THE WONDER OF SCIENCE
“How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?”
-Satchel Paige
So far it’s been a pretty smooth day for an old guy tooling along a winding country road trying to ease the pain of watching another year die in the brown and orange wind-whipped leaves glittering in gold October sunlight and just as I’m in danger of continuing to wax poetic a la Hallmark I realize there’s a cream-faced kid riding my ass in a tomato-red Camaro slouched way down in the seat baseball cap turned sideways and though I’m a little pissed cause he’s screwed up my mood with his ridiculous gangsta thing there’s no way I can stay mad cause I remember being like most every guy I ever knew drenched in lust so powerful it bordered on myth and I figure he wants me to move over and let him roll, that hot car the emblem of a tom-cat need to spray. You’ve got to understand, though I’m trying to be big about this the truth is I’m jealous of his generation’s luck as by the time he’s fifty those hormone treatments I hear they’re working on now will be an everyday thing and ten times more powerful than any of our ED drugs. And I’m thinking it’s possible we might sneak in and get a piece of this action. It goes like this: they’ll have to have subjects to run their trials on, right? Now you tell me who’d be more sensitive to new-found pleasure than a bunch of old folks with their fun pretty much done. Better yet: can you imagine as I can that it’s not impossible with all this testing going on one of them will discover you can be shocked open and have all the wild passion of teenage hormones rush back in? Hell! if they could do that I’d let them strap me to a table open the roof and raise me up into the heart of the baddest storm in storm history to get the jolt I need and I’m just realizing this fantasy has me so juiced I’ve got the pedal to the floor coming out of a twisty patch of road with Junior in his hot-shit red Camaro sucking my fumes and I’m headed for that quarter-mile stretch of Forgedale Road with the two scary dips one right after the other where in the old days I’d push my battered truck up to seventy, scare the shit out of the kids their friends pale, asking Is your dad OK? feeling my testicles swoop and rise like they did when I was a boy riding an elevator to the top of the Empire State Building. And wouldn’t I buy me a lifetime supply of whatever they come up with and a brand-new 400 horsepower truck get that baby up to 90 show you how I’d use those dips to get airborne clear the highest branch of the big sycamore by the cow pond—eighty years old, I hear!—and not even scrape my new-born butt
