BABY BOOMER ALERT: YOU’RE OLD AND YOU CAN’T HIDE IT ANYMORE

A question for readers in the baby boomer demographic: when did you realize you can’t hide your age?

Was it when you first made a skin tent on the back of your hand?

The first dark spot that looked just like the one you remember on your grandma’s arm?

When you noticed something going on under your eyes the first time?

Or all of the above?

The real question is how far do you want to go to hide the evidence of aging? More cream, more hair dye, more hydration, more vegetables and exercise?

Caring for yourself isn’t some kind of fetish, or is it? Look into a bathroom drawer. How many tubes of goo, bottles of hydrogen peroxide, extra cartons of Q-tips?

Most important is the number of mirrors in the bathroom. One on the wall in front of the sink? One on an arm screwed into the side wall, a couple of hand mirrors?

Does the view change in any of them? Not unless you have the mirror that answers the question ‘Who’s the fairest of them all?’

The baby boomer panic on aging sends a ripple effect of disgust to younger generations and laughs for older folks.

Talk to a much older person about your aches and pains and see what they say. It’s usually something like “getting older isn’t for sissies.”

Do the same with the youngers and they act like you could be contagious, like a sore shoulder is going to jump their way, like they might get high blood pressure from standing too close to you, or gout from wearing your sandals.

The look you get from the youths isn’t so much disregard for you because you’re old. Their look means you’re not old enough to pity. See, a large swath of baby boomers haven’t packed it in and gone passive, accepting what ever is put in front of them.

That’s frightening to people used to seeing their elders cruising out their lives in neutral. No rocking chair and a blanket to watch the world pass by is a scary thing compared to pushing the boundaries of age.

In a world of ‘I can’t do that because it hurts,’ baby boomers still try. At least they try more than their parents and grandparents. Too many outsiders don’t understand the stress we lived under with parents from the super star generations before us.

As if all we had to do was accept the good fortunate of being born in a particular time of wealth and bounty. Hey man, making choices was hard when there were so many and they all looked good.

Were baby boomers nothing more than a birth bulge brought on by horny GI’s coming back from the Pacific and Europe? Of course we were. Then what?

Who was ready for the job of raising kids after raising hell and saving the world from the demented ideas of WWII? No matter what you hear, no one is ready for being a parent the first time.

And yet we’re working it all out together. Time for a group hug? Too soon? Let us know when you’re ready. In the meantime, bad baby boomer will get back to destroying more of the world and laughing about it like it wasn’t their fault.

The rest of us will be picking up the pieces and looking for glue.