What's So Funny? Getting Old
In our society getting old is funny. The very act of continuing to live on makes you a laughingstock until you become an object of pity.
Go to any grocery store or pharmacy or any other place they sell birthday cards and it’s all about sagging breasts and wrinkles and all the other slights and insults. Those jokes about forgetting things, little doggerels about excess weight and higher stairs, I suppose they keep you from taking yourself so seriously. I mean nobody else does, so why should we?
Your personal ad starts to say, must enjoy making soup and going to church, watching Law and Order. The antique stores that used to carry a breadbox your grandmother owned and later your mother’s little white chicken-shaped candy holders? Suddenly you’re looking for replacement mixing bowls there. Your cooking pots date back to the Kennedy administration for example.
What else is so funny about it? All those doddering elderly moves that they used to do on Laugh-In. (Remember Laugh-In?) You know why old people move like that? Because we’re in pain--oh yes, I forgot: pain is funny. And what else is funny? You find yourself sitting in a circle of old women knitting shawls discussing bursitis and toes that don’t work--and finding it fascinating.
Well at least one doesn’t have to worry about not being beautiful any more because one has been invisible for quite some time. I often think I’d make a great spy.
Go to any grocery store or pharmacy or any other place they sell birthday cards and it’s all about sagging breasts and wrinkles and all the other slights and insults. Those jokes about forgetting things, little doggerels about excess weight and higher stairs, I suppose they keep you from taking yourself so seriously. I mean nobody else does, so why should we?
Your personal ad starts to say, must enjoy making soup and going to church, watching Law and Order. The antique stores that used to carry a breadbox your grandmother owned and later your mother’s little white chicken-shaped candy holders? Suddenly you’re looking for replacement mixing bowls there. Your cooking pots date back to the Kennedy administration for example.
What else is so funny about it? All those doddering elderly moves that they used to do on Laugh-In. (Remember Laugh-In?) You know why old people move like that? Because we’re in pain--oh yes, I forgot: pain is funny. And what else is funny? You find yourself sitting in a circle of old women knitting shawls discussing bursitis and toes that don’t work--and finding it fascinating.
Well at least one doesn’t have to worry about not being beautiful any more because one has been invisible for quite some time. I often think I’d make a great spy.
posted by Pat at 9:26 AM
2 Comments:
Uh-oh, I think I share much of your sense of the world, and I haven't hit 50 yet. Is middle-aged the new old?
50 is so young, you still think you can "beat it"--old age I mean.
Pru
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