Arnold G. York
Thoughts on aging
You know you’re getting old when:
€ You can remember when all new automobiles came with factory-made seat covers, and when TV came along it was new and everyone piled into a tiny apartment to watch Milton Berle on Tuesday night.
€ You walk into a very fancy, hip new hotel and all the lobby furniture is covered with ill-fitting slipcovers that look suspiciously like the stuff grandma used to put on her furniture in Brownsville.
€ All the new restaurants seem too noisy and you walk into a Starbucks ask them to turn down the music.
€ You begin to wonder if the generations that came after you were all born congenitally deaf or whether Sony produced the Walkman so they ultimately could go into the much more profitable business of manufacturing hearing aids.
€ You pine for the nice, dark old-fashioned restaurants with red booths and wooden floors like the Fox and Hounds on Wilshire and Cheerio’s in Santa Monica.
€ You wonder whether anyone deep down can tell the difference in all these expensive designer waters.
€ You wonder why Malibu, of which 7.3 percent of the population is of Italian heritage, has 73 percent of its restaurants serving Italian food.
€ You wonder whether the citizens of Malibu suffer from chronic dehydration, which is why they all seem to be carrying water bottles.
€ You’re shocked that euro is going to cost you $1.41 and is supposedly headed for $1.80, and you wonder when it all began to go downhill.
€ You can actually remember when the Japanese Yen was 350 to the dollar and we used to buzz around Tokyo in 70-yen cabs, which were affectionately known as Kamikaze cabs.
€ You’re astounded that anyone would eat raw fish and you remember when no one in the United States had ever heard the word “sushi.”
€ Europe was actually a bargain for Americans and you went there because it was fun and cheap, even if the French were snotty.
€ You can’t remember anymore who is alive and who is dead, and then you run into some “B” actor in Ralph’s who you thought died 10 years ago.
€ Blade Runner is celebrating its 25-year anniversary
€ You accidentally stumble onto a reality show and you’re sure that some of the younger actors must be replicants.
€ It makes less and less sense why some people continue to believe so strongly in the following: Evolution and a belief in God are incompatible or that Charles Darwin is a left-wing plot; being totally against abortion and then refuse to support any program that would enable women to keep their children, like child care, or parental assistance; be so bothered by a couple who loves each other, wants to live together and take care of each other, and wants to be married, because the couple happens to be gay; a president who is actually thinking of vetoing a child health care insurance bill because it’s too expensive and a step toward socialized medicine, when at the same time Congress just authorized another $150 billion for the war in Iraq.
€ You mention Vietnam and some of the kids look at you as if you were talking about the War of 1812, which they never heard of either.
€ You lived through enough cycles, like stock market cycles, weather cycles, real estate cycles and special “can’t miss” diet cycles, and you know most of it is a lot of bull and that things go up and down (except your weight), and there is little you or any politician or stock market guru can do about it.
€ Every conversation with someone you haven’t seen for a while begins with two 10-minute exchanges of medical updates.
€ That the 10 pounds you were going to lose 25 years ago has now turned into 35 pounds, and as you look around at your friends it’s pretty much the same with all of them, except the athletes.
They, of course, all look great except that all their joints are collapsing and there’s a lot of conversation about hip replacements and new knees.
(And when I smugly tell them that no one ever wore out their knees sitting on the couch watching television, I don’t mention that I’ve actually got a little arthritis in my thumb, which Karen is convinced comes from constantly changing channels with the TV clicker. She says that I’ve got the chronic TV clicker syndrome, but women just don’t understand that there is nothing wrong with watching six TV shows simultaneously. I guess it’s kind of a guy thing.)
€ It hasn’t happened yet but it’s only a matter of time of time before we’re talking about the nutritional value of various types of “Ensure” and the dependability of different brands of “Depends.”