“Who’s that handsome guy?” My grandpa remarked after looking at his reflection in the mirror after I gave him a fresh haircut. It was nothing fancy. I simply used his clippers, stashed in his bathroom drawer, to trim the back and sides of the scraggly, unevenly grown hair sprouting from his scalp in random places. Like ninety percent of the men in our family, he was the patriarch in our family who had the iconic “solar panel” of baldness that creates a clearing of hair on the dome of his head, caused by male pattern baldness.
After a slight snicker, he asked if we could take a picture of him and me on his phone. I knelt down next to his wheelchair and snapped a shot. Immediately after the picture, I showed him how it turned out. We shared the same awkward “McCawley-style” smile that didn’t look like a smile at all. In fact, we both had the same smile, opening our mouths like chimpanzees and showing our teeth. We never developed the trait of being photogenic and having the quintessential angle at the side of our mouth that created dimples. However, one could see that we were happy and having a good time. In fact, it looked like two guys who were having a night on the town in our teens. My grandpa even remarked, “It looks like we’re about to go raise some hell on a Friday night.” One can’t help but laugh after hearing a remark like that immediately after taking a selfie with a one-hundred-and-two-year-old man.
The fact that my grandpa actually knew what a selfie was made my jaw drop. This guy was born in the 1920’s, lived through the effects of the great depression and the infamous Dust Bowl in Oklahoma, had to bail out a plane in World War 2 after a bomb was dropped through the wing of the plane when he was twenty years old, and had overcome prostate cancer on multiple occurrences. “How could he even know what a selfie was?” I thought to myself. For a human who was over a century old and had literally seen the world evolve from a time with no computers and rotary phones, to the creation of the iPhone, his ability to adapt to the world’s changes was amazing. Even though my grandpa was stubborn, a tad ornery, and didn’t hesitate to simply walk out of the room the moment he disagreed with something, he sure enjoyed his one hundred and two years of life.
A few months after this experience, my grandpa passed away. I remember the laugh we shared that day after I gave him a haircut. For someone who experienced a few suboptimal conditions throughout his life that could make anyone sad and frustrated with the cards he was dealt, he sure knew how to laugh, smile, and make others feel like they were part of something.
Research consistently shows that a healthy diet, plenty of sleep, and adequate exercise support longevity. It should come as no surprise that, with advancing age, the likelihood of bone and joint deterioration and a few surprise medical conditions can present themselves when we least expect them. Additionally, short-term memory loss, hearing distortions, and impaired eyesight are likely to occur more as age progresses. However, something that is commonly overlooked when addressing lifespan, which my grandpa demonstrated, is our ability to be healthy by interacting with people and simply smiling.
Adhering to habits of eating the right foods, getting enough sleep, and exercising two to three days a week creates an advantageous environment for people to mitigate general age-related conditions. However, an invaluable tactic toward getting as many healthy years as possible that can significantly expand our health span is taking some time to smile, laugh, and maybe crack a lame joke to make the people around you feel less tense.
Sean McCawley, the founder and owner of Napa Tenacious Fitness in Napa, CA, welcomes questions and comments. Reach him at 707-287-2727, napatenacious@gmail.com, or visit the website napatenaciousfitness.com.