As a kid I didn’t pay much attention to my grandma’s confusing warning and later when I was a smart alecky teenager and my parents gave me the same command, I’d just smile and ask politely, “How can I do that?”
By then I was convinced most adults are worry warts. They kept repeating the same impractical advice as they rubbed their aching joints and said goodbye to their youthful vim, vigor and figures: “DON’T GROW OLD!”
There wasn’t much room between youth and old age back then. “Life Begins at Forty”, a radio program, was based on the accepted idea that people needed encouragement to keep going when reaching 39. Comedian Jack Benny held on to that border age for more than two decades and we all enjoyed and encouraged his stubborn refusal to move on.
The Lawrence Welk TV show had a sponsor who claimed its completely organic product, Serutan (” Natures”spelled backwards) would relieve at least one of the problems of viewers over 35.)
Apparently, back then, the common belief was when we neared the top of the “hill” at 39, we’d soon be sliding down the other side of life’s mountain. I agree, the two-sided hill is a much better idea than a hill that leads to a dangerously high cliff.
Sometimes humor can get us through seniority easier than vitamins and Advil. Comedian George Burns, who lived to be 100, once boasted when he was born, the Dead Sea was only slightly ill and Milton Berle (“Uncle Milty”on early TV) who joked for us into his 90’s, claimed the miracle drug of his youth was mercurochrome.
When my little grandkids asked about my Air Force career I said I’d enlisted before the airplane was invented, so we didn’t have much else to do but wait around. It was a joke of course, but they bought it and, to this day, they must think I’m 70 years older than I actually am . Some days I feel that old.
Maybe we’ll never get to be officially old. Some experts now claim that life begins at 80. Perhaps that works for turtles, but I was very busy during my first 79 years. Was that just my breaking-in period?
Imagine That 