Sourpusses and Something to Laugh About

For the past three or four years I’ve been telling everyone that I’m almost seventy when, in fact, I’ve still got two years to go before I effortlessly float into Septuagenarian Land like a feather on the wind. At least that's the plan and, no, I don’t have a propensity for lying. I’m just trying to avoid the depression of achieving that benchmark that my mother went through on her 70^th birthday. I figure after the long prelude I’m giving myself to becoming a septuagenarian, I’ll be so used to saying the big S word that I won’t even notice that on my 70^th birthday I’ll be just around the corner from death. Yes, Virginia, youth is wasted on the young.

They say that laughing every day keeps you young. Okay, I can do that but I ran into an older-than-me woman the other day who probably hasn’t cracked a smile in decades. I had stopped at a VFW roast beef dinner that is popular with the after church crowd in the area and just before I got to the first course in the cafeteria style line, the woman cut in front of me and brought three other people with her.

Looking down her nose at me, she said, “You’ve been here before so you can go to the end of the line.”

“No I haven’t,” I replied. “I just got here.”

“Really? Well we’re here now,” she shot back, “we’re not moving.”

As I contemplated the fact that I’d just been treated like chopped dog food, her husband whispered an apologized for her behavior and I was washed in sympathy for the man. She’d probably been acting like a prick her whole life and he’d been humbly mopping up after her since their marriage. They’d obviously just come from church which got me to wondering what that woman did when the minister is giving his sermons. Does she mentally make out her grocery list when he’s talking about love thee neighbor and other Golden Rule type anecdotal stories? Does she visualize the choir director in his underwear? Love, peace and fellowship---what the hell do those things mean to a woman who acts as if rudeness is her God-given right?

I didn’t say it, but it put a smile on my face to think about what I should have said to the sourpuss, line cutting church lady. I should have said: “That’s okay. Octogenarians like you are always in a hurry since you’ll be meeting your maker any day now. Me, I’m still a sexagenarian so I’ve got more time here on earth.” ©

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Are You Reliant?

If you want to feel old really fast get a new digital camera. At least the one I just got is making me feel that way. It came with not one but TWO user guides and some of the pages have such small print that I have to use a magnifying glass just to read them. Worse than that, the camera has a mode dial with tiny icons on it and without my handy-dandy magnifying glass I'd never know those little suckers are suppose to represent things like: portraits, night shots, indoors, landscapes, movies and a bunch of letters I've yet to decipher. It even has an icon for aquariums. Aquariums! Who needs that? What I want to see is an icon for starting my coffeemaker in the mornings.

My very first camera was a Kodak Brownie box camera that I got for Christmas when I was a kid. Brownies have very few moving parts---a shutter, a button and a spool to thread a roll of black and white film inside the glorified cardboard box. I still have that camera. And believe it or not, I've only had two other cameras in between that Brownie and my new Canon. One of those cameras was sold off last summer on eBay as an antique. That sale alone established me as having entered the realm of old-dom, but I already had my suspicions. Being old is like living in a parallel universe. You can function normally in the world but in the back of your mind you know that unlike most of the other humans moving about, you have no future. You only have today unless, of course, you like dwelling in the past.

Having just bought a camera that should come with a master's degree if you learn how to use all its functions, does it sound like I dwell in the past? No, but I'm not so sure Don, my husband, doesn't live back there. The other day we had one of those infamous 'conversations' that all spouses of aphasia and apraxia patients would label as what-the-hell-difference-does-it-make? He managed to get out the words 'employment,' 'Mrs.,' and 'house' plus the phrase 'long-long ago.' Two hours later of off and on again games of Twenty-One Questions I finally figured out Don was trying to say that a guy he had worked with and his wife came over to visit him fifteen years ago. He, of course, was thrilled that I cracked his coded speech but I was working hard to keep my weary brain together long enough not to blurt out, "What the hell difference does it make that you had company fifteen years ago?"

Indeed, what the hell difference DOES it matter what happened in the past? We can't go back there. Or can we? We can still day-dream about what was once upon a time and is no more. We can still buy 120 film to re-spool in Brownie box cameras. We can still capture life in black and white, but what fun would that be while everyone else is sending vivid color photographs around the world as fast as a mouse click? Dwelling on the past doesn't make us young again. It just makes us irrelevant.

