This is Getting Old by Susan Moon

her. “My old knees can’t go up the slide.”
    â€œJust try! You can just
try
, Grandma!”
    But I didn’t try. “I’m sorry, Paloma, but my knees are too old.”
    The next day I was taking Paloma upstairs to have a bath. “Carry me, OK, Grandma?” she requested.
    I was tired. “You can walk,” I said. “I’ll hold your hand.”
    â€œI can’t do it,” she said. “I have old legs!”
    As I get older my bones are getting older, too. I have osteoporosis in my lower back. It runs in my family. My mother lost five inches of height from it, and I’ve lost an inch and a half, but it doesn’t hurt and I wouldn’t even know I had it except for the bone scan.
    The arthritis in my knees and thumbs is more annoying. At the minor-detail end of the scale, I can’t open jars very well any more because of the arthritis in my thumbs, and this canbe bothersome when I’m alone with a vacuum-sealed jar of homemade plum jam. A friend gave me a wonderful gizmo, like a potholder, with rubber webbing on one side, which is remarkably effective for opening jars, but if it doesn’t do the job and there’s no other pair of hands in the house, I have to get through the morning without jam. As for my knees, they don’t like going up and down steep hills, they object to the warrior pose in yoga, and I can’t squat at all anymore, which makes it hard to pee in the woods. Hopscotch is out of the question.
    In a way, it adds interest to life to have these small problems to work on. Taking care of oneself becomes a more intricate project and sharpens one’s problem-solving skills. My knees talk to me, and I have to respond. The old bones provide a kind of companionship. It’s not really me who needs things like handrails and hiking poles, it’s my knees; I make these arrangements for them, because we’re family.
    Without spending my whole life reading about it on the Internet, I try to learn how to take care of my bones. For years I took a drug prescribed for promoting bone density. Over a year ago I decided to stop, because of the slight risk of serious side effects, and I promised myself I would care for my bones as best I could by taking calcium and vitamin D and doing daily, or almost daily, weight-bearing exercise—in my case walking and working out at the Y. After a year on my new program, I asked for another bone scan. I was proud of myself when the test showed that the osteoporosis had not gotten any worse. I’m my own research project.
    I used to take my bones for granted, but now that I’m paying attention to them, I see that they are a great invention. When young people’s bones are growing, for example, cells get added to the outside of the lengthening bone at the same time that cells are subtracted from the inside, in order to enlarge the hollow part where the marrow lives, in a complex engineering project. When I was about twelve, my leg bones were growing so fast that I got terrible leg aches. My mother called them “growing pains.”Both of my sons also had leg pains during their adolescent growth spurts.
    Now I’m shrinking. Under the soft flesh, the bones are shorter, lighter, more porous than they used to be, with spurs here and there that were not part of the original design. But they are still good bones—hinges and sockets, ball bearings and cables. I love their names: humerus, tibia, scapula, fibula.
    One time when my son Sandy was a teenager, he and I were hiking along some abandoned railroad tracks in the country and we noticed lots of dry bones—the scattered vertebrae of some large animal, probably a deer—lying on the ties between the rails. We collected them all in our pockets and took them back to the cabin where we were staying for the weekend. We spread them out on the table like the pieces of a puzzle. The hollow round bones had little feet and outspread wings and