Locked Out of the Future

Medical research suggests that as men and women start to get older, a man’s brain atrophies – “dies,” actually – three times faster than a woman’s.

This news comes at a bad time. I have reached a stage of maturity where a perfect stranger might glance at me on the street and think, “There is a man who is starting to get older.”

I don’t feel particularly older, and I don’t think I am old. Mature, maybe. All my parts are 1943’s, and I wouldn’t hesitate to drive them long distances across the desert at night.

But I couldn’t walk up to a perfect stranger on the street and say, “If you think I am starting to get older, you are wrong,” while looking him straight in the eye. I am more realistic than that.

I am at an age where, in the context of medical research, I can look forward to a rate of personal brain deterioration that is three times that of a woman, and I just want to say to the scientists how grateful I am for the information.

In a way I expected it. I remember feeling inferior in adolescence on learning that girls “matured emotionally” faster than boys. Why should it be any different on the other end? Women my age will still be playing bridge well into their 70s, while I have retired to a corner to drool.

The researchers apparently are aware that men are not likely to be happy about that. One researcher, a younger man apparently drawing conclusions while he still could, said the study “may predict that men are more likely to get grouchy with age than women.”

The research indicates that women apparently lose brain cells equally on both sides of the brain, while men tend to lose “about twice as much brain on the left side as the right.” The research also supplies the information – letting me know what I’m in for, I guess – that the brain’s left side (the side where my cells begin to slough off in heaps) involves language, speech, logical reasoning and analytical thought.

At the very hour that I learn my brain is turning into compost, I am dependent on at least a dozen different sets of numbers, passwords, etc., to get through an ordinary day. There are numbers and passwords that I am supposed to remember. The ATM people and the voicemail people and of course the Webmeisters are forever warning me not to write those numbers down anywhere. I can count at least a dozen. I may have other codes, but I can’t remember them right now. That is a bad sign.

The other day I was in a modern public building that required a code to get into the men’s room. In light of the research I think that is sexual discrimination but it’s not going to do me any good. Before I am dead but after I am so right-brain heavy that my head lolls on my shoulder, all makes of cars will be unlocked by number codes. Groceries will be bought by number codes. Homes will be entered by number codes.

It will be a woman’s world. I don’t mind that. But I don’t look forward to becoming such a burden.

I don’t look forward to being a blithering old grouch, yelling from the garage, “Get up from that bridge table and come out here and unlock the car for me!” at my wife.

If any woman will have me.