Broken

Our company has an annual party at our office. We invite about 500 of our nearest and dearest clients, get about 80 or 90 "yes" RSVPs, and end up with about 50 or so people to party down with. It's fun. We rearrange the furniture. We get Mexican food catered in. We rent a frozen margarita machine. We all eat and drink and smile.

My job, four years running, has been to bartend. It's a good job for me, as I really don't know that many clients (being in a non-sales position at the company), and it gives me something to do. Plus, I really like making frozen margaritas. Regular and strawberry, strong and weak, salt and no salt. You get the idea.

My point is this: I am old. I am old and broken. I can't even co-host a four hour open house party without feeling like I might die on the way home. About two-thirds of the way in, my legs begin to feel as though they have been beaten with a baseball bat, my lower back about the same. Not to mention the, um, chaffing that sets in after several hours of running around getting drinks for people. During the cleanup process, I begin to silently cry.

Then, as I'm filling up trash bag number eight, B looks over to me and declares, "You have a gray hair." Imagine my surprise.

So, a couple of hours later, I'm trudging through our neighborhood looking for infant cough medicine. My walk has gone from its cheerful, bouncy gait to this pitched-forward, half-limping sort of meandering, and I think, "Can this be it? Does my body just keep going downhill from here?"

Maybe I just need to do more of this. Or this. Or this.

Or, maybe, just a lot more of this.