Old age sucks

I wish I could write that old age is a mountain of fun but then I would lie. It all depends on your and your friends’ sense of humor. Can you look at your life and laugh about it? How silly can you be? How much can you enjoy the patchwork bag of memories that is yours alone?

A good friend and I had lunch at a new mall that I wanted to explore. We met at the concierge — her idea — at almost the right time. I was almost precisely on time but there was a human traffic knot a few feet away so she got there first. We ate then stopped by a store of maternity dresses. I wanted to have a look because with our stomachs, I said, we could certainly get away with maternity dresses. “How much?” I asked. “P4,538” (or something like that) the salesman said. “Nope, too expensive for me,” I said.

“Why are you so expensive?” my friend wanted to know.

“Rent is probably too high,” I answered, then thanked him, smiled and walked away. 

Younger people may think nothing of spending that much money on a dress, but when you’re 72? Every time I buy a dozen eggs, I sigh. I remember when I was newly married, which was only 54 years ago, a dozen eggs were P1.80 and they came in only one size. Now you have organic, natural, small, medium and large eggs, brown and white eggs, even eggs with two yolks. I mean, how much variety is that? Do you need so much variety in things as simple as eggs?

 We had to stop by a bookstore so she could buy one of those sharp-cutting knives. She was going to use it to rip apart something. Maybe the seam of a dress or something like that. At our age we don’t discuss things very precisely anymore. She was looking for the right knife. Suddenly she asked me, “Do you remember when we used blades?” 

“Yes, I do,” I nodded, thinking what I would give to find a box of razor blades like the ones we used before. Men used them for shaving. They would pop one into an old razor, lather their chins with shaving cream and shave. When the blade got dull they would throw it away. We would rescue them and use them for our sewing needs or to shave our eyebrows into shape or to shave our legs and armpits if we were too lazy to pluck. Now where do you find those blades? We are in the age of disposable razors.

 As we waited at the counter, she turned to me and said, “Old age sucks.” We both burst into loud laughter. Because, yes, it does. There I was standing in the middle of a bookstore dressed in my exercise clothes because I came from The Sunshine Place, a senior’s center, where I did my Yeba dance class, meaning dancing to Pilipino disco music while she came from a visit to her ophthalmologist to have her eyelashes that have been giving her trouble lately checked. She has glaucoma, you see, and the eye drops for that disease are famous for making your eyelashes grow longer but you don’t know in what direction or whether you will have multiple layers of eyelashes or what. So you go to the doctor to consult. Once upon a time you just went for a pair of glasses, or colored contact lenses. Now you are older and your visits are much more complicated.

The Sunshine Place is an ideal place for seniors because they have all sorts of classes and hobbies. They have a huge, extremely successful painting class taught by Fidel Sarmiento, an outstanding painter and karaoke singer. One of his outstanding students, in my opinion, is Conchitina Sevilla Bernardo. Conchitina and I have known each other forever. The painting classes are on one end of the big room and on the other end are the writing classes that I teach. So one Saturday afternoon I admired Conchitina’s beautiful painting. 

 “You know,” she says, “when they gave me a pacemaker I thought I was dead. Then I discovered this place and the painting classes and now I am still very much alive.” 

“You must have so many beautiful paintings by now,” I said.

“Yes, I give them to my children for their houses. I don’t know where to put them anymore,” she laughs. “Look at us, we’re like teenagers in this place,” she says. We laugh out loud together.

That should make a good column, I say, and since then I have been thinking...

 Old age does suck when you think in terms of pains, operations, pacemakers, but no matter what age you’re in, parts of you are alive, full of laughter, brimming with memories of your youth, and often feeling happily alive like teenagers still. Old age is not a mountain of fun. It’s more like the Chocolate Hills of joy and good times.

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