You know, you can be operating in full-scale denial mode and still pick up on things pertaining to precisely what you’re ignoring. For example, I’m noticing a whole subculture in terminology that hadn’t resonated with me until just recently. Today in the AARP Bulletin {Hey! The smug grin was uncalled for – the rag was in the mail, who can fathom how or why!} this sentence jumped off the page at me – “People think of ‘elderly’ as this gray plane, as if [older people] are all the same and shouldn’t be seen.” Wow, cold, dude.
So we have da’ yooths, who so far as we know all think and behave alike, and then ya’ got yer generic interchangeable old farts, which why are they even allowed off the grounds on their own? In the middle we have The World of Everybody Else, a world which neither youth nor old-fartism is expected, nor particularly welcomed, to grasp. Nothing personal, most likely, in most cases, just a perception – one that’s always existed and probably always will unless future technology gives us ways to read each other’s thoughts and feelings. People in the know are pretty sure the young and the old are not part of their ranks, a perception that clearly cheats the world to an astounding degree.
I had two remarkable grandmothers who were as different from each other as chalk and cheese, and each of them managed to get across to me the reality that we stay who we are on the inside all our lives while our bodies go to shit around us. One grandma, forever young, accomplished that by example, the other through stories. One night in her 80s, that grandma dreamed she was nineteen again and danced all night in a long flowing skirt and a sparkling-white Maidenform bra. Advertising in the psyche, man, but it was clear how real it all still was in the light of day. Her disappointment that it was only a dream was palpable even to a self-absorbed cheerleader-head, but the gut-punch was when she said “It was so wonderful – my body was as young as the real ME again!” That one stuck.
You can’t convince some folks that people under 18 are, indeed, people, and you can’t break the idea that after a certain age we’re all disposable. But you can try.
Playing for Time 
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