I bought a shirt the other day. The first time I wore it, I noticed something bothering me. It was the 500 tags sewed into the side seam of the shirt.

There used to just be like one, two tags tops on an article of clothing. The material type and washing instructions.

Even those two tags would usually require cutting off as they would be itchy against the skin. And you had to cut them, not rip them as I sometimes would do. Ripping them risks ripping out the seam and could leave you with a hole.

Cutting the tags off with scissors requires the skills of a neurosurgeon though. If you don’t get it precisely right the remnants of the tag will still be itchy and bothersome. So you’ve got to cut it closely enough to avoid that scenario.

Wow. I finally get one up on the aging process, but who would ever know? It remains hidden, never to see the light of day and only was recently revealed to me via an X-ray.

I went to an orthopedic doctor a couple of weeks ago. I had this bump on the back of my hand that my primary doctor thought was a ganglion cyst.

The orthopedic doctor examined it and said, “Nope, not a ganglion cyst. Looks like some arthritis forming. Can happen with aging, and the bones start to bump up against each other.” Or something like that. I can’t really remember the details (also something that can happen with aging).

He said, “But let’s get some X-rays to be sure.”

You know those Progressive commercials where the Millenials are turning into their parents and Dr. Rick tries to help them?

Well, paging Dr. Rick for Baby Boomers turning into their parents.

It struck me the other day when I was having a conversation with my friend. I was meeting her for lunch at a place about a 20 minute drive away. She had also invited me back to the same area for a happy hour with former coworkers.

Paradox. A situation, person or thing that combines contradictory features or qualities.

Paradox number 1. I love the Grateful Dead. I hate going to their concerts.

Now, normally, any band I love, I love going to see them live in concert.

I love the Grateful Dead, but had never been to any of their shows until I was married to Ernie.

Ernie not only loves the Dead, but is indeed a Deadhead. A super fan for any of the uninitiated.

So much so that the song he picked (with her approval of course lol) for the father of the bride dance at our daughter’s wedding was Scarlet Begonia. H

He even surprised her with a scarlet begonia and tucked it into her hair. Afterwards, the bartender told us that that was an epic father/daughter dance and that he had never seen a Grateful Dead song for one before.

So, in the mid to late ‘80’s when he realized I had never been to a show, he couldn’t wait to take me.

How much did your Valentine’s Day cards set you back, last week?

A few blog posts ago we took a look at the price of pizza. This week let’s take a look at the price of greeting cards.

When did a greeting card go from costing $1.50 to $8.00? Is it just me, or is $8.00 for a greeting card ridiculously expensive?

Especially for something that someone will read, and whether it’s later that day or days later, will eventually toss it in the trash. Unless they are a hoarder. In which case, they will keep it, along with any other greeting card they ever got, forever.

No one was more disappointed than me when our local gift shop, which sold their greeting cards at 50% off and I never had to spend more than $2.50 for a decent card, went out of business. I no longer have a go to discount card store.

Talk about losing hours endlessly scrolling through social media?

That’s got nothing on losing hours endlessly watching on demand streaming tv.

How did we ever watch a weekly tv series in the past? That seems so antiquated now. Kids today could never imagine having to wait a week to get the next episode of whatever show they were watching.

Now when you watch a series on Netflix you build your cocoon—blanket, drink, snacks and you don’t leave for HOURS, possibly even days. Just. One. More. Episode. You don’t even have to do anything to get the next episode—it just comes up on its own in seconds. And just like that, 10 hours have gone by.

Social media. Because your life isn’t complete unless you are up to date on what your neighbor is cooking for dinner, what that person you haven’t seen in 30 years is doing for vacation, and what some distant relative’s political views are.

My introduction to social media happened one day when my husband Ernie asked me how my one brother was doing after his surgery. I looked at Ernie quizzically.

“What surgery,” I asked?

“I don’t know,” he answered, “but he posted something about it on Facebook.”

