I'M SMILING ABOUT MY ATTENDING a Saturday night dance a few years ago at Traverse City’s Senior Center. Back then, I towered over all these ‘old birds,’ and I remember the odd feeling that came over me. I was so tall and truth be told, I’m only 5’10” in my stocking feet.
It was like running into an NBA basketball team at O’Hare, but now the shoe was on the other foot. Has that ever happened to you in your travels? The players are so tall. That is exactly the feeling that came over me at this dance. The older population certainly had shrunk, and it took this collection of men for me to become aware of this condition of aging.
My oldest brother was never very tall but the last time we were together, at our annual Father and Son golf outing, I swear he shrunk four inches. As I wrote in my earlier memoirs my father must have been under the influence of this cosmic phenomenon called gravity. I kept willing him to be taller as he aged. I also wrote a piece about running into 95-year-old former Michigan Governor Milliken at a shop in my city. He, too, was becoming smaller.
Sir Isaac Newton strikes again. If you missed that, don’t fret, I had thought gravity was in Galileo’s domain. Wrong.
The sky isn’t falling, but everything seems to be shrinking.