I was refilling my trusty Yeti with Diet Dr. Pepper at the gas station soda fountain when the explosion happened.
It caught us all off guard, a gasp could be heard from the wine aisle.
I kept moving. Playing it cool is my automatic reaction.
But as I turned away from the array of soda nozzles, I looked up to see the gray-haired culprit, his face bearing the casual smile of oblivion—as if he didn’t know what he had done.
But he knew. Every old man knows that his sneeze is loud enough to tear a hole in the space-time continuum.
I know, too.
For years, I thought it was just my dad. The dread at family gatherings when, as a father of napping children, I would clinch at the very thought of him sneezing in the same house. Or the shock when, while watching television or staring into the void of my phone his sneeze came quick.
My wife was caught off-guard by it for years. She got used to it. My kids, amazed, may never really adjust their young sensitive hearing to the brute force attacks of it.
At least we could all laugh about it together—or so I thought.
I don’t remember when it started—when the ancient daemon ghost of elder masculinity invaded my diaphragm—but it’s there now. And will be forever. I mourn the memory of pardoning myself politely after a muffled snuff, the forced suppression of a sneeze. Or, and I swear this true, when I could just pinch my nose and make the thing go away altogether. If I tried that now, the pain would be excruciating, not to mention the projectile ear wax would penetrate the sheetrock across the walls of whatever room I was in.
There comes a time in a man’s life when his age takes over. His grooming needs increase just as his grooming awareness decreases. His sneezes convert from decibels to Richter-scale measurements. He begins talking about himself in the third person.
He’s there now.
The torturous purgatory for me, though, is knowing what I have become. Unable to turn back, but able to know what I am inflicting upon the ear drums of those around me. I feel it coming, the sneeze, almost every time, my eyes widen, knowing the mockery that will be following. If possible, I warn those around me—pleading with eyes watering for them to save themselves. It’s too late for me, the longer I hold it, the more my nose rises heavenward, the worse it will be.
And then—it happens—and all the people in my home or the convenience store stare. I am becoming the old man. He waits for me—that oblivious smirk is his knowledge that all things pass—youth flees. I envy his apathy. Time and minor nasal irritation will drag me there.
But the dirty secret—the release felt after a sneeze of this magnitude is so blissful—that’s the real reason we don’t stop it. I’m still young enough to risk sharing this secret—all the older men have wandered off to use the bathroom by now, anyway.
We sneeze this way, because it feels good.
And at our age, not much else does.