The Senior Take-Out

The other day, while I was waiting for my Thai food take-out, I picked up a free local newspaper called “The Prime Time for Seniors.” It is an earnest, thick paper (32 pages), that proclaims itself to be “Colorado’s Information Source for the 50-Plus Population Since 1986.” My pot stickers were taking a few moments, so I leafed through it. I was amazed by what I saw, particularly by their definition of market share. Quite apart from the fact that somebody thinks they can make money off over-fifty group, by their defintion, Hilary Clinton is a senior citizen and Barrack Obama, like john F. Kennedy among the youngest of presidential candidates, will be a senior in five years. I was forced to envision a giant vaccum cleaner sucking more and more people into a dust bag labeled “senior” so they can be sold things to.

Sid, ever the rational thinker, isn’t bothered much by this—he’s always gone his own way and done what he wants. He started climbing world-class mountains around the world in his sixties and only gave them up (reluctantly) when he injured himself back country skiing. I’m not so sanguine. I can’t help being bothered on a matter of principle. I hate being labeled and I hate even more having people make assumptions about the label they have applied to me—particularly when it is to make themselves money.

A look through the newspaper itself is fascinating: the kinds of activities singled out for praise include volunteering, foster grand parenting, something called “continued independence,” vision loss, respite care, keeping active, senior housing, adult day care, keeping active, diabetes, and arthritis. For fifty year olds?

I remember myself at fifty. I was assistant to the president of a $300 million a year university. I worked with the state governor’s office, with the media, with legislators, with the state attorney’s office, with faculty and community groups. I was a senior? I was interested in nursing homes? In hearing aids and motorized wheel chairs? Pulleeze, I was trying to keep my boss out of the newspapers, trying to placate the regents, and working with whatever new venture the president had come up with along with writing his speeches.

In recognition that I was just being my usual churlish self, I went back through the newspaper looking for something I could relate to. Where were the people like me who start getting published in their sixties? Who start new and successful businesses? Who run for office? Who hold full-time jobs? Who, like Senator Edward Kennedy, continue to serve their country? I couldn’t find them. I guess they just aren’t the people you can sell things to.

I delicately dumped the paper in the recycle bin, but the aftertaste lingers. I am still astounded at the way that everyone over fifty suddenly gets vaccuumed into that dust bag of decay that implies that those aged fifty are merely in the ante-room of Alzheimers and physical collapse. Maybe some of us are. But a lot of the pictures in that newspaper were of people who looked in their eighties or more, doing things like playing beanbag baseball.

I don’t know why I feel so annoyed over being lumped in with a group that has an age spread of forty years, from fifty to the further reaches of human survival. All I know is that it does annoy me. I have no control over what people think when they hear the word “senior.” But what’s worst to me is that I have no control over who gets labeled that way.

Excuse me while I imagine Senator Kennedy and Senator Clinton playing beanbag baseball in a league of retirement homes.