrin in person. (OMG)

    He is 84- probably past the cranky stage.

    Anna, are you here?

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    1. I was there – didn’t stay for the signing with Buzz Aldrin. With two not-quite-ten-year-old girls who got ansty after sitting through his presentation with Harrison Schmitt – though Mr. Schmitt was out and about before his presentation and I caught him then. Nice man. (Brief brag: when they talked about him studying at the University of Oslo – my mom was there at the same time. He remembers my mom from that year. 🙂 )

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      1. Cool! How great that you got to talk to him about that. What was he studying in Oslo-for that matter, what was your mom studying?)

        We stayed and got everything autographed-very fine day with a 15-year-old geek.

        During the part talking about the future of space exploration, Buzz Aldrin was supposed to speak for about 5 mintutes then take some moderator questions. Our guess is he spoke at least for 20 minutes.

        Not one bit cranky about it either. I think his thought was, I’m 84, I’ve walked on the moon, I’m talking until I am done 🙂

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        1. My mom was studying organ (music and performance), pretty sure Mr. Schmitt would have been working on geology. They were both part of a group of Fulbright scholars there for the year – sounds like they all hung out in a gang.

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        2. ah, Fulbright year. I do remember him saying that now.

          How very awesome of your mom to be a Fulbright scholar!

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  11. As I’ve expressed before, this is the very first decade with which I’m having a struggle. Of course, it’s the first and probably last decade which leads directly to being truly “old”. The hardest part is that I’m still relatively youthful in terms of appearance and vitality “for my age” and I’m just not OK with this steadily slipping away. Yet.

    One of you mentioned “book club” above. I had this novel idea last week of forming a book club just for therapists – not just any book club, but all those “should read” books pertaining to doing therapy which have sat on the shelves for years without being read. Surprisingly, 15 therapists enthusiastically responded! My plan is to have them bring a list of all these unread books to our first gathering. Should be fun!

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      1. Thank you so much! I must’ve mentioned my discomfort with driving anywhere unfamiliar? I have to pick my son up at the airport at 1PM – otherwise I’d definitely have taken you up on this. Please let me know about the next one (and which book you’re discussing)!

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    1. BiR, there is a tipping point for lawns, too, when they suddenly get bigger. The distance from my garage to my back door became dramatically longer this last winter. I never remember making an effort to waltz through that span with my grocery bags before, but this winter it suddenly needed planning, resolve and a team of Sherpas to get my sacks of food from the garage all the way to the door.

      It works the other way. After my mom died my dad asked me to drive him to the little town where he’d grown up in the early 1920s. He mostly enjoyed the trip to Keosauqua, but one thing infuriated him. The garden where he had toiled like a slave under the hot sun had shrunken dramatically in his head from the place he remembered. He was pissed off that the garden could have changed sizes so much, although it obviously had not.

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  13. Hey Clyde of Mankato, I like your attitude. Never lose your sense of humour. We are all going to get there someday or face the alternative.
    Leslie

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        1. Nothing is all bad news, Leslie. The kind of TV I watch is usually sponsored by ambulance chasing law firms. They keep telling me that if I die of meselthelioma I can make out like a bandit with their legal help. There is an upside to anything.

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  15. My tipping point is usually when something hurts. That’s been happening since I was in my 20s, so by the time I hit 70, I will be well used to joints that don’t behave the way they ought. I also come from a line of people who are preternaturally cheerful and/or content, so that bodes well for my later years.

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  16. I think my tipping point can be derived mathematically using an algorithm involving amount of sleep and amount of food ingested-so far, age has far less to do with it than either of those.

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  18. my wife noted the other day that if i am feeling up against the wall and in the midst of doing something and someone gets in my face i tend to act like i have hit the tipping point.
    mouth noises unnerve me, it used to be chewing of ice or potato chips would be the only things that would turn me into a ball of fluff, like fingernails on the chalkboard for some i couldnt think or function if the mouth noises were going on. my dog injured her paw a little bitand she was licking it. the sound of her continual licking was a turning point. i had to get up and leave. there are times i get un nerved by stupidity especially if its messing me up on trying to get somewhere or get something done but for the last while (couple of years) i am able to realize that no one does it the way i do and they all have their own deal and i should be thankful i am dealing wth them for the current two minutes and then i can be done with them. someone is waiting for them to get home and has to live with their brain 24/7, i am able to got away in a short while and good ridance..
    i take a little solace in knowing i would hate to live with me in some respects and the people i am angsting over likely feel like i do that they are for the most part just fine thank you very much and we are all searching for our own happy place in the world.

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    2. tim – I don’t even have to be at my tipping point to be irritated by repetitive noise. I have a very low tolerance for it.

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  21. A good rainy Sunday to all Y’all.

    I managed to get some oats planted yesterday.
    I’m excited that I’m planting ‘registered’ oat seed this year that will become ‘certified’ seed for sale next year.
    Working with Meyer Seed out of Potsdam MN, I’ve been getting seed from them for years. I’ve learned a bit about the process of creating seed and the regulations involved on their part. Interesting.

    Plus one of the brothers, John, grows 40,000-50,000 glad bulbs on his farm and donates the majority of them to hospitals, nursing homes, gift of life house and other places.

    And they drink grape pop!

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    3. Can you see the field of glads from the road? I think that would make me smile every time I drove by. And I might drive by on purpose some days…

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    4. Sorry I missed today – the stars aligned and said, “Anna you will be home with The Dog Who Hates Thunder.” And yay for Carl Hiassen! Have been reading some of the “kid” books he wrote with Miss S (“Hoot” and “Scat” thus far) – they’re just as fun as his grown-up books, but with with a wee touch less of the “adult” language…

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  22. BBC update. Next meeting is June 22 at BiRs, 2 p.m. Primary title is Bluebeard, Kurt Vonnegut. Secondary title is Skinny Dip by Carl Hiassan.

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  23. Thanks for all the birthday wishes, baboons. Had a very nice day despite the weather and despite the fact that I cancelled our dinner out. Daisy is terrified of thunder and was shaking like mad during the storm. Didn’t have the heart to leave her alone. This was my 71st birthday, so I’m waiting for the crankiness to set in big time. So far I’m no more cantankerous than I normally am.

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