Over the Hill or Just Under the Weather?

With all the recent advances in medical technology, we’re going to be living longer than ever. Great. This means we’ll have twice as many cranky old people to deal with. Don’t get me wrong, I have the greatest respect for the elderly, in fact I think they are one of this country’s most underutilized resources, but boy, they’re not half grumpy sometimes.

My husband just turned 50. Now I realize that 50 is hardly geriatric, but lets face it, it’s one foot in the social security line and the other on a banana peel. And he’s already in practice for waving his cane at the neighborhood kids and yelling, “Get the hell off my lawn, ya dern varmints!”

Out of fear of his impending sulk, I respected his request to not throw an extravagant surprise party complete with full mariachi and a roast. Instead, to celebrate this milestone, we drove around the neighborhood at 20 miles per hour with the left turn signal on. It would have been a perfect night out for him, had it not been Halloween weekend and the local police had not chosen our street to set up their semi-annual sobriety checkpoint. I was driving, so I slowed the car and rolled down my window ready to convince the officer that we were clean and sober. We had both had a glass of wine with dinner some five hours earlier, before seeing Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and then going grocery shopping – another wild Saturday night out. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. They took one look at my husband’s salt and pepper hair and waved us on. In hindsight, perhaps it wasn’t the hair that convinced them that we were of little threat to anyone’s safety. Perhaps it was the beaten, downtrodden, “Oh, shit, I’m almost dead” look my husband has adopted since he reached the half-century mark. Since his birthday, my beloved has developed the following symptoms: delicate stomach, chronic headache, tingling in two fingers of his left hand, insomnia and general muscle and joint pain. He also appears to have shrunk be at least an inch and a half. Psychosomatic? Surely not!

As if he wasn’t feeling sorry enough for himself, he received a very real reminder of his continued demise--a letter from the AARP. This wasn’t his first--the AARP marketing dept are way ahead of the game—but this one offered him a free desktop calculator with big color-coded buttons “so you don’t punch in a wrong number and mess up your checkbook!” He tossed the letter on the kitchen floor and stomped on it, thus reducing his mental age by a factor of 10.

Needless to say, he was feeling pretty down in the dumps about the whole thing. To cheer him up, I pointed out that in only five more birthdays we would be able to eat at Denny’s for half the price. For some strange reason, he wasn’t amused.