This year I turn 72.
Pat and I have decided to create a new club we are calling the “AYA” Club. It is a group for those of us who rarely go through a day without hearing someone say, “At Your Age”. My doctor says it. My dentist says it. My eye doctor says it. The server at the restaurant says it when I ask if there are onions on the salad. The guy at the grocery story offering to carry my bag with two loaves of bread in it says it. It would actually be easier to give you a list of those who do NOT say it because it is much shorter list. One example is the conversation with my doc about my back. His comment was: “Well, normally, we would do another fusion that would help for ten years or so, but at your age….”
That ranks right up there with the number of receptionists, secretaries, clerks, and others who now call me “Sweetie”, and “Hun”. Makes me want to reach out and slap them up the side of their head. I haven’t yet found the right term to call them in response, but I will find it.
I check the morning news and read that a growing number of people are convinced that I have now reached the point that I cannot be trusted to fill a role that involves critical decision-making. I am too “Old” to think clearly enough to understand things. I am just waiting for the email telling me that the van will be here tomorrow morning to take me to the iceberg they have prepared to set me adrift like in the “old” days.
Please understand. I don’t mind being 72. But that is just one small piece of who I am. It defines how many trips I’ve made around the sun, but says nothing at all about who I am or what I am capable of.
In fact, there are some really nice benefits of being 72. If I don’t want to do something, I can just blame it on my back, or my neck, or my knee, or most any other body part, and no one questions it whatsoever. I can go to bed at 8:00 pm if I want to, and everyone just smiles that “AYA” smile. If someone is talking about something I don’t care about whatsoever, I can just tune them out and blame it on a “Senior moment”. And then there are those “Senior Discounts”. Yes, there are some nice things about “AYA”.
But 72 is a part of what I am, it is not WHO I am. You are welcome to have your expectations of what it means for me to be 72 years “OLD”, but one of those expectations had better not be that I am going to be like that.
Sweetie.