Opinionated Bean

My birthday is in a couple of days, but as it falls on a work day this is the weekend to celebrate my increasing decrepitude.

Today my mother took me out for lunch. She hasn’t been taking care of her teeth for the past decade so her gums are quite sore so I had to choose where she would lavish me with lunch. I chose The Old Spaghetti Factory. She was able to munch away on a manicotti. Afterwards I popped into the office to do some extra work and now I sit at my ‘puter typing away.

Tomorrow is a piss up at The Pilot Tavern here in Toronto - a wake of sorts, for my fast diminishing youth.

I never really relished my birthday so much before. In the past it was just another day, a sort of yearly “meh, I’m older” but when I turned 30 I started looking forward to celebrating my old age. Am I in the “seventh stage of man” as expressed in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” - have I reached second childhood, bypassing 3 other ages?

As is standard across the judeo-christian world I had Easter Lunch with the parental units yesterday. My mother, thankfully, did not cook too much food. There was actually a reasonable amount of food on the table. At first I thought this was because she’s finally taken note of all of our complaints that she cooks too much and tries to over-stuff us… and trust me when I say I do not require more stuffing, I am well padded already.

The reason for the reasonable amount of food is my father. He had one of his testes taken out in October’07 and the doctors ran tests on the removed teste and put him through a bunch of CT Scans and MRIs and found nothing. The fear was that he may have testicular cancer. They couldn’t find anything, not even lymphoma, but to be safe they decided to put him through chemo.

Once every two weeks he goes in for a chemo session. At home he has to self-inject another type of med for 7 days, then rest for 7 days, and then repeat the process. Usually, according to my brother, by the 5th day of injections he is is barely moving as he feels sick and weak. The paternal unit has lost lots of weight and is shuffling about and even falling a few times a day.

My brother asked me quietly if I thought our father is close to meeting his maker. I tried to reassure him that a positive attitude goes a long way towards improvement in health. But I’m not so sure. He’s 76 and feeling his mortality. His brother, my uncle, died at age 76 (but he did have a few strokes, a heart attack or two and diabetes) and my paternal grandfather at age 70. With the death of my uncle my father started to question his own mortality - his contemporaries are dying off and he feels quite lonely. Coupled with a wife who is driving him nuts (and who he has said in the past few years he would have divorced years ago if there hadn’t been any kids), he’s not doing well mentally.