I have a theory about what is missing the most in the lives of old people---goals. So I'm vowing to live long enough to learn all the functions on that new camera and Don has agreed to live long enough to fill all the slots in his new penny collectors album that goes up to the year 2020. Setting goals is a good thing. They make you do off the wall stuff like buy aquariums just so you can learn to take pictures of fish and to get pennies back in change to check.

Jean Riva 2009 ©

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Old Farts

As many baby boomers do, I’ve needed total knee replacements for several years, but I’m scared to death I’ll have a stroke if I do. The doctor says my best chance for not having one would be to lose some weight. But guess what, folks, I still don’t look like Twiggy. So what, I tell myself, if my bones are grinding bone against bone. And so what if I have this ghastly vision that in a couple of years I’ll be ten inches shorter and the skin on my legs will be bagging in folds at my ankles and I'll look like I’m wearing flesh colored gaiters. My brain will still be intact and my husband, Don, and I won’t have to share a room at the nursing home while the dog goes off to a shelter. Whenever this scary thought passes through my mind, I look around the kitchen wishing the fairy godmother of brownies has left some that I can stuff in the biggest hole in my face.

Seriously, thought, there are days when the pain is about to fry my senses and I want to shove Don---a stroke survivor---out of his wheelchair and scream, “Get up so I can sit down!" But I keep that thought to myself because I’m not Kathy Bates in Steven Spielberg’s movie Misery. No, I’m a good little caregiver-slash-wife and we caregivers-slash-wives know what that means. We bottle it up and button it down and keep our feelings and fears to our selves until the pressure builds up too much. That’s then we yell something like: “Do you have to leave your dirty socks on the floor!?” Why do we women do that, not share with our mates what's really poking pins in our butts and making us grumpy?

I’ll be the first to admit it. One of the reasons I don't want to get my knees replaced is because overweight old people don’t look good naked. We’ve got bulges and things that look better draped in clothing. It’s not just the extra pounds but at a certain age we start growing things: warts and moles and bumps of unknown origin.

So instead of getting my knees over hauled I keep pretending and telling everyone who will listen that I’m older than I really am. If I were eighty, for example, it would be acceptable to spend guilt-free hours sitting at my computer or lusting over the new varieties of sweet peas in the Park’s Seed Catalog. No one ever told me that housewifely things required so much walking around. Vacuuming and dusting and cooking, who cares! If I were eighty, I could eat dill pickles for breakfast.

Growing older and imperfect makes you feel like you’re also growing invisible. I could walk into a bank in broad daylight, rob it and no one but the security camera could describe me. I hate feeling invisible. Even worse is being noticed and treated like my brain is operating on only two of eight its cylinders. “Here’s your change, dear. Can you find your car in the parking lot?” Elvis may have left the building, but I still have all the bats in my belfry. Thank you, very much.

Our concept of age is a curious thing. For many months after Don turned fifty, he had a glorious time telling everyone he was sixty so that he could then hear them say, “You look so young for your age!” It was a joke he played on waitresses, to ask them for their senior citizen discounts only to be turned down while feeding his ego. Then one day we went to a state park and when attendant in the booth told him it would be $10.00 to go to the beach. Don replied, “Does that included the senior’s discount?” thinking he’d get this young girl to pay him a compliment. But she didn’t. She looked him straight in the eye and said, “Sorry. That will be $5.00 then.” Don got an expression on his face like a young cat that just caught his first mouse and he didn’t know quite what to do with it. It was the last time he ever asked for a senior discount.

What is it that William Faulkner said? “The past is not dead. It is not even past.” What did he mean? That we cannot escape our past? It’s true, you know. Our lessons learned and favorite pranks are always with us, tucked away like souvenirs carefully glued down in scrapbooks. I’m telling this to all the young people I know so that one day when they visit me, old and sitting in a wheelchair, they won’t assume that the smile on my face is from passing gas. The smile, I want them to know, could be because I'm playing in my memory garden and dreaming of the days before I started wearing flesh colored gaiters.

Jean Riva ©

Painting: Egon Schiele

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