Here’s a loving little piece from Danny Lavery about working in a senior care center and driving people to their appointments: “Getting in and out of cars.”
It’s possible to take the “Don’t get old” injunction too seriously, to take someone else’s aging as proof of failure, to decide that if one just does enough balance and mobility exercises, lifts enough weights, they will never experience physical frailty or loss of control, remain in perfect rude bursting sheer vigor right up until the moment they drop dead, still as healthy as an ox. But I am inclined to take it seriously, that little automatic annual deduction of muscle that one scarcely notices until the stairs and the bathroom become newly dangerous; there is a balance to be struck between living as if there were no tomorrow and behaving like that billionaire who’s always drinking his son’s blood.