Every couple of days I encounter a visual reminder of my age, at first startling and disconcerting, now simply annoying. I walk on an indoor oval track at a fitness center in a nearby town and on the north side of the oval the wall is a huge mirror, so every time I swing around I get to see a slouching, slightly chubby old guy shuffling past. I suppose it’s an inevitable realization, this aging-in-place business. As we say far too often, it beats the alternative, a statement I find neither amusing nor enlightening.

Just when you think you’re looking pretty good you see yourself in a large mirror, or a downtown storefront reflection and then, well, you’ve become a member of the age group that plays cards at McDonalds in the mornings. “A ‘senior’ coffee with cream, please.” “That’ll be 99 cents.” Don’t misunderstand, I’m thrilled to still be around. The entity that writer Thomas Hardy called the Spinner of the Years has given me a good, long life, and I am grateful.

On a recent morning, a couple of other old guys joined me for coffee, and we spoke of many things, including the fact that the wife of one of them was my favorite junior high school English teacher, a lovely woman who introduced me to poetry, and had me writing it, something I’m still doing 60 years later, though I suspect that the me who was 12 was likely a better poet. It seemed so simple then. As I age things become less clear.

And so at dusk, I sit with a glass of Scotch, and I watch the parade of does being chased by stags and I find myself thinking about what my friend Robert Waller called “time and the curious spiral dance of which I am a part.” He nailed it. This dance we all do is both curious and spiral, always folding back on itself, the way dust does behind my car on a gravel road, falling to the surface, only to be lifted by the next passing vehicle. I learn to put words together on paper and six decades later I’m sitting with the spouse of a woman who helped develop whatever skills I may have. Spiral indeed.

Deer are active this time of year, as are the coyotes. I’m hearing them pretty much every night now, about 50 yards away, yipping, keening, howling, and barking. It’s a sound I’ve come to love, a fascination with the wilderness of centuries ago, long before folks like me moved in. Because the family/pack is so close it’s becoming clear that they inhabit the caves in the limestone bluffs lining the hollow below my house, and I’m good with that. I don’t want them in my home, so I’m not going to invite myself into theirs. Common courtesy.

Today I found myself listening to a station airing long-ago Christmas music, and I was transported, not to a junior high school English class, but to my mother’s kitchen, a place where she had a plastic radio, a radio filled with the holiday sounds of Nat King Cole, Andy Williams, Dinah Shore, Sarah Vaughn and, perhaps my favorite, Mel Torme. It wouldn’t be long before I would be cranking up Jethro Tull, yes, and the James Gang, but those days in the 1960s with my mother were heaven, especially during the holidays. She gave me that radio when I wandered off to college. I still have it, and it works just fine; thanks for asking. She never got a chance to see her elderly self in a mirror, so I promise to stop whining. May your holidays be brilliant.

Kurt Ullrich lives in rural Jackson County. His book “The Iowa State Fair” is available from the University of Iowa Press.

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