W. Bruce Cameron-Old Age Is Inherited — We Get It From Our Parents

Feb 27, 20130

Editor’s Note: The following column was originally published in 2008.

According to pollsters, I am part of an “aging demographic.” But who isn’t?

I’m not worried about getting older; I’m worried that as I age, I will become more and more like my parents. I am, after all, the result of a scientific experiment in which their DNA was commingled by a process too hideous for any child to contemplate.

In my youth, I overrode any inherited traits by applying judicious quantities of obnoxiousness, but lately I’ve noticed I’m spending a lot of time trying to find the car keys, a search to which my mother has dedicated most of her life.

A few years ago, my father mistook his hearing aids for peanuts and fed them to the dog. Does that mean I am automatically condemned to do the same thing? I was already condemned to hunt for the things a few days later out in the yard — a highly unpleasant task. Isn’t that enough? (My father, by the way, was unenthusiastic about using them even after a cleaning, but the dogs were more than willing to eat them again.)

I don’t have hearing aids, of course, but as part of my highly successful obnoxiousness program, I listened to loud rock music with headphones throughout my teenage years, ignoring my parents’ advice that I was ruining my hearing.

“You were right. I never should have cranked up the volume through my headphones,” I tell my father.

“What?” he asks.

“I said, you were right, I should have listened to my parents!” I shout.

He shakes his head. “Peanuts? I fed them to the dog.”

On my mother’s side, she often asks me questions like this: “Who was that actor, you know, he was in that movie about the dog?” (It turns out that the movie is “The Day of the Dolphin,” and the actor she’s thinking of is Eddie Albert — who wasn’t actually in that movie, which wasn’t about a dog. The person who was in that movie, George C. Scott, looks a little like Eddie Albert, the way Spain looks a little like Canada.)

“Why did you want to know about Eddie Albert?” I ask my mom.

“I don’t know,” she replies.

“Who?”

“He was in that movie about the dog,” I tell her.

“The dog? Fed him my peanuts,” my dad says. “You seen my hearing aids?”

Lately I, too, am finding names and faces to be slippery. I was at a shopping mall when a man tapped me on the shoulder. He looked familiar, so when I turned around, I put a pleased-to-see-you expression on my face, hoping he was someone I liked and not, say, Charles Manson.

We exchanged pleasantries, remarking on how remarkably remarkable it was that there was weather outside, while I searched desperately for some sense of who he was. There was an air of authority about him, so I speculated to myself that he might be the mayor of San Diego.

“You don’t recognize me, do you?” he finally said.

“Of course I do ... senator, uh ...” I said weakly.

“I’m your doctor.”

“Right! Sorry, it’s just that usually when I see you I’m not wearing pants.”

“I was calling to you; didn’t you hear me?”

“No, where were you?”

“Standing right here behind you. I think I’d like you to come in for some hearing tests.”

“Sorry?”

“Hearing tests!”

I agreed that this was a fine idea, shaking his hand as we said goodbye. “See you soon, Doctor ... Doctor,” I told him. I’m pretty sure he has a last name and that “Doctor” isn’t it, but it was the best I could do at the time. He’s a handsome man with white hair, sort of what you’d expect if Eddie Albert and George C. Scott had a baby.

So: I’m having trouble recognizing the people I’m having trouble hearing. I am, as it turns out, exactly what you’d expect if my mother and father had a baby.

There’s no cure that I’m aware of for my increasing inability to recall faces and names, but luckily there’s a technology for addressing my hearing issues. And I know right where to find it.

Out in the yard.

To write Bruce Cameron, visit his Website at http://www.wbrucecameron.com. To find out more about Bruce Cameron and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at http://www.creators.com.