D  e  s  e  r  t     E  x  p  o  s  u  r  e     May 2005

Old Before My Time

Premature aging and the agony of the dreaded AARP card.

I wasn't supposed to have to write this column for another year. Pretty much every columnist in America who has attained, shall we say, a certain age has written about his or her version of this horrific personal experience. Heck, Dave Barry has probably regurgitated it four or five times.

But not me. Not yet. Not until 2006—or so I thought.

Then it came in the mail. The envelope. Hands trembling, stack of mail clutched to my chest against the whipping spring winds trying to carry off to Tyrone this week's edition of Entertainment Weekly and three or four requests for money addressed to my late mother, I staggered to the house. Risking a brutal paper cut, I raggedly tore the envelope open. There it was, a red-and-white rectangle of plasticized paper affixed to the bottom of a "personalized" letter:

My AARP card.

The horror! The horror!

A cry at the injustice of it all ripped from my lips: "But I'm only 49!"

I knew this day would come when I turned 50. Somehow, the AARP (the initials used to stand for "American Association of Retired Persons," but now the acronym stands on its own) tracks down everyone in America at the cusp of those "golden years" and sends a temporary membership card the instant you're eligible. But that's age 50—not, for heaven's sake, age 49, when the vitality of youth still courses through your veins! (OK, I don't know about your veins, but my 49-year-old veins at least.) The difference between 49 and 50 is, well, like the difference between 29 and 30! I'm still in my prime! Next birthday, sure, maybe I'll collapse into my dotage and start leaning on a cane, wistfully recalling walking through a blizzard five miles to school every day. But that's next year!

I don't know what the AARP is up to, but I'm not the only one to be hit with premature membership. A friend of mine had the same soul-shattering experience recently when she turned 49. Perhaps the battle against President Bush's Social Security privatization plan has turned so dire that the AARP needs to start edging deeper into the Baby Boomer pool. Pretty soon, even Generation Xers will be getting offers to "register for access to these 22 AARP benefits today." Then the AARP registrar, or whoever it is who keeps track of membership rules, will start looking the other way as 22-year-olds get sucked into the ravening maw of "elderly" eligibility.

Before you know it, we'll all be old before our time.

Understand, please, that I'm not someone who's worried unduly about advancing years. I didn't have a midlife crisis about turning 40 (plenty of other causes for crises in my 40s, but not age per se). When I turned 30, I didn't fear that nobody younger would trust me anymore.

I have only the usual vanity about my aging appearance. After a mercifully brief fling with Grecian Formula and other such goop, I learned to live with graying hair (I blame my dad, whom I never remember having anything but gray hair). At least, I figure, I still have hair. (I also weigh roughly the same as I did in high school—so take that! you balding, pot-bellied ex-jocks! Who's laughing now? Bwah-ha-ha!) When the gray in my beard of many years started to outnumber the brown, I shaved it off lest I begin to look like Burl Ives—albeit, please note, a svelte Burl Ives. And I confess to eyeing the new moisturizers and other "age-defying" elixirs now aimed at men, but have not yet succumbed. Wrinkles look good on a guy, right? (Hey, Robert Redford still looks pretty dang good for a fella whose face has more creases than a topographic map of Colorado.)

But that doesn't mean I'm in any hurry to turn 50 and join the AARP or to start bankrupting my unborn grandchildren by collecting Social Security. (Nor, if my daughter is reading this, am I in a rush to have those imaginary grandchildren, even if it would be a good idea for them to start earning money now and paying their lawn-mowing wages into the Social Security Trust Fund for us oldsters.)

All in good time, as the Wicked Witch of the West once said, all in good time. The sand will run out of that hourglass soon enough.

Still, the premature arrival of my AARP card has caused me to ponder the good things about growing older—and I don't just mean those 22 exclusive member benefits. For one thing, I no longer have to worry about what I'll be when I grow up. I think I must be finally there. I worry a lot less about padding my resume these days, too; it's way too long as it is.

Even that whole vanity thing gets put into perspective. I'm almost 50 years old—by the AARP's warped calendar, I'm there—so how good do I have to look any more? Whom am I trying to impress? While I'll still try to control any random drooling and hair growing out of my ears, I think I can safely give up on trying to look like a candidate for People magazine's list of the world's hunkiest guys. Not that any such resemblance was ever a possibility, but at least now I can admit it! I'm almost 50, folks: What you see is what you get, and it's all downhill from here. Just be thankful there's no problem with incontinence. (By next year, though, I'm not making any guarantees.)

On the other hand, aging has inspired me to pay a little more attention to my health. The bright side of not being able to eat everything any more means that you don't eat everything any more. Fewer fried foods, more fruits and vegetables. Less red meat, more fish. I painstakingly examine cereal boxes in search of the maximum allotment of whole grains. (Indeed, I'm considering eating the boxes instead to really bulk up on fiber.)

I'm even reaching the point where the commercials on the nightly news are aimed at my age group. That 5:30-6 p.m. bloc is the only time when TV advertisers target anyone who remembers that Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings (or who remembers Wings, for that matter). Evidently everyone who cares about what's going on in the world enough to tune in to the evening news is falling apart. If you believe Madison Avenue, TV news viewers—presumably all proud owners of AARP cards—have lost control of their bodies below the waist. Either they need diapers or Viagra or (and this is quite a mental picture) both.

It's nice to have Madison Avenue care about me for a change, though it scares me a little that I'm starting to pay attention to these commercials. Just in case....

So what am I going to do about my premature AARP invitation? Having recovered from my initial shock and horror—and after drowning my sorrows in a 30-something-ish bout with fried foods and ribeye—I admit that I'm seriously considering accepting. For a mere $12.50 a year I can grease my way into my golden years and join that group so feared by politicians. I can stand up and be counted in the fight to get what's coming—and then some, oh unborn grandkids—to me and my fellow gray-hairs. I can finally make somebody listen about those 10-mile walks through a blizzard to school—or was it 15 miles? I can probably even stop worrying about ear hair and just let it all hang out.

They might not take me, of course. Technically, the membership requirement is 50, not 49 and counting. And the actual application form (the card I received, I'm coming to realize, is just a temporary stand-in for the real thing) does ask for the AARP wannabe's birth date. The AARP honchos may just rip up my application and cackle, "Wait till next year, youngster," then go back to their rocking chairs and watching the nightly news.

That's OK, too—I can wait. One more year to enjoy my riotous, raucous youth. (Boy, do I have some fast catching up to do....) One more shot at People magazine's "Hunkiest Beefcakes on the Planet" list. One more year in my 40s! Heck, I might start goop-ifying my hair and regrow my beard. I'd definitely take that box of adult diapers back to the megamart.

Besides, if the AARP makes me wait and doesn't send me The Card for keeps until next year, I can wring another column out of it 12 months from now. With Dave Barry on sabbatical, somebody's got to do it.

David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure. He's only 49, dammit.

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