The Old Poop

The weather here in Florida this month has been weird. Generally, January highs reach the low eighties and there's maybe one day of rain the whole month. This January we’ve been lucky to see highs in the low sixties. And it has rained. And rained. Then rained some more. On days there’s no rain, the sun refuses to shine. Today was another of those chilly, gray days. So this afternoon I plopped down on the sofa and watched a classic movie, "On Golden Pond," on Netflix, starring Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn as an elderly couple returning to their New Hampshire lake house for the summer.

I first saw “Pond” in 1982 in a movie theater in Hawaii, where my wife and I were vacationing. We were 30 and had just found out she was pregnant with what turned out to be our oldest son. We were living in New York back then, on East 49th, directly across the street from Ms. Hepburn, whom we saw often. Not that we were on speaking terms but it was impossible not to notice the world’s most famous actress sweeping the sidewalk in front of her brownstone, as she did every morning.

Fonda plays a retired professor, Norman Thayer, who is becoming crotchety, forgetful and suffers heart palpitations. Hepburn, who plays Ethel, his wife, was in the full throes of the Parkinson’s Disease that eventually killed her when the film was made. Her voice quivers, her body shakes.

At the end of the movie, as the Thayers are preparing to return home, Norman suffers a heart attack. Ethel rushes to his side and, in one of the better acting jobs in screen history, tells him how much he means to her while frantically calling the operator for help. (The operator. Remember her? It was always a her, wasn’t it?)

It’s one thing to watch that movie when you’re 30 and your best years are ahead of you. I remember appreciating the acting, writing, cinematography and scenery. But it would have been impossible for my 30-year-old self or for any 30-year-old to truly understand where the Thayers were coming from and what they were facing.

It is something else to watch it when you’re 64, retired, and get interrupted twice during the movie by calls from two medical offices setting up appointments and from the pharmacy telling you your prescriptions are ready for pick-up.

Somewhere between the first time I saw "Pond" and the second, I attained the perfect age but wasn’t smart enough to recognize it. And if I had been, what would I have done with that information?

Beats me.