My 89-year-old mother talks about how she’s getting old. And then, she and I were walking around CVS and she was talking about her housekeeper’s 102-year-old mother, saying, “Trish’s mother is getting old.”
I asked, “You’re 89. Trish’s mother is 102. When does getting old end and being old begin?”
There certainly are. Good point. I’ve know people like your in-laws. So useless so early. So sad for them.
A positive attitude certainly helps. As do good genes and good mental and physical habits.
My larger point was that eventually that positive attitude can shade into wishful thinking that then shades into outright fantasy. And at that last transition, what has stood you in good stead all those decades is now an active liability. Perhaps even a fatal one.
Last year I was released from the hospital to spend two weeks in a rehab facility because my legs were no longer working properly. The day after I got there I was wheeled in for what they called “group therapy”, where a bunch of us sat in a circle and did various exercises. I remember thinking as I looked around “why am I here with all these old people?” Then it occurred to me that at 73 I probably qualified as an old person.
Yeah i have a friend who had a stroke that damaged the party of his brain that handles balance. After a lot of rehab and physical therapy, he can walk slowly. But he lives in an assisted living facility because he needs to.
The first one he moved to, when he couldn’t walk at all, was a nice place physically, with good therapy. But it was smallish, and at least half the residents were seriously senile. And he’s very smart. None of the other residents was ever especially smart. He went nuts in that social situation.
He’s finally moved to a huge place, that has a lot of other smart people for him to hang out with. He’s not “just fine”, but he also is fully mentally competent, and spending his days with people who are a lot older than he is, mentally, was not good for him.
Fairly often, my mom will get into a conversation with an elderly person she’s just met, and talk about things like her garden, her farmers’ markets, or her latest international travels. And then the other person will say something about wishing they were still Mom’s age.
At which point, of course, they compare numbers, and it usually turns out that Mom’s at least five years older than the other person.
I find it very irritating that Wikipedia keep updating actors’ photos, so they look absolutely nothing like the person I remember, when I’m checking to see if that semi-familiar name that just popped up in a conversation is who I think it is.
One of the clues for me was when I bought an “oldies” tape and every song on it was younger than I was.
Coming up on three times as many for me. . . .
For me it was five-cent candy bars and twelve-cent Hostess cakes.
Cigarettes and gas. Can’t remember which was which, but when I was six or seven one was 30 cents and the other was 33 cents.
I remember one day on the boat when I was chatting with a kid who had just recently reported on board, and discovered that I was in boot camp when he was born.
In such situations, I do google image searches for “ Young,” or “ 1960s,” or similar, so I can see what they looked like back in the day.
Ouch.
It really hurts when someone 10 years younger than you asks if they want me to have them carry something on the way to a Killer Queen rock concert.
Ouch! That’s tough. @Chronos’ Mom too.
Everyone ages mentally and physically at two different and idiosyncratic rates. Leading eventually to healthy bodies in vacuous minds and vice versa. Yet until they’re basket cases in one aspect or the other they’re all are thrown together in “old fart’s homes” by whatever marketing name.
It’d be nice if we could segregate the mentally and physically infirm.
I think in my mind it’s going to be like Highlander where one day I’m going to wake up in bed next to an old lady whose going to freak out because her husband looks the same age as the day she met him. And of course Queen will be playing on the 24k Mega4D Hologram Projector.
When I’m out driving somewhere and I’m stuck behind some slowpoke I’ll say “Let’s move it, grandpa!” Then I remember that I have great-grandchildren.
Freshly issued MediCare card, and was given a Senior Discount without question at the museum, all within the past month. And really I can see how someone like me may feel like we could raise the official bar.
Good idea. Though of course having to go look for an old photo just adds to the annoyance factor.
For me, it was in 2017, the 40th anniversary of the release of Star Wars.
The movie Star Wars was as old, that year, as Metropolis was when I was born.
I was not alive when films were silent. I was not even around during the golden age. But those times were not remote to me. I knew people who’d lived then. I could name lots of film actors from the silent and the golden age, and had seen most of the important movies from that time.
But those days are as remote to anyone now, as The US Civil War was to me. As remote as constitutional slavery.
I was with co-workers in June and we were talking about the upcoming Semiquincentennial celebrations and I could remember the Bicentennial celebrations. I have co-workers born after 9/11.
I had a moment like this when I realized that the novel Dune was published five years before I was born. Not in some distant past, like I’d always felt. Although I was born in 1970, the world I grew up in was so much more like the 50’s than today. Sure, there were a few PCs in my junior high school. But my culture was still analog. Todays digital world is so different. It makes me feel so old to see how quickly people today have surrendered their personal autonomy to the internet for convenience.
We have some friends visiting from Tokyo and they look old.
But they are 10 years younger than me.
I only look young in my memory.
One of my friends is dating a guy who i assumed was “about my age”. He’s at least ten years younger than i. Another friend has a cousin who i looked at thought, “old and decrepit”. He’s younger than i am.
A lot of my friends are 20 years younger than i am, which makes it too easy to think, “I’m only a little older than that”. But I’m a lot older than that.
It is weird how that works. I have 4 ages. From youngest to oldest:
My selfie age is a bit older than my mirror age, but much younger than my “Somebody else took a picture of me/us” age. Yikes!
But for darn sure, some folks look and largely are functionally old at 50, whereas others are comparatively middle-aged at 70 or even pushing up to 80.
Why are these different ages? I have the same thing. Definitely older in photos. Is it the reverse image thing, i.e. we are so used to seeing ourselves as a flipped image that it somehow makes us look older when we see our true image?