I was cackling and guffawing with my dear friend as she detailed her experience of shopping with her 16-year-old daughter on what she called “Old Folks Day.” She giggled, “We have to dodge walkers and canes and those motorized carts.” My own laughter skidded to a halt on the friction of a harsh reality: I was the butt of her joke.
I am in need of neither a cane, nor a walker. I get in a moderate amount of ambulation each day, so the motorized cart is also out. But I have ridden across the landscape of my life for more than six decades and though the face I see in the mirror does not resemble the face I imagine, I can prove an entitlement to the “Seniors’ Discount” at businesses that offer such a thing. Despite that, I have taken that discount only once, when I took my grandchildren to see a movie. I had a vaguely guilty sense of having stolen something.
When I was a young man living in Pittsburgh, Penn., I used to listen at night to a jazz station. They often played a song that I thought was called, “I’m Growing Old.” (I have since found that the artist I believed to have been the singer claims not to have sung it. I have yet to find a copy of the song, though I did find the poem and the poet who wrote it: John Godfrey Saxe.) When the song spoke of growing “fonder of the fire, mindful of the cold, and careless in dress,” it did not give me a vision of a life that might be my own. But I am now — ok, I admit it — in the seventh decade of my life, a number unimaginable to the twenty-something who had listened to that song.
On a recent visit to my fun-poking friend, (“dear friend:” an old-folks term) she watched as I tied the laces on my shoes and after noting that I did this each time I moved to another room — I am not a fan of the bare foot, unless it is under sheets, in a shower or buried in sand — she commented that I needed “slip-ons.” I responded to her, “I told Lisa (my eldest daughter) that if she ever saw me reaching for those brown plastic slip-ons that old men scuffle about in, she was to take me out back and shoot me. Just put me down.” I have no slip-ons, no fluffy sweaters that I miss-button, no “putter pants” with elastic waists. (Well, one pair of putter pants, purchased when I was about 10 years younger and did not know what putter pants were.) I am no cliché.
I have been told that I do not “look” my age, nor do I “act” my age. I’m not sure that I know what look I am supposed to have at this age, for I have never been here before. When I am shooting pool in the bar with my team, young people take pleasure in playing songs that they know will cause me to dance. After telling them that I am “107,” I bust a move, “wobble wobble,” or “Gangnam” style. These moves are a source of great embarrassment to my son, although hugely amusing to the bar’s patrons, judging from the lack of gunfire.
I am not going to “go gentle,” but I am “skidding in sideways,” and not by wrestling weights and stunning my feet against pavements. I believe that our inevitable slide into extinction can be “Electric,” and accomplished with grace and style and “The Cupid Shuffle.”