Andy Young: I’m fine with my age, nut test massaging sticks

By Andy Young

Special to The Windham Eagle

I am not overly sensitive about my age, or at least no more so than anyone else who just turned the sum of Willie Mays’s uniform number, the number of children fathered by President John Tyler, and the square root of 625.

And I’m not vain about my body, either. The truth is I’ve got far less reason to complain in that regard than most folks who have just attained the age of four dozen plus a score minus the number of eggs currently in my refrigerator.

Most of my body parts (eyes, ears, arms, legs, knees, etc.) are still functioning, and I’ve got a working brain, plus a keen sense of smell I’m grateful for, except when I’m downwind from a paper mill, or a sewage treatment plant. And with the exception of one titanium hip, all those still-operational items are original equipment.

But I do have one nagging appearance-related complaint.

My fingers are too fat.

There. I said it.

I probably shouldn’t whine about the composition of my hands. My Uncle Eddie told the story of one of his friends who miscalculated the length of time between when he lit the fuse of some fireworks that he was holding in his right hand one July 4th, and how soon they would go off. The aftermath left the man bereft of three fingers, and with a new, lifelong nickname: “Lefty.”

Some years later I had a colleague who had six fingers on each of his hands. He also supposedly had six toes on each foot, but I never had the nerve to ask him to remove his shoes so I could count.

But that acknowledged, certain newfangled technological developments have, on far too many occasions, left me painfully insecure about my own embarrassing physical deformity.

Ordinarily I hate playing the blame game. But when it comes to the cause of my unfairly diminished sense of self-worth, I emphatically point one of my ten sausage-like digits directly at a specific culprit: the fiendish inventor of instant messaging.

For the life of me I can’t figure out how anyone with fingers wider than toothpicks can tap out a mistake-free text message of more than three lines in under ten minutes. But even worse, what sadistic creton laid out the standard keyboard? Why in Heaven’s name is the “I” located between the “U” and the “O”? Having the “M” (that’s also directly beneath the “K”) next to the “N” (neighbor to the “B”) is no bargain, either, and the proximity of the “A,” “S,”, “D,” and “E” to one another can lead to some horrific misspellings, a problem that’s only exacerbated by an execrable component of most cell phones called “autocorrect.”

Who hasn’t sent off a text message to a friend that, thanks to this damnable feature, describes being chilled to the none while out hinting noose in fig that was thick as pea soup? I recently had a promising relationship come to an end when a woman whose companionship I desired received a text message from me telling her that when it came to people that I enjoyed spending time with, she was at the very top of my lust.

But we need to embrace technology, which is why I’ll compose the next line of this essay on my phone, rather than on the usual computer keyboard.

Fist is seize ear then I taught.

Hmmmm. Not bad for someone who just turned the product of all Canada’s provinces and Frank Sinatra’s wives, plus the number of first cousins I’ve got, and the amount of times Jean Beliveau’s name appears on the Stanley Cup. <