Do you know when you start to feel your age?
An innocuous question popped up on my browsing sites. Really, sometimes I wish these systems weren’t omniscient. I might’ve searched up the best way to dress a flesh wound, but did that mean you use my demographics, cross-reference it with my potentially weak hips thanks to my age, and wrangle up half-baked questions and answers on when you actually start to feel your age?!
Preposterous.
If only someone would sue the internet for this nonsense.
I feel fine.
So what if I am slightly wobbly while descending the stairs after a fall two days afterward? It is perfectly normal isn’t it? I mean I am not a teenager anymore or in my twenties or in the decade after that for that matter. But so what?
A children’s book I’d picked up a few days ago from the library beamed up at me. Books: Ever the saviors I tell you.
The Boo-Boos That Changed the World: A True Story About an Accidental Invention (Really!) by Barry Wittenstein and Chris Hsu
The book is about a man, Earle Dickson, whose wife gets a lot of boo-boos. While a competent enough person with dressing of wounds and such, she is also aware of how hard it is to take care of wrapping the bandages and cutting the reels of cotton etc by herself, especially if one of the hands are injured.
Thus was born the handy Band-Aid. Husband and wife worked on the design together and pitched the idea.
Luckily Dickson also works for Johnson & Johnson – the business that could take up an idea for boo-boo betterment.
Despite the brilliance of the idea, it did not take off as easily. People still seemed to prefer the old-fashioned way of tending to their injuries. That’s when they hit upon the idea of Boy Scouts of America – a place where folks regularly hurt themselves, and wanted to get back to having a marvelous time as quickly as they could. (Children! The best boo-boo handlers in the whole world. I remember glorious years in which scraped knees and elbows meant nothing, other than a dusting off before running that next race to the eucalyptus tree down by the road. )
That did it. As Boy Scouts embraced Band-Aid, so did the rest of the nation. I beamed up at the son, who is a proud Boy Scout and had helped me with immediate first-aid with the boo-boo.
He then ordered some first-aid supplies off Amazon, and the site flashed that it would be available at my doorstep in a couple of hours time. We looked at each other, and said, “Wow! We are spoiled brats huh?! We just wait for it at home and peel-and-stick.”
I stared back at the browsing link being recommended to me: So, when do you start to feel your age?
👻 Maybe when you realize that getting a boo-boo and taking off soon after is harder.
🤕 Maybe it is when you groan your way downstairs from a simple boo-boo from days earlier.
😈 Maybe it is when you yearn for that beautiful moment just before the boo-boo.
Nourish-n-Cherish 