My favorite grocery store is built up on the second level of a fancy apartment building. It’s very shiny there. The name of the store is in lights on the vaulted ceiling above, and there’s a  revolving door, human escalators, and shopping cart escalators. They opened it a few years back, apparently expecting vast hordes of captive shoppers from the apartments. It’s generally pretty quiet in there.

The revolving door, the escalators, and the cart escalators routinely break down, of course. The revolving door, even when it is working, has sensor problems. It starts revolving, and after you step into it and begin to walk, it decides to stop for a couple of seconds when you’re half way through it. The cart escalator regularly used to have conniptions whenever anyone fed it one of their smaller carts, and you could hear the hammering of a trapped cart all over the store. It sounded like an MRI machine. (They got rid of the smaller carts, and it doesn’t happen any more.) A couple of years back, a hurricane flooded the area and destroyed all the store’s electrical equipment, which was on the first floor. The store had to close for a couple of months.

Otherwise, it is a very nice place, with shiny vegetables and a robot that rambles through the store looking for spills. It also has clean bathrooms, which is a big plus for people like me who are walking everywhere. 

Anyway, they also have elevators for when the escalator breaks down, which happened (once again) a couple of days ago. An older gentleman got on the elevator with me, and as we were riding up, he complained genially about not being able to walk up a dead escalator any more. I said my knees were not up to it either. 

“It’s hard getting old,” he said. We strode off in different directions.

I was having lunch with my friend Beth today, and she too said it was hard getting old. She found  out, for instance, that her foot pain wasn’t a broken bone; instead, it’s just that she can’t wear heels any more. She has reached the sensible shoes state of life, the one some women assert confidently in their fifties they will never enter. (I gave up heels in my twenties, but that’s just me.)

Age is definitely real. It’s not just a state of mind. I am not good any more at walking up stairs I used to run up. I often stop near the top  of the stairs, just to give a pep talk to my knees. 

But even though escalators break down, revolving doors stop revolving, and I have a nerve problem in my right leg that makes it lose sensation when I stand too long, I find life bizarrely amusing most of the time. Maybe hallucinogenic is the word I’m looking for. Or maybe dreamlike. 

You know, one of those dreams where I am trying to teach a college class, but it’s in a coat closet, and one of the other teachers asks me to watch their kindergarteners, and everyone is asking inconvenient questions and the kindergarteners keep walking out of class and down the hall, and then suddenly we’re all in a science classroom with jars of nitric acid and I’m handing out preserved specimens of invertebrates for people to draw. Or is that just me?