It is time for the 2018-2019 school year to begin. It recently occurred to me that I graduated high school in 1979. This means that it has been forty years since I started my senior year of high school. It makes me ask the question, “How did I go from being a senior in high school to being a senior citizen?” I know I am not the first person to ask this. Everyone ages, and we all have to figure out how we handle it.
I found my first gray hair when I was nineteen. Obviously, I went prematurely gray, but I have to ask, “When is one maturely gray?” When can I stop coloring my hair and not look older than I am? I have asked more than one hairdresser, and they all said to wait at least until I am sixty.
I try not to be an annoying senior citizen. It wasn’t until this year that I realized I qualify for a ten percent discount at the grocery store on the first Wednesday of every month. The first couple of times I went, I found myself asking the clerk, reminding the clerk, harassing the clerk to make sure I got the discount. I have forced myself to quietly watch for the discount to show up on the screen instead.
I try to have discussions about things other than my or my friend’s health issues. I’m breaking my own rule when I tell you that I try to stay healthy. Despite arthritis, I keep moving, and although I love to eat anything with carbs and sugar, I attempt to limit my intake. I am fighting the battle not to wear old-lady clothes despite wearing sensible shoes because of my bad feet. I look for the benefits of old age. I learned not to just look for AAA discounts, but for AARP ones as well.
I would like to “grow old gracefully,” as they say. My dad used to tell the story of speaking with an elderly woman he saw sitting on a porch smoking a pipe. She told him, “If you lives long enough, you gonna get old. If you don’t get old, you don’t lives long enough.” He always said that getting old was better than the alternative. I can live with that.