Posts Tagged ‘age’

I turn 40 this year. I was joking with my friend Dave (who passed that milestone last year) today and mentioned I was just waiting to see which part would drop off. We made some crude speculations along those lines and laughed about it. A few hours later I bent to open a bag of dog food and got some nice stabbing back pains that settled into a steady ache, which hasn't gone away yet. Usually my rhetorical questions don't get answered quite so quickly… Before the medically-minded mention it, this is not an age-related thing. Lower back pain is a common ailment, especially for people like me with lifelong bad posture who spend the vast bulk of their lives riding a desk. I just enjoyed the irony. I'm off to take a nice 4-in-the-morning walk around the woods and a hot shower, just thought I'd bitch a bit. Ow. Ow. Ow.

As the old year winds down and the new one begins, I think back over the seasonal ritual that does the most to remind me of my own frail and limited mortal shell. Shopping at the mall.

Not the act of shopping itself, of course. I consider that exercise, with benefits.

No, I mean the experience of going to the mall and encountering the packs of roaming teenagers who seem to live there — possibly becoming feral — who look at me the same way they might regard a diseased water buffalo who wandered into Spencer Gifts.

"Who's that geezer," they say with their sneers, clearly expecting me to drop dead and disintegrate, vampire style, any minute. "Isn't there an age limit? How did he get into our mall?"

Not all of them stare. Some just ignore me outright, the way they would any other handicapped person. A few of the more polite teens even ask if I'm lost and need mall security.

As the movie "Mallrats" explained, "They're not there to shop. They're not there to work. They're just there."

It wouldn't be as much of a problem if my wife and I would stick to the accepted old folks shops, like Sears, Walgreen's, or the place that sells soft-side mattresses. But my tastes are as strange now as they ever were and so I find myself jockeying for aisle room with the disaffected youth of today, arguing over the same Simpsons toys. The fact that I was a disaffected youth 20 years ago makes no difference.

Kids in Hot Topic (and that includes the sales help) stare openly at me as I dally amongst the aisles of gothic fashion and T-shirts that the word "retro" have rendered cool, even though wearing the exact same shirts labeled me as a hopeless geek when I wore them in 1982. The bookstores are pretty safe. The teens congregate near the magazine racks but I can easily distract them by dropping a copy of Blender and ducking past while they scramble to see what color Pink's hair is this week.

Teens in the record stores — and yes, I still call them "record stores" — smile condescendingly upon me when I hobble in. My tastes are pretty eclectic, but I'm still easily identifiable as old-fashioned since I'm actually paying for my music instead of just cruising for ideas for songs to download.

Neutral areas such as bathrooms are usually OK but the food court is a no-man's land of age warfare where wearing your pants over your hips can condemn you to the bleak coventry of the middle tables. Families huddle together against the various cliques that occupy large territories in front of China Max and Miami Subs, discussing how many tattoos are too many (answer: no more than will actually fit on your actual body) and proper piercing placement.

If you're shopping with a teen, you quickly learn to separate immediately upon entering the mall and give no sign that you were ever together, lest he or she be shunned by the tribe and get forced to hover around the edges, living from day to day on whatever leftover trends they can scavenge.

I've found that the best way to handle shopping at the mall is the same way I'd handle visiting a hostile foreign country, or falling out of the car at Lion Country Safari. Act confident, walk briskly, and throw handfuls of money at anything that frightens you. And get your shots before you go.

And above all, I keep one shining thought in my mind, one happy realization that makes all the unspoken abuse worthwhile.

They're getting older every day…