Getting Old Is an Accomplishment To Brag About!

Are You Buying That?

Is your hammock sagging?

Getting old is, in itself, an accomplishment to brag about. It's the one thing for sure that the young - cocky (in multiple ways), self-absorbed, certain that they are the cat's meow - can't be certain they'll outdo us old farts at.

Young Whippersnappers, I say to you, Sure, you may leap out of bed in the morning as though you have springs in your knees, not just in the broken down box spring beneath the sagging mattress that is no help at all as I struggle to get up; and you may have it all over me when it comes to that cocky thing; and you still may have (may have) decades and decades ahead to fritter away doing vapid, brain-dead things like screwing around and partying – while I sit in the back room telling everyone I’m meditating, when, in fact, I’m sitting there because it just takes too much effort to get up, not to mention the pain involved, for anything that isn’t a life necessity (like scooping ice cream) or a bodily function.

You may have thick, wavy hair and skin so wrinkle free that Bernini, had he seen it, would have put down his mallet and chisel in despair, knowing he could never outdo it even in his marble miracles – but I have wisdom – and still some  hair, though grey. Through the ages, cultures have prized that wisdom as more precious than gold. You may have a butt that’s high&tight, while mine hangs down loosely like a tattered hammock left out in the elements through a cold, hard winter, but …

Oh, Randy, give it up. You’re old and they’re young and not even you are buying all this wisdom-of-age crap. And besides, you’ve looked in the mirror at that pendulous butt. Just give it up!

To quote that classic Fried Green Tomatoes line of Kathy Bates, now a person of considerable maturity herself: “Face it girls. I’m older and I have more insurance.” Take that, Whippersnappers!

Still not impressed? You’re a hard nut to crack, though don’t pooh-pooh the insurance. God knows you’ll be grateful if you have it when you’re my age, considering the rate at which the parts start failing on the old clunker by then.

At least I can take some comfort in knowing that Artificial Intelligence will not be replacing my job. How could AI, or anyone, possibly replace old, grey retired guys? And putting that wisdom of age into practice, I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear you mutter, in that smug tone you have, “Why would they?”

Oh, I remember the days when I was young and cocky - though never assuredly so - mostly with bravado (is it usually thus for most?). A fat kid who grew out of his fat by 20 – but who could believe that would last, after the taunts of childhood? (The fat has since come back, and more.) And NOT a jock - some might even have been heard to whisper "sissy" in my direction if one listened closely. So my cocky was never confident, but for a few years it was there.

It had to be if one had any hope of succeeding in the gay bars and discos of the 70s, even in St. Louis, which is where I discoed then. The drinks and drugs helped – for a while. And the natural glow of youth, though all too soon that fades, and the drinks and drugs can’t do the trick alone.

Recently, looking at old photos of myself, I came across one from maybe 1975 or 6. My hair is brown, my face is smooth and my ass is tight and small enough to fit in a coach seat on a plane. (Yes, I know the seats were wider then, but still …) I’m standing tall and smiling, wearing a yellow Lacoste and white painter’s pants – I thought it was a fetching look back then – and my waist isn’t much more than 30 inches.  “Thank you for that,” I say to the pack of cigs in my hand.

Sometime in the 1970s; cigarettes; 30-inch waist - those were the days!

Shouldn’t someone have told me that those days and that waist wouldn’t last forever?  Are the callow young just supposed to know such things?  I’m blaming Fat Alfred, the banker, long retired even then, and now, no doubt, long dead.  He knew, but he didn’t let on.  He could have mentored me toward graceful aging – or maybe not so graceful, as memories of Alfred come more clearly into focus – but at least not left me to find my way there on my own.  But he didn’t.  He just sat there on his bar stool sipping drinks, sometimes buying rounds, undressing, with his rheumy-eyed stare, the cocky young guys who wandered into what all (including Alfred) called derisively the “wrinkle room.”

Youth, even my own, is so wasted on the young, even young me.

“Oh, for the long-gone days of cute, young and thin,” as a Facebook friend commented recently when I posted that photo of young me on Facebook.  I had to post it, of course.  Why else had Fate drawn me to it after all these years, if not to post?

And then my Facebook friend followed up his comment with this bumbling after thought: “But we need to remember that even the old, fat and ugly have their charms.”  Those may not have been his exact words, but that’s the way I read it.  A bold (and failed) attempt to pull his virtual foot out of his social media mouth, but I wasn’t fooled about what he was really thinking.

Forget that social media is destroying our democracy.  Even worse is what it’s doing to our egos.  Not only are all our current friends sharing richer, fuller lives than ours (with much better sex described, implied or understood); but even our own young selves, when we are egocentric and foolish enough to post them, out do us in the comments competition.

That thin young guy in the photo couldn’t have imagined the tired old eyes looking at him 50 years on.  Or maybe he could have imagined them.  After all, he was well aware of Fat Alfred the banker, just about 50 years his elder when the photo was snapped, who leered from his regular corner barstool at all the young guys – even the ones who were only  semi-cute, and slightly zoftig.

What the photo youngster couldn’t have imagined was that the tired old eyes would one day be his own. As a young man, I couldn’t have imagined that, as an old man, even I would be fat and grey. 

But no matter how old and grey I grow, I refuse to be selfish like Fat Alfred.  The very next thin, tight, hot, hung, swaggering young stud I see, I’m telling him: “Don’t be so smug.  You’ll be old, fat and grey too, one day, if you live long enough. I’m old myself, in case you hadn’t noticed, and I’m proud of it.”

Do you think, maybe, he’ll thank me for enlightening him? Maybe? Or do I already have a pretty good idea how he’ll respond? With a muttered, “I’d noticed.”