The affliction men of a certain age are too embarrassed to talk about

Women are always complaining about the physical changes they undergo as they get older. We men don’t go around talking about the changes we experience, but they trouble us nevertheless.

Our hairlines recede and sometimes disappear altogether. The only new hairs we see are the ones that inexplicably sprout from our ears. It starts taking a long time to pee. Our blood pressure shoots up. Many, I hear, require pills to achieve something they used to try and disguise whenever it popped up inappropriately at work, church or the supermarket. But of the many afflictions aging males face, the one that troubles me most is one nobody talks about: white leg syndrome.

I spend most of my time in Florida where, every day, I ride my bike an hour or so. I always wear shorts. Not those weird-ass spandex things no cyclist over 25 should wear. Plain old Bermuda shorts from Joseph A. Bank.

Though I promise my dermatologist during my annual visit that I’ll wear sunscreen, I never do. As a result, my face is perpetually tan. So are my arms. But my legs, which receive every bit as much exposure to the sun, are the color of Styrofoam.

I first noticed this phenomenon last winter. I was working out in front of a mirror at the gym where, because it’s in Florida, I am considered, at 60, a junior member. I thought it was a giant sunspot reflecting off the mirror but no – those were my legs shining back at me. Looking around, I observed that the legs of roughly half the men in the room were as tan as their faces. The other half had legs as white as mine.

I asked my wife if she had noticed how white my legs had become. “Duh, you’re just now seeing that?” she replied. “They look … bizarre.”

I brought it up to my dermo on my next visit. “Do some men lose melanin in their legs as they get older?”

He laughed. “That’s ridiculous. Your legs are white because, when you’re riding your bike, your upper body blocks the sun from reaching them.”

I might buy that if I were the size of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, but I’m not. And my bike ride isn’t the only time during the day my legs are exposed to the sun. I take long walks, read by the pool for hours, go to the beach and, once, I even golfed. Unless we go to dinner at a swanky restaurant, when it’s nighttime anyway, I spend every waking moment in shorts or swim trunks.

Look, I realize there are many men my age or older who would gladly trade their very real physical maladies for one as insignificant as mine. And I suppose I could go to one of those spray-tanning places or slather a mixture of baby oil and iodine onto my legs, as my sister used to do to her entire body when she was a teen, to attract the sun's rays. I could even hide my lily whites with knee-high socks and try to pass myself off as a Bermudian. But none of those alternatives are acceptable.

I guess white legs are something I will have to live with. Unlike the hair that sprouted from my ear while I was sleeping last night that is now approximately the length of a bamboo fishing pole. I’m going into the bathroom to cut that sucker right now. Soon as I remember where I left the scissors.