The 80s hate me

May 20, 2026

Dell Franklin and Wilbur

By DELL FRANKLIN

Editor’s Note: The following series, “Life in Radically Gentrifying Cayucos by the Sea,” to be posted biweekly includes the notes, thoughts, and opinions of an original American voice: author Dell Franklin. 

Franklin’s memoir, “The ballplayer’s Son” and “Life on The Mississippi, 1969” are currently on Amazon.

The 80s have looked me in the eye and told me I’m not as tough as I think I am. The 80s are punishing me and giving me my comeuppance after years of thinking I was bullet proof. I was warned about the 80s and thumbed my nose at these warnings which are now coming home to roost.

Right now, I’m missing three bottom front teeth, have about three good molars left in my head, and every time I look in the mirror in the morning at the joke my face has become, I break out laughing. That’s all you can do, especially when a friend drops you off at the emergency room at 9 in the morning because you think you’re dying when you’re not even close.

Yeh, heartbeats that stop and then race all over the place in over-drive and send you to your recliner taking deep breaths. A knee/calf injury that won’t go away. Waking up on Thursday and thinking it’s Saturday.

Yard work and simple domestic repair becoming a dangerous obstacle course. Bumping into jagged objects and bleeding out and clotting the bleeding with super-size band aids from the Dollar Store that you sometimes twist up in gnarled fingers and have to toss away in seething frustration and open a new one. Going too fast when you’re not fast anymore and dropping things and making a mess. Eyes fading so badly you can hardly read the baseball box scores. Losing your glasses and keys and wandering around the hutch like a blind tom, seething and cursing and hating the 80s until you discover them where they aren’t supposed to be.

The emergency room I went to will not be named, but the care and service was first-rate. Especially considering there was already a pretty good crowd of people, some younger than me, who looked worse. So I think.

I brought the perfect book—entertaining but not garbage. I was the only one with a book. Everybody else had cell phones.

There was this woman who might be 90 and didn’t need a cell phone or a book, because she never stopped talking. When she couldn’t find those sitting in the waiting room to talk to she barged into the area where RN’s, doctors and a receptionist worked and talked their ears off. She was casually dressed, hair coiffed. She sounded pretty articulate and finally saddled herself beside a man and wife and had them laughing as she talked about widowhood and various subjects all concerning herself.

My name was called and I was led to a room where an EKG was taken. Back in the lobby, more people had come in and there was a line of three at the reception desk.

Nobody was suffering too much. The old lady was yakking away. She did a lot of gesturing, like she might have been a high school teacher. There were a few people who didn’t look like they missed too many meals. Almost all white people, mostly old. I went in feeling enfeebled and after looking around felt better.

My blood test was taken in a corner of the lobby. Everybody was getting a blood test in that corner.

My name was called and I was led to an x-ray room. Many of us in the lobby were engaged by nurses and doctors as we sat because all the rooms were filled by those neediest. I had one of those rooms some time ago, without book, and it was lonely and the wait for anyone seeing you seemed endless.

The 90 year old, who’d been yakking nonstop for close to an hour, was called and a nurse came out to inform her they had a room for her. She rose and didn’t look too happy. As she was being led past me, I said, “Ma’am, who are you going to talk to all alone in that room?”

“I don’t know!” she exclaimed, throwing up her hands.

Everybody in the lobby burst out laughing.

“We’re gonna miss you,” I said.

“Wish me luck,” she said.

The waiting room at this hospital is spacious and was filling up. Everybody was patient and polite. Not like those animals in the TV series, “The Pitt.”  At one time, in ER waiting rooms, conversations could be created on what whom was suffering, which led to other subjects, and the time passed and kept ones mind off the fear and dread and sometimes pain one was experiencing. There was always a worse story than yours.

But not these days. Everybody’s looking at a phone. By the time a doctor came out (4 plus hours in the lobby) and told me I wasn’t near death and I needed further testing and they were working on my paperwork, I’d read over 50 pages, was starving because all I’d had was coffee, was so restless I’d started limping around outside the lobby on my ailing knee, was fairly dehydrated, but thrilled like I was getting out of jail.

I called a friend, and he arrived shortly after I was checked out by a nurse. When I mentioned to the nurse that I’d never seen such a crowded ER, he nodded and admitted that this was the way it was every day, because everything had changed this year with people losing their insurance.

Anyway, if you make it to 80, beware. And try to laugh, even if it ain’t funny.