My friend, Allan, goes to the massage school in Emeryville three times a week for bodywork. To some, this may seem excessive but if you take into consideration that having a trainee-masseuse’s earnest hands work on you for fifty minutes costs only $35, it’s not so bad. The third time I went there myself I noticed a little sign at the check-in desk advising seniors that the cost for them is $30, and a senior is someone ‘55 or older’. As it happened, I had just celebrated my 55th birthday and I was unambiguously thrilled to point this out to the very young trainee-receptionist. The thrill of saving five dollars continued as my masseuse (who looked no older than twelve—how could that be?) showed me to our little curtained-off cubicle, as I disrobed, as I hopped onto the table, as I awkwardly wiggled the top sheet over myself, as I placed my forehead against the paper on the padded head-horseshoe, and even as I scrutinized, through the hole, the nubby rug on the floor for evidence of sloppy vacuuming. But by the time my masseuse returned, it was coming into focus for me that I had, for the first time, been officially recognized as a senior, and I was not feeling so thrilled about that. Instead, after I described which body parts were giving me trouble this week, I started silently subtracting the number fifty-five from what I hoped might be an average American woman’s life expectancy, which I decided, after some back and forth, must be somewhere around ninety. Maybe that was a little high. Maybe eighty-five. Or eighty-eight. If I was very, very lucky. No matter what adjustment I made to the end point, however, there was no way around the fact that I was now well beyond the halfway mark.
Bummer.
Time’s a’ wasting, is what I decided by the end of my fifty minute massage. I still want to go to India. And Vietnam. (Currently out of reach, but still imaginable.) I would like to walk slowly up a dusty evening road to a rented farmhouse in the Italian countryside in the springtime. (Not entirely out of the question.) I would like to easily button my favorite pants—maybe even feel them be a little bit big. (Definitely do-able.) I want to finish writing my book about how it has been to mother and love and adore and admire—my amazingly capable disabled daughter. (Harder, but not impossible.) Also, I want to blog. Are seniors allowed to blog?
