Attack Of The Turkey Elbows

As I saunter through middle age, I have no fear of growing old. Aches and pains won't bother me.  I can handle day-long dental work and the heartbreak of liver spots.  My brittle hair can fall in blue cascades.

I just hope I don't get turkey elbows.

Because that's when you know your days are numbered. You look in the mirror one morning and even the skin beneath your elbows hangs down like a turkey's neck.  And then you get a bird feeder and a heating pad and crochet the last rites on all your pillowcases.

So I check my elbows daily with great dread.  The day I see turkey, I'll dodder right out and buy a lifetime supply of prunes (a remaining lifetime supply - probably three or four jars).

Many go to absurd lengths to hide their condition.  Sales of crude mechanical bicep clothespins and sundry other quack slack reducers are up as the turkey-elbow desperate gobble up the can't-fly-by-night hucksters' lotions and potions, scant last-ditch hope for the afflicted. 

Some, like Queen Elizabeth, wear absurdly long gloves up to their armpits and nobody has the heart to tell them, in their majesty, that they look ridiculous.  Or they do have the heart, but would also like to keep the head. 

(Mind you, turkey elbows are not the death sentence they once were. Many continue to lead active, productive lives well into their Butterball years.  Mick Jagger has turkey elbows and look at him!  I mean, eww, sure, but still.)

But nothing works. You can't fool Mother Nature, and you just can't hide your turkey elbows.

Clearly the time has come to lay to rest, as it were, the prejudices about turkey elbows that abound in our soon-to-be geriatric society.  Turkey elbows aren't quite as gag-reflex-inducingly revolting and horrifying and hideous as they were once universally thought, by all right-thinking people, to be.

Yet, one old lady I know, who has turkey elbows so bad that, when she swims, she looks like a manta ray, had to quit doing aquatics at the home because people were stampeding in panic to the deep end and drowning, including the staff and the emergency personnel.

Now, is this fair?  No.  Funny?  More study is required.  And after all, who among us is qualified to judge others just for being sick and disgusting and wrong?

Now, in no way do I wish to come across as insensitive or disrespectful, so before I receive dozens of angry letters from ancient readers, the ink smudged from taking naps between sentences, still cool where their elbows lay spread across the page, let me say that it is precisely this heartless flippancy and ignorance about an important health issue, parlaying a feigned concern for the victims' plight into cheap, heartless laughs, that has got to stop.

So cut it out, okay?

Promise?

Swear on the Queen.