Dad's prescription for aging

"I don't understand why I have all these aches and pains," my father said recently.


He is 88.


My mother hazarded a wild guess. "Age, maybe?" 


He thought about this. "Nah, it can't be all age," he said.


"It's age," she said.


My father has attained this venerable age through a lifetime of careful eating. He is careful to never eat anything lowfat or low sodium, and sticks strictly to foods like salami, bologna, full-sodium soup, chips, pretzels, and Lucky Charms. 


Anything more healthy, such as turkey, is treated with suspicion. "Yuck," he says when my mother tries to encourage him to eat a turkey sandwich.


For a while he had to eat more healthy, due to some eating difficulties, and the diet just about did him in. 


"Your mother took away my salami," he would grouse when I talked to him on the phone.


Once when my sister was visiting during this enforced diet, my father took her aside and asked, in a loud whisper, if she would go to the grocery store to get him some things.


"Didn't Mom just go?" she said.


"Yeah, but she never gets what I tell her to," he said.


So she collected his list, which included "a couple pounds of salami," went to the store, and came back with, among other things, lowfat turkey.


"Would you believe they were out of salami?" she said with a straight face.


Clearly he could not trust her to be on his side.


Eventually my father's diet almost did my mother in, too, and slowly the salami, and other prohibited foods, made a regular reappearance in the house.


"He's more pleasant to live with when he eats what he wants," she said.


And why shouldn't he eat what he wants? He is 88. There should be some reward for having reached that age.


Now, if he could just figure out why he has all those aches and pains...