After you reach the age of 40, things stop growing right. Things on YOU.

After you reach the age of 40, things stop growing right. Things on YOU. I believe that most of the cells in our body are still geared towards being devoured by a lion or gored by a Wooly Mammoth. Or swallowing the wrong kind of berry. It took several million years to get the little regenerators to last 30 years: in the past few hundred years we've asked them to last more than twice as long. You ask anybody to do something 2X longer than they'd originally been asked, you're asking for trouble. You tell a basketball player that the game is 96 minutes long; a marathoner that the race is 52 miles long; your husband that you're expecting 4 minutes of "you-know-what" -- it's just not going to be pretty. This is relatively uncomplicated stuff, and you're relatively smart. Now take a hair cell and tell it to grow for another 30 or 40 years. Take an ear cell and tell it NOT to grow moles for the next 20 years. You can't tell these guys what to do anymore. They've done their job. They're tired. They feel entitled to do whatever latent, subordinate, recessive thing has been in them all these years that they've held off doing, especially if they've held off doing NOTHING. I didn't understand any of the genetic research garble about how every cell in the body contains enough information to grow a whole new me. Didn't understand it until one day, I found a 3 inch hair growing out of the tip of my nose. Please understand: I'm not all that attracted to myself, but I DO look at my face in the mirror each day, knowing full well others have to suffer it. And I swear, there was NO hair growing out of that nose the day before. Here, 8 hours later, it looked like I'd been working for years to try and set some Guinness record. No wispy thing, this, either: big, black, thick. The speed of its growth was frightening, as if that cell had suddenly remembered its bamboo ancestry. I was relieved to realize it had acted alone.

If a simple nose skin cell can do this, there is every reason to expect that someday I'll have a liver hanging off an elbow. I kind of hope so, cuz the liver I currently use could use a rest. Long rest. It's probably dreaming of retiring as a brain cell. Little does it know.

I guess the good news in all of this is that the nose cell didn't give up its job of being a nose cell... just started multi-tasking. Maybe it's not that we outlive the expected life of our cells so much as it is they just get bored doing the same thing year after year. If you've done nothing but try to hide scalp for 30 years, you'd probably be aching for a little sunshine, too: if I'd just let the nose hair alone, for all I know it mighta been gone the next morning (or... strangled me in my sleep.) Maybe all it wanted to do was prove it still COULD do that. If it's not cellular senility, what else could it be?

Amazingly, most of the troops keep on marching, more or less in unison, though with an increasing tendency to tolerate less and less change of routine, or go haywire. You don't hear your knee cells, after a day of skiing, saying "ah, don't sweat the tear. We'll fix it tonite." it's more like "Where's Fred? Haven't seen him in awhile. We sure could use some ACL help." There's a pause. "Fred went wart." "Oh." Then, brightening, "How about George over there? He makes some similar stuff. Or did." And that's how it happens: guys filling in for guys doing other things, taking on roles for which they have little experience. Oh, they've been TAUGHT how to do it, but there's a big difference between old encoded knowledge and building new heart valves. Especially if you've spent your life in an armpit. You shouldn't be surprised if it doesn't come out exactly right.

I really don't know what can be done about this: eating and drinking well may help stabilize the conditions under which these wrinkly old cells have to operate. But you can see why the thrill of working the lower intestinal tract would wear on a guy. Seeing cold steely objects or rubber fingers every so often is probably the only excitement these fellas get. Still, people rot at pretty much the same rate, so the AMA could publish a guide, a chart letting us know on average what percentage of our cells are still doing the 9 to 5 shift, how many have gone goofy, and what sort of goofy that might be. If 73% of you is still working, you can expect about that much out of yourself in whatever it is that you're doing. As for the 27%, look on the bright side: For ONCE you have a ready-made excuse for your stupidity. Don't forget it.

And you will.