In a recent BuzzFeed post, people shared their “Oh no, I’m old” moments and the results, as you would expect, were very hilarious/revealing/depressing. The worst one was the 42-year-old man who broke his hip in his sleep. Then he broke it again while doing the PT to heal and had to get hip replacement surgery. If you’re age 70 and over, allow me to remind you he is only 42.
My age realization is when you are filling out personal information online and get to the drop-down menu for the year you were born. Watching the years fly by as you scroll ever deeper down in order to reach your birth year is discouraging.
Another 42-year-old stated that he knew he was old when he watched a music award show and had no idea who any of the nominees were. Dua Lipa had him stumped but I’ve seen photos of her on Instagram and I would say if you’ve seen only one photo of her in concert, you would not forget the name.
One poster vividly remembered Y2K. Then he realized that the year 2000 was closer to the year 1979 than 2023. I remember that many normally intelligent people thought the world as we knew it was going to end. Not.
Someone posted that he AND his father have noticed that they recognize more of the celebrities who died than the ones currently on the red carpet.
Then there was someone who admitted that they had a long and interesting conversation with someone in the grocery store – about mops. Probably not embarrassed about it either.
An obstetric nurse realized she helped to deliver one of her co-workers. That’s almost as bad as overhearing the person in line in front of you give their birthdate as 2006.
One contributor shared that he has thrown out his back getting something out of the refrigerator. And emptying the dishwasher. And sneezing. And removing the dog’s leash.
The topper would have to be the poster who said he went to his high school reunion and was gobsmacked that there were a whole bunch of old people there.
That’s a feeling that any of us can get when we’re in an airport gate waiting area or a doctors office waiting room. Guess we better get used to it and maybe take a long look in the mirror.
Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. You can also visit his author page here. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.
A few weeks ago, I got wind of an art exhibition for veterans in my county. I debated whether to apply, partly because I’m not sure critics would view my stuff as “real art.” Anyway, I did apply for the exhibit, which is in May. They accepted me, but then I was miserable for a month worrying and fretting about how others might react to my embellished wood scraps.
Sixty-nine years old is a line of demarcation for me. In 1999, my mother, a widow, was sixty-nine years old when she eloped and moved from Western Massachusetts to Cape Cod with her new husband Ted, himself a widower. A new life with this new start.
How many times have you read that a large percentage of baby boomers (as in more than 20 per cent) have exactly zero savings for retirement? I know I’ve seen that figure quoted in numerous articles. So, it may come as a surprise that, according to Fortune magazine, the average boomer has a worth of $1.2 million! That means a large chunk, perhaps 80 per cent of boomers, have been socking away the savings for retirement and to pass along to their offspring.
When you were a kid did you ever do the thing, “I think I hear my mother calling”? It was a useful gambit when some bullies were threatening or a neighbor asked for help weeding her garden or a girl gave me the fish eye after a perfectly good joke. Well, I discovered a variation on the theme, the other day, when a guy at the retirement home tried downloading his sad family story. At first, I was polite and he took it as interest (or maybe he didn’t really care if I was interested…just needed to ventilate) as he recounted the sibling rivalry with a sister four states away. We all need to listen to others as we would have them listen unto us. So, I listened. Then he got onto his mother and then his brother. By then I had stopped nodding and ‘uh-huhing.’ I mean, there are professional people who get paid to listen to these kinds of tales-of-woe.
It’s a warm and humid summer afternoon and they have the field to themselves. The mother is short and trending toward curves and folds, but still close enough to her softball prime to have a strong arm, and she does a little O-yah, arm-pumping victory shuffle around the mound when she slips a good one past her swing-away daughter. The daughter, tall and lanky, all straight lines and right angles, returns the favor when she drills one of her mother’s pitches up the crease into deep right-center, or lofts a big, floating, full-moon of a shot over the left field fence.
