July 2005

    It happened a few weeks ago and let me tell you, it was devastating. It was a Wednesday afternoon and I stopped by the Publix in Fayetteville to pick up a few items. When my turn came at the checkout counter, the cashier smiled at me and said cheerfully, “Hello! You get the senior discount today!” She didn’t say, “Do you qualify for the senior discount?” She didn’t say, “By the way, today is Wednesday — senior discount day — and I thought I would mention it in case you knew someone who might qualify.” She didn’t say, “Of course you don’t look at all like you would qualify for the senior discount — not for another ten years, at least — but store policy mandates that I ask everyone on Wednesday if they do qualify, even someone who looks really young like you.” She didn’t say any of those things. What she said was: “You get the senior discount today.” In other words, “Hey, pops, that gray hair and those lines in your face are a dead giveaway. You’re getting up there, a little long in the tooth, rather ripe. There’s no doubt about it — the senior discount is yours!”
    So there’s no denying it any longer. Oh, I could attempt to maintain my self-delusion by continuing to throw away unopened those unsolicited mail-outs from AARP, but what’s the point? When a cashier at Publix identifies you without a moment’s hesitation as a senior citizen, the game’s up.
    And since I can no longer deny the truth that age sixty is but a few months away and I am well into seniorhood, I thought I’d better do a little research to see what this getting older business is all about. So I consulted my favorite author over the years, a card-carrying member of AARP for sometime now.
    The first thing he says is that the assessment of many others is accurate: getting older is not for sissies. He writes that for him, “it’s like living in a home that’s in increasing need of repair. The plumbing doesn’t work right any more. There are bats in the attic. Cracked and dusty, the windows are hard to see through, and there’s a lot of creaking and groaning in bad weather. The exterior could use a new coat of paint. And so on.” The odd thing is, he says, the person living in the home may feel much as always. The body may feel a bit precarious but the spirit within is as full of beans as ever.
    The next thing the author says has to do with second childhood. He comments that usually second childhood is seen to be something to steer clear of, but it can also be something else. “It can mean,” he writes, “that if your spirit is more or less intact, one of the benefits of being an old crock is that you can enjoy again the benefits of something what it’s like being a young squirt.”
    Now one thing young squirts — young children — do is laugh and play a lot. If entering your second childhood means doing that again, then I’m all for it! We can spend much of our lives so dead serious about everything that for the most part we are dead — dead to joy and delight, love and laughter and play. Oddly enough, maybe one of the benefits of growing older is coming alive again.
    The author points out something else about very young children and very old children. “The pleasure of being a child the first time around is that you don’t have to prove yourself yet; part of the pleasure of being a child the second time around is that you don’t have to prove yourself any longer. You can be who you are and say what you feel, and let the chips fall where they may.” I think I like that part, too. We spend so much of our lives trying to be what everybody else wants us to be that we forget who we are. We spend so much of our time not saying what we feel that we forget what we do feel. Finally being yourself sounds good to me.
    And there’s one other thing. “Very young children and very old children,” the author writes, “also seem to be in touch with something the rest of the pack has lost track of. There’s something bright and still about them, like the sun before breakfast.” Both the young and old get scared about what lies ahead, and with good reason, yet there is also something within that you get the feeling will see them through to the end.
    Actually, the more I read about the growing older business, the more I think there’s something to be learned no matter what age we are. Something about playfulness and delight and joy, something about being yourself, something about getting in touch again with what we often lose track of in all our jockeying for position and trying to get ahead.
    Jesus himself recommended becoming a child again. He said it had an awful lot to do with salvation and becoming a human being in the best sense of that word — becoming the person God created us to be.
    So the next time I’m in Publix on a Wednesday afternoon, I think I’ll walk up to the cashier and smile and say “Hello! Give me the senior discount today!” Kind of like a young squirt would ask for something.

 

God be with you,

Jeff

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