Seriously—we’ll look at each of these individually, starting with smart phones this week, but all three can be categorized as time sucking vehicles.

As you get out of bed in the morning, you think, oh I’ll just glance at the headlines on my news feed, 30 seconds tops. Next thing you know, you’re late for work. But let’s explore, shall we?

Smart phones. These things have become like an appendage to our bodies. We all know the outright panic that occurs when you accidentally misplace your phone or can’t remember where you left it.

And God forbid you leave the house without it. You absolutely must turn around and go back to get it, no matter that you are thirty minutes in to your 60 minute work commute (pre-Covid of course).

And then there’s the charging anxiety. Constantly checking your battery life. 100% = yay! 75%= oh, ok, that’s still good, nothing to be alarmed about, 50%=hmm, getting low, half life here, 25%= oh shit, where’s my charger? Gotta get it charged. It’s gonna run out. When you hit 20% and you get that message that it’s going on low power mode to conserve battery, your anxiety is at a 10/10.

You madly text the person you are texting that your battery is low and you might lose them. You scrounge your purse for your battery charger to plug in, or you’re smart enough to have an external charger and you hope you were smart enough to make sure that was fully charged.

Ah, the indignities of aging keep-a-coming. Despite your best efforts to tone, tighten, and strengthen your aging body, one must recognize that there are things outside of one’s control. No matter how healthily you eat, how much exercise you do, when it comes to the aging body, well, it’s gonna do what aging bodies do at some point.

There I was the other night, cozily ensconced beneath my blanket, sitting on my sofa, waiting for the Chiefs-Dolphins football playoff came to come on.

Ernie walked in and asked, “Did the game start yet?”

I looked up to answer him and I saw fireworks. Now, to be fair, what married woman doesn’t see fireworks when she sees her beloved husband? Am I right ladies? But no. These weren’t the figurative kind. They were the literal.

“That is asinine.”

So texted my dear friend Christine to me when I told her I was participating in Dry January.

She followed up with, “All things in moderation” and “January has to be the worst month anyway for something like that when it’s cold, dark, and not much to look forward to. June would be a much better month.”

I followed up with, dang, she’s right and went ahead and poured myself a glass of wine, thereby removing myself from the Dry January experiment into the Damp January one.

Oh, it’s a slippery slope when you find yourself on Mount Aging. And you will, one day, find yourself on that slope, if you aren’t there already. It’s a fact of life. Like death and taxes. It comes for us all.

But don’t dismay. All is not gloom and doom. The key is to be aware and have the knowledge to navigate that slope. And most importantly, acceptance. Once you accept the situation, adaptation, the key to Darwin’s theory of evolution mind you (smart man), life will be easier.

Ernie, who retired a year ahead of me, took up kayaking. His sister introduced him to it, and he and she and sometimes a couple of her friends would go kayaking on the various lakes and creeks in the area.

Ernie encouraged me to try it. I thought it sounded like fun. Why not give it a try? I’m an outdoorsy person, right? At this point, thoughts of our ill-fated ski trip (see previous blog post) should have come to mind and raised some red flags.

Like the Robot in Lost in Space who would warn Will Robinson about impending danger, my internal warning system should have kicked in with a “Danger, Mary Lunghi, Danger”.

But I blithely gave him the go ahead to purchase two kayaks. He was clearly into it, I thought I would enjoy it as well, and it would be a fun, outdoorsy activity for us to do together in retirement.

The year was 1988 or thereabouts. I was working at an agency in downtown Boston. In a tall, skyscraper type building located at 101 Arch Street to be exact.

One day, the windows were being washed. By a very hot guy. Needless to say that all of the young women in the office, about 5 or 6 of us, had congregated in the hallway outside of the office of the windows he was cleaning.

We thought he would not be able to see us if we stood in the hallway (we didn’t want him to think us rude or make him feel uncomfortable), though we could see him clearly. Very clearly. Did I mention he was hot?

As he completed that office’s windows, he slid himself over to the next office’s windows. We shuffled ourselves like we were a single entity down the hallway to the next office where we continued our gazing.

