Just this morning I experienced one of the less-pleasant rites of passage into the realm of approaching-old-agedom. It wasn’t a lot of fun but as it turned out the anticipation was far more difficult than the reality. In the course of answering all the questions and giving my name and date of birth for what seemed like a dozen times, one of the nurses mentioned something about my age and said something like “we don’t usually see men under 60 in here unless there’s a problem.” I hadn’t given it much thought other than to wonder how many people actually follow their doctor’s advice, and I guess her comment kind of answered my question. Sometimes you just have to do something even though you really don’t want to because it’s the right thing to do. So I did, it’s done, everything is fine and I couldn’t be happier.

Arnold Palmer used to do a commercial for Pennzoil where he talked about “taking care of the old equipment.” He was primarily talking about using the right motor oil, but the implication was that the right maintenance was important regardless of the actual “equipment” being referenced.

We change the oil in our cars, check the air in our tires, change our furnace filters and (sometimes) clean out our refrigerators. And that’s all fine, but don’t forget to first and foremost take care of yourself. Do the scheduled maintenance.

This has been a public service announcement.