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?
1 comment:
Yeah, they are. Definitely. I'm 46 and so not quite there, but I often feel on the older edge of the blogging world. What I've found though is that in the blogosphere there really is no age. We're all just words and pictures on a screen. And as I age in real life and also feel faced with what has not been done and what may never be done, it's nice to hang out in a place where age sort of falls away and I move easily outside the demographics of my physical self.
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