An odd thing happened early this year. Beginning around May, almost every time I saw myself in a picture, I saw an emaciated, dead-eyed, wasted, skeletal wreck of an old man, unappealing in all aspects, the type of person you see in pictures of war-torn areas, an old man sitting alongside a road, naked, wrapped in a blanket, begging for food. The same thing happened on occasion when I looked in the mirror, but not as often. Of course, I immediately began to wonder if other people were seeing the same thing and trying not to stare. Impossible to verify, but if you’ve spent a lifetime with a slightly iffy self-image, it’s easy to imagine and believe.

Meanwhile, all I could do was soldier on, while trying to figure out why it was happening. The best I could do was trace it to the death of my wife last year. When she left, my positive reinforcement feedback mechanism left. Fifty years of being looked at with eyes of love obviously made me feel pretty good about myself even as I aged. But now, without that, I was aging before my own eyes and looking pretty haggard. Not pretty. I also have a feeling I was just letting myself go.

But that was then and this is now. Internally I mostly feel good about myself. I exercise, play golf, comb my hair, and try to dress decent. I’m okay with getting old, and I hang out with people who smile a lot. So, my guess is that was probably a temporary thing. Pictures of a sad man at a sad time. Because yesterday, when I saw the pictures of me and my grand-kids taken recently at their school, I saw a man happy in the fullness of his years. That made me feel good. And it reminded me there are still a lot of people around who love me, and maybe I just need to spend more time with them.