Through the Ages : There...

The onset of “short arms syndrome” is subtle, insidious, irreversible. Suddenly the arms are too short to hold a printed page far enough away to bring it into focus.

It hit me nearly 15 years ago--back when I still rationalized that I was canceling 1 1/2 packs of cigarettes a day with a two-mile jog. Walking 18 holes of golf was only a warm-up, and spending a full day in the park keeping up with my then-4-year-old daughter was . . . well, child’s play.

But someone hit fast forward and it seemed I was buying Christmas presents and singing carols every other weekend. Just like that--10 years, and that romping preschooler was playing JV basketball.

Still, I had always argued that time is simply a way of organizing experience, and Bertrand Russell was younger at 90 than Rush Limbaugh has ever been.

But the legs have their own reality.

At my daughter’s insistence, I kicked the cigarette habit. But the jogging also disappeared, and my waistline became an expanding universe.

One day I was helping my daughter work on her layup: “Keep your head up when you dribble. Concentrate on the backboard. Take off on your left foot from the right side, right foot from the left. Release the ball at the top of your jump.”

I decided to demonstrate, only to find that my vertical leap had been reduced to standing on my toes.

I made the shot. But any respectable 10-year-old could have swatted it back into my face. I silently thought what I have long been fond of saying of anything I thought was too physically taxing: “I’m getting too old for this.”

My daughter was polite. She turned her back to snicker.

I blinked a couple more times, and I was packing her off to college.

Shortly after she left, though, the passing years hit with undeniable impact. A pickup zipped into a nearby space as I was parking my car. The very attractive young woman in coveralls smiled as she got out and moved quickly toward me with arms outstretched. I looked over my shoulder, certain she was headed toward someone else.

“My God,” I shouted. “It’s Noosha.” I had known her since she was about 9. I had collected her a few times to join my daughter and other youngsters for an outing to, say, the Hollywood Bowl. Now she was a senior at UCLA and had moved back into the complex where she had lived as a child. If I had been oblivious to growing older, Noosha’s return disabused me of that fantasy.

But the reality of my aging was sealed on a rare trip to a music store. “John Coltrane?” the teen-ager at the counter asked with no idea whether I was referring to a musician or a cheap wine. “OK,” I said. “Just show me where the albums are.”

Her confusion turned to contempt. With a grand sweep of her arm, she said: “You’ve just been wandering around for the last half-hour in more than 2,000 square feet of albums.”

“Those are compact discs,” I protested. “I don’t even own a CD player. I want the album albums--those big, black vinyl discs.”

“Oh, those,” she said, pointing to a distant alcove. As I started my trek back to where Rosemary Clooney and the Four Freshman languished, the clerk asked: “By the way, mister, when was the last time you were in a record store?”

That afternoon I bought a CD player, a new pair of jogging shoes and a year’s supply of Tiger Balm.