I love this woman’s attitude. Well, sort of. She made me laugh. She also made me wonder about old, and old age, and elderly and what counts.
“Late, late, late middle-aged” definitely made me laugh.
And it got us talking in the blog group.
Alison wrote, “What’s wrong with “elderly”? Or “old”? When I let my grey hair grow in, my mother objected, “It makes me feel old.” Mom, you’re 90. You ARE old.”
Cate added, “I also don’t mind being called old. I think 60 is sort of cusp-y where there is no longer any doubt that oldness is on the horizon, although I think I personally feel like “old” will land on me when the first CPP cheque lands in the mail. But I was happy to take the seniors discount on the French train. Old is permission for so many things, to me.”
I’ve been thinking about aging too lately. Sometimes people ask me if I’m still working and I confess to being taken aback. Of course, I’m still working. I have no intention of retiring anytime soon. (Good thing too! I’m trying not to look at my pension funds in light of Trump-induced stock market crashes.) But lots of people my age (60) are retiring. It’s a perfectly normal age to retire, even though my plan (all going well) is closer to 70.
I also see groups of older people and then I wonder, are they my age? Do I look like that? What’s “like that” even mean though? Sometimes, it’s “old lady hair.” Or “old lady clothes.” But that’s not about age really. Probably I didn’t like their hairstyles and clothes and wouldn’t have chosen them for myself when they were 30 or 40.
I guess it also feels funny to suddenly be in the same age group as my mum. She’s in her early 80s. I’m in my early 60s. But we’re both, for lots of purposes, seniors. We can both get the high-test flu vaccine now. We can take seniors’ aquafit together. (We don’t but that’s another story. I’d like to!)
So I guess like the 73-year-old in the reel above, I don’t think I’m old. I think I’m late middle-aged. But not yet late, late, late middle-aged. 🙂
That’s not young but it’s not elderly either. Maybe 80 will feel old.
But maybe I’m just not sure what it is to feel a particular age. I felt like a very old young person when I was young and now I feel like a very young older person. Maybe I’ve just always felt like me.
Speaking of feeling like me, this might be me in a seniors’ fitness class.