How Not To Talk To A Senior
I just turned 70 and, apparently, if I died now it wouldn’t be too soon. That’s not meant as a putative friend might say, “She didn’t die a moment too soon,” but as the seemingly universal opinion that dying as early as mid-sixty is not a life short-changed. That’s old age and that’s what old people do. They die, they watch TV, they shuffle around the block in the morning dragging their old dogs. And if you run into them on their walk, remember: the only two topics of conversation are the weather and their little rat terrier.
I realized I was considered old when people started calling me “dear” — doctors, neighbors, cashiers, librarians (though, I’m sorry, they’re all women who look older than me). And along with the “dear” came greatly scaled-down conversations. It was the same thing every day and multiple times a day: “Think we’ll get more rain?” and “How old is your dog?” The forecast question was usually followed by the stale adage, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.” Not because they’d forgotten they said it just the day before but because they thought I would forget.
I remember once reading a short story about a man so bored by his luncheon companion that he fell asleep face first in his soup. You can take only so much. When and why did this start? Don’t these people realize I’m of the Woodstock Generation? Though I didn’t make it to the festival because my friends and I spent all our money — $15 — on the one in Atlantic City two weeks before. And drugs. But we still saw Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane and the Mothers of Invention. Care to talk about Janis? That was the heyday of grass and hash, and acid safe enough to drop. Which we did every Friday, as soon as our campus-cafeteria jobs ended so we wouldn’t waste a minute of our weekend. It’s a wonder I made the Dean’s List. Or earned a degree. And moved to Boulder before it was Boulder, before the Pearl Street Mall.
Or we could talk about the Vietnam War protests on the University of Colorado campus, or encircling Rocky Flats, or washing clothes alongside Allen Ginsberg at the laundromat near my house. My sister and I heard Gloria Steinem speak at CSU not long after she launched Ms. magazine and saw Angela Davis at Loretto Heights College after her release from prison. We were the only Caucasians in the audience and had our purses confiscated but then cordially returned when (we guessed) no weapons were uncovered.
Half of the 70s and part of the 80s I spent at a left-wing daily where the staff brought their dogs to work and my toddler slept in the office during the long overnight shifts. We were midway into pasting up the paper one night when an editor broke the news that John Lennon had just been shot. I tore apart the front page and rebuilt it with the new lead as we took Little Feat off the back shop stereo and played “Imagine” into the morning. I was at The Denver Post the day Columbine happened and it stayed on the front page for months, the beginning of mass-shooting stories.
After a large-scale downsizing at the Post I had to start over in my fifties, leaving behind a three-decade-long career.
But the old are resilient. Take my little terrier. We’ve trekked a thousand trails together and still hike every afternoon. She was fast enough once to catch a chipmunk though I always tried to distract her. But she’s snagged only five in 15 years so it wasn’t exactly genocide. On one hike she was the prey, when she wandered off-trail and a trio of coyotes attacked. They fled when I crashed through the trees louder than a mother bear but her wounds soaked us both as I raced uphill to the car, imagining a heart attack and a murder-suicide headline.
We survived, her stitches healed and she doesn’t think twice about chasing rabbits though she does weigh the effort for squirrels. She’s learned they’ll just scale the nearest tree. But that’s not infirm, that’s pragmatic. With age comes wisdom.
So the next time you’re tempted to talk about the weather — wait a minute. Then, don’t.
