Of Lug Nuts and Wheels

My doctor once told me with far too much glee that the wheels started coming off the car at fifty. I don’t dispute the inevitable need for extra tuning and servicing, but I do want to protest that it’s much later than fifty.

Claiming to be aged at fifty it self-indulgent. It’s the rather smug assurance that at fifty the wheels are most definitely not coming off the car. Consider whether there’s any joke in the statement that the wheels start coming off the car at seventy.

In fact, a great deal of talk about the aging process tends to be the vain ruminations of people who don’t think they qualify as seniors. The person who gets upset when the first AARP bulletin arrives in the mailbox is really wondering what list they are on rather than whether they are really “old enough.” They don’t think they are seniors or they wouldn’t be offended. They think of themselves as still being with it. Still active and alive while all those “seniors” are sitting around reflecting on their lives and probably peeing themselves.

What they haven’t realized yet is that being offered a senior discount or an AARP membership is only stage one of the aging process. It is far different from having a senior discount automatically deducted. The offer implies that there is a question. The deduction is a slam dunk. It is also a moral dilemma.

What do you do when you are at the counter and the young thing offers a discount to you and you have more than enough resources to not need any favors from local merchants? “Oh no, I’m not that old yet,” you can say proudly if you aren’t, as if it mattered to the young thing who is actually trying to be kind. But what do you say to the automatic deduction? You can hardly say “Oh please, I’m not that old, I can easily afford this, please add on more money to the bill.” You can’t without making a fuss and a fool of yourself. So you slink away with your ten percent discount. Society, in fact, has just loosened one of the lug nuts on your wheel without even asking you.

But you’re just getting started in the process. Stage two happens when everything that goes wrong with you, from the common cold on through everything more serious somehow becomes tied to the number of years you have been alive. It’s almost a convenient excuse. You broke your leg skateboarding? Obviously, your bones have become weaker through age. You need a tooth crowned? Must be age is weakening your tooth enamel. You need a skin cancer removed? Must be all those years of sun exposure and not the fact that you haven’t used sun block at 11,000 feet at the ski runs. Quite apart from the fact that these things may be true, it’s discouraging to think that age has to be eliminated before other reasons are even considered.

But it’s stage three in the process that you have to look out for. That’s when advertising shows pictures of people your age and suggests strongly that spending thousands of dollars for botox and plastic surgery is justified so that no one needs to look like you. You have now become the bad example. That’s why they show men in the Viagara commercials who look far too young to need any help. They don’t show the countless real seniors who use it. Perhaps they think that no one would believe that seniors are still interested in sex.

What a surprise is waiting for these people.

Bette Davis once said that growing old was not for sissies. True enough. But things look different from the other side of the “senior” divide. Certainly there are seniors who are incapacitated, but so too are some “younger” folk. Not every eighty-year-old is a candidate for a nursing home, although news reports suggest that. Being a senior is a relative term even if my fiftiesh cousin once commented that it was too bad that I had all this experience that nobody wanted. To him and everyone else, I want to say that while the lug nuts may loosen on my car, the wheels aren’t going to come off that easily.