Time Keeps on Slipping, Slipping, Slipping...

I was recently looking at the cover of an entertainment magazine that was depicting some stars of a reality show called High School Reunion. A high school was staging a twenty year reunion and the program focused on how some of its participants (those pictured on the cover) were able to work out their memories and relationships with each other, happy and sad. I looked at the assembled young men and women from the high school that was the subject of this show and said to myself, “I wonder what they look like now after twenty years?” Then I saw, on the cover’s left side, a small inset of the same people in 1989 and realized that this WAS how they looked twenty years later. And suddenly I felt very, very old.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for me to tell what age people are, be they young or old. The other night, I went into a local doughnut shop and got a couple of doughnuts, a decaf coffee, and sat down in their dining area to consume it. After a few minutes, a police officer walked in, asking employees for information about an apparent suspect that they supposedly knew. The officer asked the woman who sold me my doughnuts and coffee for her name and date of birth. This woman, who I had thought was quite elderly, then gave her year of birth as being 1951. She was only five years older than me! And then suddenly, once again, I felt very, very old.

At a steak house restaurant in Ocala with my family a few months ago, an employee there asked me if I wouldn’t like to see the specials being offered there for seniors. And suddenly, well, you know my drift.

I just joined AARP and received my membership card and handbook. And you can take it to the bank that I plan to squeeze every bit of advantage I can get out of my advancing age. Just wait until 55 comes around in a little more than two years!

And if people are coming to the conclusion that I’m that damned old just by looking at me, then I shouldn’t have any paranoid fears about people being frightened by an old geezer like me running down their street at one or two in the morning. Maybe it’s time that I come to peace with the fact that I’m growing older and that it’s a great time to be alive!