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gracefully. Like Rita Rudner, I plan to “have facelifts until my ears join together.”
Except for the occasional heart attack, I feel as young as ever.
When I see my daughter being picked up by her date, I:
Give thanks that she has finally met such a fine gentleman.
Wish I had installed razor wire in the front yard.
Feel like I’m handing a Rembrandt over to a chimpanzee.
My favorite song is now:
Johnny Nash: “I Can See Clearly Now.”
Roberta Flack: “The First Time Ever I Slipped a Disc.”
B. J. Thomas: “Hair Plugs Keep Fallin’ Off My Head.”
    If you answered “a” even once, please leave the room and don’t come back until you apologize to the rest of us and are carrying chocolate. If you answered “b” more than twice, please study my book
Laughing Matters
. If you gravitated toward the “c” answers, you qualify for the Midlife Discount. Ask for it at fine restaurants everywhere. Tell them Dr. Phil sent you.

    The other day I looked in the mirror and realized once again that I don’t have trouble growing hair. But location is a problem. And location is everything when it comes to hair.
    I have placed several helpful sayings throughout the house. In my study is an old Ira Wallach quote that says, “Statistics indicate that as a result of overwork, modern executives are dropping like flies on the nation’s golf courses.”
    There’s a Bible verse on my fridge: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30, KJV) .
    And now there’s the Midlifer’s Motto on my mirror: “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16).
    I love the word
renewal
It speaks of better things ahead. It reminds me of a God who has promised to make all things new one day. I began to hang on to that promise a little more tightly as we entered uncharted territory with Mom and Dad.

I do wish I could tell you my age but it’s impossible
.
It keeps changing all the time
.
    G REER G ARSON
    F or five years my parents lived in the suite we built for them, witnessing the onslaught of our teenagers and raving about their new life. “The best years of our lives,” Dad told us over and over again. They loved having teenagers careening around the house. Each morning the sun rose through their living room window. And each morning Dad was greeted by our Maltese dog. The two were inseparable. Dad fed the pooch bananas for breakfast; she would take them from no one else.
    Then came the first signs that my father’s forgetter was working overtime. Mom found the ice cream under the sink one day, and when she asked Dad how it got there, he joked: “Oh, it was too hard for my dentures.”
    His sense of humor was intact, but he often grew disoriented, forgetting what organization he was employed by for twenty years, referring to childhood places as if they were just down the street and asking me to take him there.
    One night I found him in his favorite chair, his eyes glazed with tears. “I don’t know where I should go,” he said. “I have no work.”
    Mom pulled me aside, almost frantic. “Is there anything we can do?” After several visits to the doctor, Dad was diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s, that slowly encroaching thief who reduces brilliant scientists to babbling children and saints of God to cursing sailors.
    Though he remained kind and gentle, Dad frowned more often, as if he were trying to navigate an unfamiliar car through a strange city, thinking east was north.
    I sat with him at night when I could, watching his Toronto Maple Leafs, a struggling hockey team that has offered him mostly misery for years. When we talked of old times, his eyes brightened.
    “Remember when you used to cut my hair?”
    He smiled.
    Dad was no more trained in cutting hair than I am in flying helicopters, but that didn’t stop him for a minute. Someone had given him a set of hand-me-down electric clippers, and every once in a while he’d oil