Last week, I wrote in this space about my one-week stay in a guest suite at The Breakers at Edgewater Beach, the Chicago high-rise for people 62 and over where my mother-in-law lives, and how the week had given me a preview of what old-age might hold in store. My sympathies really were with the folks there, even if I couldn’t wait to get out of The Breakers and its crowded elevators by the end of our trip.

In a highly entertaining three-minute voicemail I received the day the column was published, a 74-year-old Dropping In reader called and said, “There’s a lot of empathy here.”

You can say a lot in three minutes and eight seconds. The caller certainly did: The caller told me they’d read Dropping In since I started writing it two years ago, that I’d finally “knocked it out of the park” last week, and that they’d just been drinking a gin and tonic with lime. We both chuckled at that last one.

The caller also believes I should take Dropping In more in the direction of last week’s column, and “not all about skateboarding and not all about this and that.”

The caller said their modus operandi is to tell people “what’s right about them and not what’s wrong about them,” before adding, “I appreciate you, but I think you need to start leveling your journalism towards this kind of thing. It’s important. You’re getting old. For God’s sake, you’re 57. You’ve got kids in college.”

I didn’t get a chance to call them back for clarification about what direction they had in mind, but I think I got their gist.

To the caller, I say: Don’t worry, I can’t forget that I am getting old, that I am for God’s sake 57, and that I have kids in college, as I am surrounded by reminders: my 2001 Sienna van, my used furniture and threadbare clothing, all of which are getting older, too — partly, yes, because I am supporting kids in college, but honestly, even if I had money to spend, I would probably spend most of it on skateboarding stuff. It’s what I’ve always wanted to spend my money on.

Besides the accoutrements of my life, there’s also health to remind me I am getting older. Several weeks back, I started noticing a pain in my chest. I hoped it was just some kind of pectoral injury, because skateboarders fall in the push-up position a lot, or at least I do. More worrisome would be if it had something to do with my lungs, because as longtime readers like my caller know, I gave up cannabis last year and have soldiered on mostly sober in this day and age, which has to be among the worst but most necessary decisions I’ve made. Maybe the years of smoking that preceded abstention were catching up with me.

But the funny thing about worry is how inaccurate it can be: While I was staring mortality in the eye in Chicago, I also saw, in the bathroom mirror, a noticeable lump in what my doctor here in Bend is referring to as my sternum. It’s just to the right of my sternum, below the knobby part of the collarbone, in an area I’d have called the upper chest.

It’s also right where I’d been feeling the pain, which as is always the case with me, I find difficult to describe. I have to be the only person writing for a living who has absolutely no facility for describing pain symptoms, at least in terms others seem to use.

“Is it a shooting pain?”

I’d say it’s more “occasional,” like it visits while I lean forward.

“Is it dull?”

Dull compared to what? If we’re comparing it to a knife, yes, it is very dull, unless that knife is of the butter variety. Is it dull compared to my atrophied vocabulary of pain descriptors? No.

“Is it throbbing?”

Heh heh, but also, I don’t know.

I was relieved when I went to the doctor last week and, right away, he said he didn’t think it was cancer. After our appointment, I had X-rays done, and they were negative, in the good sense. The lab work I had done over the weekend revealed only high cholesterol, serving as another reminder that I am getting old, 57, etc.

For the sternum lump, I’ll be going in later this week to have an ultrasound in an office that happens to be right next to one of my favorite curb skateboarding spots.

For my cholesterol, I am going to take a test called a CT coronary calcium scan to help determine the state of my arteries. It’s $100 out of (threadbare) pocket, money that could go toward the skate stuff that helps me forget that I am getting older.

Because yes, caller, I’m all too aware I’m getting older.

And whether or not the ultrasound can help determine what that lump near my throat is, I will probably get out my skateboard after my appointment and grind some curbs, because skateboarding is how I cope, keep calm and carry on through this life, lumps and all.