When I leveled up a few years ago and achieved the vaunted half century of birthdays, our mailbox soon flooded with mailers from the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and the National Council on the Aging (NCOA).
My assumption was my birthday was in a marketing database and as soon as I crossed the eligibility threshold, someone released the deluge of senior citizen mailers. OK. Ha Ha. Very funny. I could brush these off easily and send them straight to recycling.
But then the mailer trolls escalated. Our mailbox was now crammed with full color, multi-page portfolios from every senior assisted living center in our region. Now I was annoyed and yelled to no one in particular as I flipped through the latest batch, "Bloody hell! I'm not a decrepit invalid! Why are they sending me... Oh. Wait. This place has a kayak launch?!" I may have saved that one for future reference.
I was resigned to being targeted via snail-mail, email, text, and phone from organizations hawking services for "very mature" adults. Fine. It's just a local annoyance that I could tolerate. I soon learned that I must have unknowingly been casting a constant area of effect spell around myself announcing I'm on the backside of fifty wherever I went.
Andrea and I were on the road down south when we stopped in at a restaurant for dinner. It was standard, run of the mill fare. Service was good, and the place was neither a hole in the wall nor were they gunning for a Michelin star. We paid our check, tipped our waiter, and were on our way.
I did notice we paid less than what I was expecting, so in the car I reviewed our check. There, emblazoned and literally burned onto thermal receipt paper were the fateful words: "Senior Citizen Discount Applied".
Being blessed with Filipino genes, I was accustomed to comments saying I looked younger than my true age, so this antithetical statement threw me for a loop. Did my Asian-bestowed voodoo of perpetual youthful appearance dissipate? Do I now appear older than my age? I was torn. Do I go back in and have the cashier correct her slander?
Then I remembered those times back from my childhood when a theater attendant sold 10-year-old me tickets for the 8-year-old price. I just shook my head, "Wow. Cosmic karma is one grim, unrelenting SOB."
A few weeks later, in a totally different region of the country, Andrea and I pulled over in a small town in Pennsylvania for lunch. The teenaged hostess smiled as we approached, "Is it just the two of you?" I nodded and replied, "Yep."
"Great! Follow me!"
She then gathered up a pair of menus, wheeled sharply, took a step, and then...she paused. I, of course, wasn't expecting her to break her stride and almost plowed into her. After a moment, she took another step and paused once more. I had now come to a full stop and watched her slow progression towards our seats. She never looked back at us and seemingly assumed we were in step with her strange, processional dirge.
I turned to Andrea, put one hand on my hip, with the other, pointed my thumb towards our hostess, and silently mouthed, "What the hell?!" Andrea was barely stifling a snorting laugh and was no help.
An exceptionally long time later, we were seated at our booth. I took a deep breath and leaned across the table towards Andrea. "OK. What. Was. That. About?!" Andrea enlightened me.
"Look around you, Wayne." It was then I noticed we were by far the youngest patrons in a room full of octogenarians apparently taking advantage of the lunch time specials. "You should be impressed with their customer service! They're accommodating their customers' needs!"
Sure enough. I watched folks slowly rise from their seats and do the slow shuffle to the food bar.
So, yes, their customer service was above and beyond, but my takeaway was, "Lawd, have mercy. If I look like an 80-year old, I really need to hit the gym."
Is the universe telling me I'm getting older? If so, my knee jerk response is, "Pfft. No shit."
My measured response is, "You needn't have bothered with junk mail and age-perception challenged service staff." Every few months a new and novel pain will dramatically announce itself in some joint, muscle, or nerve cluster and give me that message loud and clear."
Is the message instead, "You should slow down."? I'm not likely to heed that one, either. A close friend has said, "Make whatever you do today count. You're trading a day of your life for it." It seems that living life at any speed other than "to the fullest" is a terrible waste.
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