Used to be, that if asked about the categorization of clothes, I’d have responded as follows: athleisure (which in the old days we just called sweats), casual, work casual, professional, dressy, and formal.

However, post-Covid and post-Retirement, there is another, far more important categorization that trumps all the others, IMHO. And that is, soft clothes and hard clothes. Really, all clothing can be boiled down to those two descriptors.

That’s what it has come down to for me. And guess where I fall? If you thought soft clothes, you thought right.

There are two kinds of people. Those who buy real Christmas trees and those who buy fake ones. I suppose you could say that there is a third kind, those who don’t buy any Christmas trees at all. But for the purposes of this story, we will not include them.

So, real vs fake Christmas trees. There is no middle ground here. Talk about your divisive issues. Maybe not to the level of gun control, abortion, or same-sex marriage. But close.

I’ve crossed the line. I am officially old. I now wear my reading glasses on a chain around my neck. Nothing says old like wearing your readers around your neck.

One could say nothing says old like needing reading glasses, but since that starts around age 40, and 40 is the new 30, that is hardly old.

When my eye doctor first told me I needed reading glasses, he suggested I go to the dollar store and buy a bunch and leave a pair in every room of the house. Good advice. That’s exactly what I did.

At work however, I only had one pair. I don’t think the company would have appreciated my randomly leaving reading glasses around the office.

Somewhere along the way, weather became WEATHER and became a national past time, akin to a major sporting event. We’ve got all kinds of ways to keep track of weather now. There’s the old school way, your local evening news. Well, truly the old school way would be opening the door and sticking your head out to see what the weather is like and figure out what to wear for the day.

But now, you’ve got an app on your phone, you’ve got weather alerts on your weather app on your phone, you’ve got the weather channel on tv, you’ve got an assortment of AI support in the form of Siri, Alexa or Cortana. So truly, knowing the current and future weather by the minute is now at your finger tips.

Used to be that the protocol for tipping was very clear. First of all, tipping was mainly for when you dined in a restaurant.

You would dine in at a restaurant where a waiter or waitress, waited on you. They reviewed the menu with you, answering any questions you might have, they described the specials. Then, they took your order and gave it to the chefs in the kitchen who prepared your food. The waitstaff carried your order out, sometimes requiring great feats of balance, and placed it on the table before you. They periodically checked in with you to see if everything was ok, refilled a drink, and repeated the process should you desire dessert.

For all that effort and attentiveness, we tip them. We also tip them because generally they are not paid well by the restaurant and so they rely on the tips to earn an income.

The good Lord gave us all talents of one kind or another. And while we very much appreciate the talents we do have, it’s the ones that we haven’t been given that really can rankle us.

For example, I love music. I love listening to music, dancing to music, and singing to music. Of those three things, I can listen very well. I can dance better than Elaine Benes. But I can’t sing.

I was not aware that I lacked that talent for a fairly long time. I would sing my heart out when at home listening to all kinds of music-I was especially fond of musicals and would sing along to all the albums we had: Sound of Music, The King and I, Oliver, Mary Poppins, South Pacific, Oklahoma!. I would sing at church on Sundays. I would sing in the car listening to the radio.

Covid wrought more than a few changes and adaptations to our daily lives a few years ago. Not the least of which was the inability to get to a barber or hair salon for the three or so months we were all in quarantine.

For me, this meant taking the plunge with going silver (note that I said silver, not gray, as silver sounds so much more sophisticated). I had been contemplating it for a time anyway and between lockdown and my colorist Karen moving to FL (I miss you!), it seemed like as good a time as any to take the silver plunge.

For Ernie, this meant that his hair grew. Pre-Covid, Ernie always wore his hair pretty darn short. A very close cut. In barber parlance, I think it would be like a 1 or a 2. For those of you unfamiliar with barber parlance, think Kevin Costner in The Body Guard. Not quite military buzz cut, but super close.