Age not an indicator of sense
As I finished my fettuccine Alfredo at a restaurant last week, a waitress no more than 25 years old paused at my table long enough to say, “I see you’ve eaten everything. Good for you.”
Yours truly is 69 years old. I evidently look like an old coot, or at least old enough to be talked to as if I were a 3-year-old.
Given her tone of voice, it wouldn’t have been surprising had she said, “Now it’s time for your nap, but maybe you should first try to go to the potty.”
I chuckled awkwardly before the waitress moved on. When she returned with the check, I paid with cash. It’s a wonder she didn’t offer to count it out for me.
To say the waitress was annoying is an understatement. She undoubtedly felt she was being pleasant to a guy well past his prime. I said nothing to dissuade her. Saying something probably would not have helped.
Life is what it is.
There’s a TV commercial I view with both amusement and alarm in which a 50-something actress plays a 60-something retiree. She says, “I’ve got a nice long life ahead of me.”
Lady, if you are 65 now, you have 10-15 years ahead of you. Get real.
As you might sense, old age, or growing old, has flummoxed me. I feel like I have one foot in middle age while the other foot is you know where.
“Help me, I’ve fallen.” Well, get up and quit complaining.
I prefer to be at the YMCA at half past seven in the morning. Recently, however, I’ve been sleeping in. As much as I want to douse the lights earlier, I inevitably turn in at two in the morning. And then I occasionally lay there for an hour, an hour-and-a-half. No wonder I’m not out of the house by 7:25.
I think all of it is a sign of old age.
From the ridiculously shallow to the sober reality of our two most recent highly-publicized shootings: the one at the ballpark outside Washington where Rep. Steve Scalise was grievously wounded; the other in Las Vegas where scores were killed and hundreds injured by a nut job perched in a hotel window scattering his victims to kingdom come.
In both cases, the shooters were north of 60. Scalise was shot by a 66-year-old. The Las Vegas shooter, Stephen Paddock, was 64.
John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald were both in their 20s. Dylann Roof, who killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina., in June 2015, was 23. The sick puppy who murdered all those first-graders in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2013 was 20. The 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech in which 32 died and 17 were wounded was perpetrated by a 23-year-old.
You get the picture. Sure, a number of these type murderers are older men — mostly 40-somethings. More, though, are in their twenties. None have been 60 or better. Until now.
Most men by 60 are content to leave well enough alone. Some have mellowed; some have gotten a bit wiser, their emotions no longer on hair-trigger. Frequently, men past 60 simply lack the energy to stir themselves into action.
Maybe Paddock was loony. Maybe he was evil incarnate. Maybe there was some ideological basis for his actions. We shall see. Or not.
Back to the ridiculous, to the ludicrous. In other words, back to our 71-year-old president. Donald Trump visited Puerto Rico the other day ostensibly to inspect hurricane damage. He ended up tossing paper towels to victims.
Henceforth, Donald Trump, president of the United States, commander in chief of the armed forces, should be known as Tossing-Towel Trump.
It reminded me of the time I spent at a Pittsburgh soup kitchen during which some moron pitched old clothing from a balcony into a crowd of a dozen or so poor people.
Such patronizing, condescending conduct I never thought I would see again. But here was Trump the towel tosser in Puerto Rico acting like an 18th-century monarch raining crumbs on the heads of peasants.
That kind of behavior gets old mighty quick.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.