Therapy

I knew I was getting old a few years ago (or more than that, I suppose) when I realized that the new engineers at work not only didn't remember the first Apollo moon landing but in fact weren't even born then. Since then, many signs of my advancing maturity have made that realization yet more obvious: reading glasses, sore knees and dropping race times, an end to the marathons, aches and pains in my knuckles and elbow, bifocals...

So I suppose it shouldn't have shocked me that when my physical therapist called me in from the waiting room, she seemed just a student. But heck, she almost probably wasn't born when the first Shuttle went up, or if she was, she would have been crawling around in diapers as I was sitting in the press room at the launch site in the spring of 1981.

Here I was, getting lessons on my anatomy and biofeedback instructions on my "pelvic floor" from someone who seemed to be generations younger than me. Still, she was really good: her description of the surgery were clear and mercifully free of medical jargon, and her instructions for my at-home exercises were easy to understand. And she spoke with such confidence that I was immediately willing to trust that part of my fate to her.

In spite of that, as I lay here on the floor tonite doing the exercise sets she assigned, I find myself amazed at the generations that separate us -- at her youth and the lack of mine.

I suppose that, like bifocals, it's just something you eventually get used to. I guess that's a kind of therapy, too.

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