One Thing or Another: Not So Fast (Age and the Morning Routine)

It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.

By Mark McNease

I hope my morning routine hasn’t stretched to an hour when I’m seventy, and I certainly hope I can accomplish it unaided. I’m trying.

I used to be able to get up, shower, dress, and ready myself for another day faster than the opening theme song to the morning news. By the time the anchors announced the top stories, I was pouring my second cup of coffee and adjusting my tie, fully prepared to meet the demands of a stalled career.

How does anyone without superpowers accomplish this? Was there a phone booth in the bathroom, into which I hurried one minute and emerged from the next scrubbed and presentable? Or was it youth itself? A youth that extended into my fifties before vanishing into the mists of a morning routine grown longer by the year?

Until recently all I had to do was brush my teeth, jump in the shower, run a razor over my lubricated face, and be done with it. Then, after losing enough teeth to have permanent bridges impersonating them, I discovered that ‘permanent’ is a relative term. The upper bridge came loose. Faced with a difference of many thousands of dollars, I opted not to pour more money into a dental sinkhole and instead go with a partial plate. I don’t mind it, really. I’ve gotten used to it, as has my tongue, relearning to utter the sibilant ‘s’ without making it obvious I have false teeth. The big difference is the time it takes me every morning to prepare my smile for the world. Not only have I been told by my dentist that I need to use an electric toothbrush after all these years, but there’s a cleaning process to dentures that requires what I’d never needed before in my morning routine: time. Time to soak them in fizz, time to brush off yesterday’s sealant, time to put them back in. This takes a good ten minutes to do thoroughly. It used to take sixty seconds.

Then came the CPAP. I don’t know if my sleep apnea is from being overweight, getting older, or just something the universe decided to drop on me. I’d known about the snoring for years. When you have a partner, you learn these things. They tell you. Then, having been told you snore like a buzz saw, you realize where those morning headaches are coming from, and why you’ve spent the last five years exhausted during the day. It’s the sleep apnea, stupid.

So off I go the local sleep center. I consult with a ‘sleep doctor’ who luckily has a great sense of humor. We laugh at the life threatening malady. We talk snores. We talk face masks. And we set up a home test, since spending the night in a mock hotel room tucked inside a medical facility just would not work for me. The home test was easy. I discovered my breathing stopped 122 times during the night, for as long as a minute. I’d been at risk for the serious consequences of oxygen deprivation for several years. Now for the past month I’ve had the pleasure of sleeping with two little ‘pillows’ in my nostrils that force a stream of air into my nose.

It’s the cleaning of the thing that takes time. Suddenly, along with a partial denture to rehabilitate every morning, I have parts of a CPAC machine that must be cleaned if I don’t want breathing problems added to the manifestations of age.

That quick get-up-and-go I was used to for so long has gotten up and gone. I need at least twenty minutes to get ready now. The morning news has been told by the time I get out of the bathroom and dressed. I always saw myself as the winning tortoise in life, the one who accomplishes his goals by being steady and relentless, and now I feel like a tortoise, too. I’m slower. I walk, at least after being in a position of rest long enough, with that ‘old people’ walk, until I’m back in motion and bipedal again. I talk age with my aging friends and coworkers. It’s what we do, part of our shared language of getting older. I’ve accepted it.

I hope my morning routine hasn’t stretched to an hour when I’m seventy, and I certainly hope I can accomplish it unaided. I’m trying. In the meantime, I’ll take it as a lesson to slow down, smell the shaving cream, and just get there when I do.

Mark McNease is the author of eight novels, two short story collections and miscellaneous fiction. He’s the publisher and editor for LGBTSr, “where age is embraced and life is celebrated.” He co-edited and published the anthology Outer Voices Inner Lives (Lambda Literary Award finalist), and was the co-creator of the Emmy and Telly winning children’s program Into the Outdoors.