Didn't My Skin Used to Fit? by Martha Bolton Page A

hear: ‘‘Honey Do’’ lists, mother-in-law visiting plans, and long distance service sales pitches, to name a few. The advantages would be endless.
    Until then, if we want to get out of uncomfortable situations, I guess we’ll just have to keep on faking it.

    He’s so old that when he orders a three-minute egg, they ask him for the money up front.
—Milton Berle

47

Who Unplugged the Fountain of Youth?
    People have searched for it for years, and in case you’re one of those still looking for it, I’m sorry to inform you that there is no fountain of youth. There is no pool of magical water where you can go for a dip and regain your youthful vitality. There are no water springs that will grant sharper memory or tighter skin. And if there were such a place, we wouldn’t be able to get near it anyway. Can you imagine the parking problems?
    No matter how badly we may want our youth to return, it’s not coming back. Oh, we can snip a little here or tape a little back there, successfully taking a decade or so off our appearance, but we’re not fooling Mother Nature. Once spent, youth can’t be recaptured. We only get one dip in it, one go-around. Fountains of youth and time machines make interesting books and movies, but they are purely fictional.
    I’m not so sure a fountain of youth would be a good idea anyway. Would we really want a world in which no one grew old? What kind of an existence would it be where we were all eternally adolescent? After a while we’d get tired of the childish games and rock music. We’d long for more variety, more substance, and some of the wisdom that only comes with age.
    I once attended a church that had a young pastor and only a handful of older members. There was plenty of youthful energy there, but something important was missing. I like to call it the ‘‘been-there-survived-that mentality.’’ I don’t know about you, but I appreciate it when I’m going through a difficult time and an older adult shares with me that she, too, went through a similar difficulty and made it to the other side. It gives me hope.
    So don’t waste your time searching for the fountain of youth. Youthfulness isn’t what you’re seeking anyway, it’s usefulness, and that isn’t found in a fountain. It’s only found within yourself.

    The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.
—Maureen David

48

Evading the Obvious
    I once attended a memorial service in which the person delivering the eulogy did everything she could to avoid saying the word ‘‘dead.’’ She used words like ‘‘departed, passed on, no longer with us, away, on the other side, gone to a better place, at peace, at rest, sleeping, walking with the angels’’—well, you get the idea.
    Most of us are uncomfortable talking about death. It’s not something we put on our list of New Year’s resolutions of things we want to do. We realize it’s a natural part of the life cycle, but we don’t like to dwell on it.
    As we get older, though, the concept of death becomes harder and harder to ignore. We’ve attended far more funerals than we would have liked, and the fact that life has no guarantees is a truth that always seems to be slapping us in the face.
    We may have even experienced a few brushes with death. My first close call came when I was only three months old. It was Christmas Eve, and my family had just left my uncle’s house, heading for our home just a few miles away. While stopped at an intersection, we were struck head on by a drunk driver and knocked off the road and down an embankment.
    Our car was totaled, and our injuries ranged from my father’s critical condition to broken bones and bruises for most of the rest of us. One of those broken bones happened to be my arm. I easily could have been killed, though. But obviously God had a different plan for my life.
    Then on a youth retreat as a teenager, I nearly drowned while playing underwater tag with our youth