This is the body of an eighty-one-year-old man.
Hello, hernia scar.
Howdy, hip replacement.
Good evening, gall bladder surgery.
I pivot.
Calling 911! Where did my ass go?
I look like a candle that was mistakenly left outside during the summer: melted into an amorphous lump.
I turn and analyze my manhood.
Even my candle wick has disappeared, obviously frightened by its surroundings, a groundhog that does not want to emerge for the winter.
I study my pubic area. I lift my arms. I touch my head.
And where did all of my hair go?
I have become a sphynx cat in my golden years.
And yet there is a shag rug on my lower back.
My hair has simply relocated south like every other retiree.
I take full stock of the image before me—as clear and as unsettling as the sag of soft skin at my belly—and yet my eyesplay a trick on me: In the reflection, I can still see the picture of “Center Sid” when I was seventeen years old and playing high school basketball. My dark hair was thick and lush, and it fell across my forehead and onto my lashes as if I’d spent an hour styling it that way. My jaw is set, my dark eyes intensely focused on something. What? The future?
My body is lithe, my biceps pumped, my arms veiny, tufts of black hair popping from my armpits. My legs are muscled and hairy. My cheeks were always pink, as if I’d just completed wind sprints.
Sid Silverstein was a stud.
I remember in high school Rabbi Weiss always telling us, “Time is an invitation.”
His deep voice echoes in my head:
“The life of man is like a breath exhaling; his days are like a passing shadow. We drink time, we eat time, we live in the shadow of time, and yet we are oblivious to it, especially what is happening this very moment.”
Standing here—over six decades later—staring at my elderly reflection, I finally understand the importance of his message: A thousand years have passed, and yet it feels as if it has only been a single day.
I touch my body, run a hand over my chest and stomach.
It’s not that I’m in bad shape.
For eighty-one!
I work out five times a week. I watch what I eat. I don’t even take a statin.
But the reality is, existing within an eighty-one-year-old body is like living in a haunted house: It is filled with unexplainable creaks, moans, horrors and—when you least expect it—screaming terror.
A shriek pierces my bathroom.
“Oh, my God!”
“Jesus, Teddy!” I yell, grabbing my towel to cover up.
He slaps his hands over his eyes.
