I don’t like to come off as overly dramatic, but Bob does. I also don’t typically like to throw my husband under the bus, but if I did, he would insist it was a greyhound and not a school bus. It makes for a better story.

We’ve been together almost forever, but I can still remember the first time we went to the beach and I saw a big scar on his chest. He explained it was from a knife fight. That was hard to believe, but Bob assured me that the kid up the street from them made it a point to try to beat him up as many days a week as he could. Thankfully, Bob was quick – speed can really be a help to little guys like Bob who were on the skinny side as a kid. I was horrified that he would have to grow up defending himself to the neighborhood bully, especially one that wielded a knife. Bob took it in stride. I was reminded of a definition of comedy – tragedy plus time equals humor, but this wasn’t funny.

I’m not sure if it was one of his sisters or his mom who gave more insight into this scar years later, but the truth came out that the alleged knife wound came from going over the handlebars on his bike. The handlebars were missing their hand grips so that rough metal pipe sliced his chest open.

I will barely mention the scar on his hand that resulted from another knife fight. This one was with a pumpkin that he was carving for Halloween, but it was another story worth embellishing. Pumpkins can be aggressive.

Flash forward about 50 years and I hear Bob telling the story of someone with whom he had an encounter. It was a rough day because the other man had actually slit Bob’s throat. He pointed to the scar while the wide-eyed listener must have been wondering who would do that to a senior citizen. The answer was a surgeon during a disk fusion.

This all adds up to why Bob is fine with going to the doctor, though he’s not as fanatical about it as his father was. Those visits can yield good stories, and that is the sort of fodder that people of a certain age need to relate with their peer group and confuse their grandchildren.

Bob making a big splash for our grandsons.

Speaking of his father – Bob will never catch up with that man when it comes to wanting to go to the doctor. When Dale was ninety, we were returning from a dermatology appointment. (I took him to his appointments back then because he lived in an assisted living facility and Bob was still working.) He told me that he believed it was time for his colonoscopy.

I looked at this blind man who also had mobility issues and said, “Dad, I don’t think you could handle the prep.”

As he began to lodge a protest, I added, “You know, something’s got to kill you. You’re not getting a colonoscopy.” He gave in on that one, but only because he couldn’t make his own appointments.

I think about caring for our parents and hope it will help me when I’m in their shoes. Bob’s mother died suddenly in her mid-eighties. As for the other three of our parents – two out of three did not always make it easy on us as their care-givers. They weren’t too bad, and I know they were grateful, but it was hard for them to receive help and, therefore, challenging for us to give it. We want to learn from that. Aging is hard – very hard. Let’s try to do it gracefully like one out of every three parents. (Thanks, Mom!)

Mom’s 97th birthday last March.