Old age comes a-knockin’ and Grandpa answers the call

It starts simply enough. For me, it was a single piece of mail, an invitation from an organization called AARP. I couldn’t understand, however, what they could possibly want from a guy like me. I presumed this must be the same group that had filled the mailbox of my parents in their later years. Although nothing in the literature included words to decode the acronym, they couldn’t fool me.

“The American Association of Retired Persons has come a-knockin’,” I said to my wife Kristin as I waved the red and white letter across the room. “They’ve obviously mistaken me for a man twice my age.”

“And five times your mental age,” she said. “Did I do the math right? Five times 13?”

The letter was only the beginning. Before long I was falling asleep within minutes of hitting my recliner, talking back to the TV newsman and scolding the neighbor kids for leaving their bicycles out on the sidewalk. One time I even caught myself putting sandals on over the top of socks.

Seemingly overnight, I had turned the corner toward becoming an old man. This was apparently not such a surprise to those around me.

“Have you not noticed your shaggy eyebrows and how the hair has migrated from the top of your head to the inside of your ears?”

Apparently, one does not need to get close enough to notice tiny and insignificant, as far as I am concerned, grooming details to make judgments on the rapid approach of my dotage.

Just the other day, I shared an awkward moment across the checkout counter with a store clerk who quite cheerfully asked, “Any discounts today?”

With equal and innocent cheer, I asked, “Well, I don’t know. How about you tell me?”

The clerk paused, turned a little red in the face and said, “Well, I’m not supposed to ask, but … you are older than 60, right?”

“What could possibly make you think that?” I laughed. “Your faux pas is safe with me — just as long as the discount is large enough.”

One of the most affirming acknowledgments of my ascent into the realm of the elderly came from the mouth of my very own granddaughter. At 20 months old, she’s pointing and naming everything in sight and making startling observations on everything from chipmunks at the bird feeder to stars in the sky.

As Sadie sat on my lap at a joint birthday party for her two older brothers, she was calling out notable figures and random colors from a table full of Star Wars-themed stickers that lay in front of us.

“Robot, princess, yellow,” she said. Then she picked up a sticker of the character Obi-Wan Kenobi, perhaps the oldest-looking human character in the entire franchise — white beard, tired eyes, wiry eyebrows and, if you look closely enough, hair coming out of his ears. Then this innocent tot, currently my favorite human on the planet, turned to me and said, “This Papa!”

If Sadie sees me as an old man, then an old man I am.

Kristin and John Lorson would love to hear from you. Write Drawing Laughter, P.O. Box 170, Fredericksburg, OH 44627, or email John at jlorson@alonovus.com.