Volume 1, Issue 3 & 4 - Diverse Voices Quarterly

THE AGE OF ANTIQUITY
Diverse Voices Quarterly, Vol. 1, Issue 3 & 4 86
by
Gary R. Hoffman
I was born at an early age, but the first thing you should probably know about
me right now is that I am an old fart. I realize there are several other names for people
my age—senior citizens, silver boomers, just plain old people, over-the-hillers, living
antiques—but I am partial to my own descriptive moniker. I am plodding steadily
toward having the number seven as the first digit in my age. (Sixty-nine is now an
adjective telling how many years old I am. It used to be a verb, conjuring up an
explosion of erotic thoughts.) Strangely, it seems like just a few months ago that the
first number was a two or three.
Hitting five-oh was a biggie for me, not because it was half a century, but
because of a dream I used to have: I would never live to be fifty years old! On the night
before my fiftieth birthday, I decided to stay up all night. I knew I was born at 5:15
a.m., so I would stay up until then just to see what would happen. Later I decided that
was a really dumb idea. If you are going to die, why not be asleep and not know it?
(I’ve decided if I have chest pains anytime soon, I’m going to try and go to
sleep—quickly!) Sometimes, wisdom really does come with age.
A real classy perk of growing older is that you haven’t expired. Waking up on the
right side of the grass each morning is a real bonus in anyone’s life. The older you get,
the bigger the bonus becomes. The main disadvantage of all of this is putting up with
the damned symptoms that come with getting older. My body simply will not function
in the manner I have grown accustomed to accepting. It’s an old story, but parts really
do ache where I didn’t know I even had parts. And other parts have simply worn out
while I continue to live. A line from a recent movie said it best about people from my
era: “Never pass a bathroom, never waste a hard-on, and never trust a fart.”
There you have it! A statement about three things that affect us in life, and two
out of the three involve bathroom habits! You know a person is old when they discuss
BMs more than orgasms. If you asked many older folks to define sex, they would
say—“What?” Then, “Oh, yeah. I remember that.” And yes, o thee of the younger
generation, at one time I said that would never happen to me. But it did, and God, in
His infinite wisdom, gave us little blue pills.
Which leads us to the next subject about growing older: The world is basically
created for young people. “Ha!” you say doubtingly. Well, undoubt, and look at the ads
on television. This medium is supposed to be a reflection of our lives. (That
statement’s scary as hell, isn’t it?) How many times do you see an old man, struggling
with a cane, trying to get out of a new car, while Mama sits in a seat beside him,
trying to remember if she put her glasses in her purse when they are really on top of
her head? (And she can’t find her purse, anyway.) See any senior citizen dancing along
a beach, unless some voice-over announcer is telling us that this pill is good for 36