Silver Threads: Couples who age together ail together

Alongside far too many things like Christmas card photos of friends, once-interesting newspaper clippings, and outdated notices of doctors’ appointments, our refrigerator door is adorned with a 2½- by 3-inch magnet bearing the words “Major electric appliance heal thyself.”

Given to us by artist John Prebles, who has them made for the kooky gift shop at his kooky and fascinating UCM Museum in Abita Springs, the black magnet with its white writing, little drawings of appliances, and crosses and stars of David has kept the refrigerator healthy for the last 10 or so years.

I wish we had thought to put the magnet on our hot water heater (and here I must digress: An editor at the paper I worked for during college days pointed out that such appliances don’t heat hot water, they heat cold water. Just sayin’.).

Anyhow, the water heater apparently is on its way out, as is our washing machine — I discovered about 3 inches of water in the bottom of the tank when I went to load it the other day; the dishwasher, which moans mightily as it goes through a cycle; and the only remaining television in our house that doesn‘t require the programming expertise of our teen-aged grandsons. I especially wish I’d gotten a magnet for that old TV set, because if you read my first column when NolaVie made its debut last February (published on this page), you know all about the pain and suffering I’ve gone through with our new state-of-the-art one in the living room. Doesn’t anybody make the old kind for old folks?

You’re probably going to say, well, you bought all this stuff for your house at the same time; no wonder you have an epidemic of malfunction on your hands.

Sometimes that’s true, but not entirely in this case. I think it’s a kind of contagion, a household virus if you will. My husband and I will be 82 and 77 within two weeks of each other this summer, and when one of us malfunctions, the problem seems to cross over into the other.

I wake up complaining that my neck and back ache, and he falls down the garage steps and sprains his thumb and bruises his elbow. I go to the eye doctor for a macular degeneration checkup; he comes up with cataracts. He gets hay fever and I develop a post-nasal drip. The other sleepless night I got up at 2:30 a.m. and encountered him in the dark hall, meandering toward the kitchen for a glass of wine to put himself back into lala land.

He becomes hard of hearing, and complains that I can no longer speak in tones he can understand. Neither of us can eat Mexican food for dinner any more.

Thank goodness this contagion doesn’t yet extend to our brains. What one forgets the other usually can remember and we manage through a joint effort to keep appointments and come up with names of long-ago friends and traveling buddies with whom we once saw the world. Since he had the cataract surgery last summer, my husband’s eyesight is better than mine, and he can find my glasses for me and locate the cans of diet Coke I’ve left sitting around the house.

I wonder that John Preble didn’t design some heal thyself magnets for us older folks, although I know they wouldn’t work as well as the one on our refrigerator. Fourteen-year-old Jack tells me, however, that within another generation stem-cell research will have paved the way for the replacement of diseased and aging human parts.

In the meantime, since I can deal only with our ailing major appliances, I think I’ll head to the north shore for some help. Can I get some for you?

Bettye Anding is a former editor of The Times Picayune Living section, for which she wrote Silver Threads until her retirement. Email her at btanding@cox.net.