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On golden ski slope

By G.D. Maxwell "Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough." (Groucho Marx) "The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom." ( H.

By G.D. Maxwell

"Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough." (Groucho Marx)

"The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom." (

H. L. Mencken )

"Gettin’ old sucks!" (Me)

Okay, it’ll never make it into Bartlett’s, but in our heart of hearts, we know it’s true. Gettin’ old sucks. That it’s way better than the alternative is cold comfort because, let’s face it, the alternative is still a pretty abstract concept until it sneaks up, taps us on the shoulder and whispers in its chilly voice, "Time’s up, turkey."

It’s pointless to obsess about death. Death’s like your last final exam and like all the other exams in your life, giving it any thought until the last possible moment serves no useful purpose whatsoever; you’ll forget everything when the time comes and you’ll just spend needless hours tormenting yourself. The only people who obsess about death are those same keeners who never understood that deadlines were something to make, not something to beat. Serves ’em right.

The only time I can remember giving my own death any thought was the first time a part of me died, that is to say, the first time a part of me was murdered. The culprit was an endodontist – Latin for sadistic inflictor of unimaginable pain – and the victim was a lower molar.

At the moment of death, the moment she plunged her shiv into the nerve of the ailing tooth and killed it dead, there was, just like they say, a bright light at the end of a long tunnel and I could see my dear departed tooth swirling the bowl.

I went home, had a wake for my tooth, got rip-roarin’ drunk, realized my dead tooth couldn’t really enjoy the party, understood grievin’ is for the livin’ not for the dead, got philosophical, passed out and paid a big price the next day when I had to get on with life with a large number of brain cells having joined my molar in the Great Hereafter. Can I get an Amen?

But aging and death obviously aren’t the same thing. They’re more akin to foreplay and climax which, while being more or less joined at the hip, aren’t the same thing either. The main difference is that this is definitely one of those times even guys don’t want to rush through foreplay.

So far, the indignities of aging seem to be manageable. I can deal with the reading glasses; I can pretend the lighter hairs in my beard are actually, finally blond coming through; I can fool myself into thinking everyone who skis and jogs feels like their knees are about to give birth to aliens when they’re finished.

And I can even live with the dread of what’s lurking just around the corner which, based solely on the commercials interrupting the evening news, seems to be a life of incontinence, flatulence, erectile dysfunction, high cholesterol, higher blood pressure, acid reflux, and, of course, a generally frustrating battle with chronic constipation punctuated only by bouts of raging diarrhea, all of which work in concert, conspiring to turn me into the junkie I spent so much of my earlier life trying to avoid becoming.

Like Bernard Baruch, I always considered old age as, at a minimum, 15 years older than I am. The flaw in that highly subjective outlook is the theory of relativity. If I were living in, say, Sun City, I’d be considered the young hoodlum the rest of my neighbours would be keeping an eye on.

But living in Whistler, I’m definitely the brother who was left on Earth in Einstein’s parable. I age every year while my brother, floating through space at the speed of light, ages hardly at all. Except, like a death of a thousand cuts, my theoretical brother is actually the people I work with every year and I don’t have to wait a couple of decades to witness the startling results.

I grow demonstrably older every single year. Yet, in an age-defying miracle, when I return to my seasonal job as a Common Counter Worker, all the people I work with are 22. Every freakin’ year.

There seem to be, between Canada, Australia and the UK, an endless supply of 22-year-old fresh-faced suckers. If there weren’t, Intrawest would have to rethink its whole business model.

When I started my career as a CCW, it wasn’t so bad. I couldn’t fool myself into thinking I was blending with my co-workers, but at least they seemed to intuitively know it would be pointless to seek the wisdom of the ages from me.

Now, I’m older than their fathers.

So now, here I am, caught in what I like to think of as the awkward years. Too old for my CCW peers, too young to tie my wagon to the Mature Action Committee.

Not that I’m certain I’d want to. To be honest, I have a problem with the whole mature thing. I don’t feel mature. I’m sure, in fact, that if I were mature, I wouldn’t be a Common Counter Worker. And quite frankly, I’m not all that interested in being much more mature than I am right now.

But I fully expect to get older. And crankier. And proud of it. I fully intend to become a Geezer, and as God is my witness, I’ll wring the full measure of Geezerness out of my experience.

Beside which, given the lack of success MAC’s had at moving the municipality toward actually chipping away at the whole aging-in-place thing, I’ve got to think No Place for the Old and Infirm in Whistler is more official policy than a problem in search of a solution.

Of course, an opportunity may exist to piggyback the solution to this intractable problem onto Slash Gordon’s official policy to develop more tourism. Maybe B.C.’s contribution can be the Continuum of Care Ski Resort Model.

Under the model, people would start their ski resort lives out at a place like Whistler where only youth, vitality and mindless cliff jumping are valued. In Phase II, The Middle Years, people realizing they can’t possibly afford to raise a family in Whistler would move to Fernie or Rossland or maybe Silver Star, places they could afford homes.

Phase III, The Fallin’ Apart Years, call for easier mountains and closer health-care facilities. Kimberley and Panorama come immediately to mind.

And finally, Phase IV, The Golden Years. Years when gentle and rolling replace steep and deep as desirable terrain features. When close, full-service hospitals hold more appeal than full-on après bars. In other words… the Sun Peaks Years. Gee, maybe we could get Al and Nancy to revert to calling it Tod Mountain.

Or maybe, if we’re both smart and humane, we’ll find a way to make aging in place in Whistler a reality. Soon. For my sake.