Good morning. I got up today, heated up my Keurig coffee and opened the mail.
There were ads for things like khaki pants, hoodies and a formula for strengthening the loose skin around your neck.
I have more khaki pants than I need, 14 hoodies, and the skin around my neck is properly loose.
And then this grabbed me:
ENDS TOMORROW.
OK, it’s about a sale, but with words you don’t want to read when you’ve finally become a nonagenarian. Oh no, you’re gonna look it up?
OK, take a breath, grab the table with both hands, and I’ll tell you. It comes as no surprise to my closest friends that this past September, this Virgo has turned 90.
OMG! OMG! 90.
A diabetes ad says, “It’s only a number.”
OK. That sounds comforting.
No one in my orbit seems surprised. Outside of the three women in my life, She and my two daughters, I have only two friends left. And I only see them on FaceTime.
The best are a nice married couple who were in Hamburg, Germany, for two weeks, and now they’ve gone to South Carolina to play golf.
I don’t fly. I have enough turbulence in my life, and I have no money to go to Freeport and certainly not Hamburg, Germany.
She, who is still benched with two kinds of arthritis in her knees, is occupied with books and managing our budget. My daughters are rich and happy.
None of my Hollywood friends have lived to become 90. Johnny Carson said, “Hollywood will kill you.” It did.
So I checked on a few celebrities I’ve worked with, to see if they got the ENDS TOMORROW email.
First it was Bob Newhart. I got to know Bob when he hired me for a great segment on his show called “Group On a Hot Tin Roof.” His regular cast on that segment, like Jack Riley and the darling Suzi Pleshette, have left us. They will be missed.
That leaves Bob Newhart at 93 and me at 90, still working.
So I never played ball with Willie Mays, who’s 91; or danced with Rita Moreno, also 91; never kissed Kim Novak, 90; or got shot by Clint Eastwood, who is still making movies at 91; and I regret that I never learned those three chords with Willie Nelson, who is about to turn 90. But we’re all here.
So what do you do when you’ve turned 90 and still look like the late Louis Jordan?
I got this good looking and healthy by walking 2 miles a day for 20 years. I don’t do that anymore. There are too many dogs now.
I walk a mile or two a day, mostly in supermarkets and around the house. As I’ve told you many times: I do laundry, walk in the market, make Her Highness breakfast, mini-lunch and grand dinners.
I do yoga in the morning and stretches in the afternoon between writing two pieces a week, while the teacher I married 62 years ago does the books and pays the bills.
It’s no surprise to anyone that I’m the guy who lost two checkbooks in snow drifts on his 2 mile-a-day walk in winter’s past.
I play the piano while dinner is in the oven and lose nightly in Jeopardy! to the woman who reads three books a week. That’s what a 90-year-old writer does when there is no one else to do it.
Ends tomorrow? I hope not. I’ve got a roast in the oven and Jeopardy! starts soon.
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.
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