It’s December and I went down to Fairhope and Baldwin County for my annual getaway. There were new restaurants to discover, old favorites to visit, a perfect massage treatment with Claudia at the Grand Hotel, an Advent service at the Anglican church at Point Clear, drives along the bay and past orchards of satsumas and pecans, interactions with writer friends, and general rest, reading, and relaxation. The weather took a gloomy turn so a planned visit to write about the oyster beds at Murder Point on the Gulf of Mexico will have to wait for another year.

On the second full day, at lunch after the massage, I got a phone call that my mother had a medical incident the previous night. She was resting and recovering in the hospital and I was assured that there was no need to cut my trip short – that she was well cared for where she was. After that call, it was a juggling game of should I stay or should I go. I decided to spend the night and decide the next morning.

The next morning, after church, I decided to have lunch and decide. After lunch, I decided that since I only had another day left in my trip, I might as well stay unless something happened that would require me to head back to Birmingham. You see how this is going to go.

So, on that last full day of indecision, I stumbled, twisted my ankle, and had to be helped up to my room. Since I couldn’t put weight on my left foot, the ever-gracious security staff at the hotel brought a wheelchair up and carried me to the ER of the local hospital. That’s how the last day of the getaway I look forward to all year turned into a seven-hour stint in the ER.

I am no stranger to hospitals in the past decade; stoicism is the key whenever you find yourself in one. Everybody at the ER at Thomas Hospital was great, even though it was a day-long affair. Unfortunately, it wasn’t my first time there; I took a fall at the pool about fifteen years ago and was witness to Thomas’s brand of medical hospitality. I am not clumsy (he said, after the fall) and those two tumbles fifteen years apart are the only falls I’ve taken during that time.

Which brings me to the reckoning of the wristbands. When I was admitted to the ER, I was given three wristbands. The first was my identification, with name and birthdate. The second red band was for an allergy alert. I had a reaction to penicillin as a young boy and have been told to avoid penicillin. (If you must have a drug allergy, penicillin is the way to go; there are so many things you can take instead.) The third wristband, yellow, said “FALL RISK.”

Sitting for hours, trying not to stare at the other suffering people all around, one seeks out distractions. At some point, I decided to study my wristbands. The name and birth date checked out. It was the parenthetical that drew focus. “(70-year-old man)” it said. It didn’t seem quite real, but there it was. ALLERGY was something I am used to and that one got a passing glance. Then there was FALL RISK. There I lingered. “(70-year-old man).” “FALL RISK.”

FALL RISK was there, obviously, because I was in the ER as the result of a fall. But the idea of being described as a fall risk suddenly made me feel very old. The people in the Thomas waiting room that I had thought of as “the old ones,” on their walkers and crutches and in their wheelchairs, were suddenly my peers. As I departed hours later in a wheelchair with an orthopedic boot and a new set of crutches, I joked to the nurse that over time I would morph my awkward stumble into a skiing accident.

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I have tried to model my attitude toward getting older on humorist Garrison Keillor, who is in his eighties now and shares his essays online at “Garrison Keillor and Friends.” Keillor (perhaps too often) begins his contemporary essays by stating that “I’m an old man.” But he celebrates the fact that he can leave behind concerns that he had when he was younger and cherishes little things that he once didn’t attend to. His is a fresh, frank, sometimes repetitive and self-indulgent, take on life and the events of the day. I try to keep it in mind as I spend hours on end with my mom at her rehab facility, observing her fellow clients. I refer to the experience as my “Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come” – a specter I hope to somehow avoid.

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I realize that it’s a form of bigotry to say that I have respect for the aging process and old people while resisting the inevitability of becoming one myself. And while I do not try to hide my aging, I feel a need to defy aging stereotypes. Sometimes, validation comes at unexpected moments. Last night, after a 50+ hour session of sitting up with my mother at her rehab facility, I ducked out to the grocery store to pick up some things. The weather here has turned cold and I was wearing my most vintage item of clothing – a black leather jacket that I picked up in Indiana in 1994. As I was paying, the teenager who was bagging my groceries said, “Man, that jacket is dope.” When I realized that he wasn’t being ironic, I thanked him. “How old is that jacket?” he asked.

“A lot older than you,” I replied. “Over thirty years.”

To which he replied, “I want to have a jacket like that one day.”

As I left the store, I felt a little less tired. The limp from that skiing injury was somehow less pronounced.