By Mary Cristy

Healthy seniors may thrive happily. Others less fortunate say, “The golden years are for the birds.”

If you belong to the “one foot in the grave, the other on a banana peel” set, you may be a prime candidate for elder abuse in its subtler forms.

This is because you’re slipping into strange habits and erratic behavior. In your youth you may have been equally spacey, but it went unnoticed because the young are expected to be a bit unhinged during puberty. But make a slip when you’re 80, and woe betide you! You’ll be shipped off to a retirement home.

Your doctor, who is kind, will assure you it’s perfectly normal and test you with one critical question. “Do you draw a blank when introducing old friends to new ones, then wake up in the middle of the night to rouse your mate to share the good news, ‘I remember!’” This, too, is normal.

He will explain, “It’s only when you forget, and forget you forgot that you’re in trouble.” But how do you know if you forget what you forgot?

Names are not the only source of embarrassment. More problematical are keys. This is a situation that can trip you up six ways till Sunday. Please don’t ask me what that means. I forget.

It’s stored in my consciousness forever, like many facts not worth knowing and stanzas of poems such as “O Captain! My Captain!” that we had to memorize in third grade. Our teacher’s name was Miss Koch, but I can’t remember the color of her hair.

But I digress. We’re considering the problem of keys, car keys, house keys, keys to deposit boxes, etc. Keys like to play games. They hide. No matter how organized you are, keys never stay put after you’re a certain age.

They disappear mysteriously when you especially need them to drive to the doctor. Stay cool, reschedule and forget it. Because that key will turn up for sure in 24 hours. It’s simply out on a coffee break. You’ll find it when the panic is over - exactly where you’ve put it for the past 50 years.

Accept that you’ve walked past it 24 times in 24 hours and never laid eyes on it.

Perhaps it’s time for that second cataract surgery. A friend had cataract surgery and thought it would solve her problems but then developed “dry eye syndrome” and found it was merely another step on the road to degradation (oops! I mean degeneration).

She was persuaded to try an eye lift as a last ditch measure. Actually she reported some improvement. But her eyebrows seem now to be aimed at the sky and she has a perennial look of surprise.

Still she felt luckier than the neighbor with silicone breast implants who declared a moratorium on swimming parties when she tried to swim to the left and her implants veered to the right.

Another aging hopeful who tried dermabrasion made medical history as “the chemical peel that wouldn’t heal,” when her mouth took six months to align with the rest of her face after a makeover.

Happily it worked out and now she’s the envy of her neighbors since her complexion is pure peaches and cream.

Having refused the options of cosmetic surgery and hair dye, I try to live gratefully from day to day.

Mama used to say, “Put a smile on your face and a song in your heart. Beauty is only skin deep.” Roses in a desert fade, not so the ones in our hearts that remain evergreen and invulnerable.

And, if all else fails, one can always eliminate mirrors at home and refrain from checking disturbing reflections in shop windows.

Cristy, a Los Altos Hills resident, is a longtime contributor to the Town Crier. Her column runs the first week of each month.