Geezers

The day my granddaughter turned 10, she declared herself “a pre-teen.”

“Gwen,” I responded, “You were BORN a ‘pre-teen.’ Between 13 and 19 you will be a ‘teen.’ At age 20, you will henceforth be a ‘post-teen.’”

What I did not tell her about were all the stages of adulthood, including pre-geezerhood, geezerhood, and post-geezerhood.

We all hope to remember a mostly happy childhood. Sure, there are disappointments, restrictions, enforced naps, and punishment. Parents are the unquestioned authorities, the givers of food, joy, and discipline. As we approach teenhood we inevitably add to the list of complaints that our parents are clearly off the rails, unfair, and just don’t understand anything. This stage usually lasts until somewhere around age 21, when we officially declare our independence and find out what it really means to be responsible for ourselves.

That adulthood that we looked so forward to, when nobody could boss us around anymore, suddenly and unhappily proves to be false. Teachers, bosses, significant others, and then CHILDREN start calling us on the carpet, marring much of our adulthood. Of course, there are benefits, but they are never unfettered. There is so much planning and sacrifice to be done to get to those benefits, except for the benefit of embarrassing our children in public. But let’s skip right over to pre-geezerhood.

I’m pretty sure pre-geezerhood is that period when we are harboring teens in our homes, as indicated above. It’s hard to pinpoint when the phases of our lives transform, in fact, it may be altogether a function of perspective, other people’s perspective. While our children may decide it happened to us around age 45, most of us would place it 20-some years later, somewhere after retirement.

This can be a very rewarding time of life. You have shed the boss, or if you were the boss, you have shed those pesky, unreasonable employees, deadlines, prescribed work hours, imposed regulations, limited vacation time, and hopefully you have no adult children living in your basement by then.

If you planned it carefully and life’s calamities did not derail you, you should be able to enjoy a nice life with little or no mortgage, enough money to enjoy an annual vacation plus visits to your grandchildren, time to garden, take up those long-purloined hobbies, go sailing, what-have-you. Or, if calamities got in the way, you have the opportunity of creating your own Mom & Pop business to supplement your income, which theoretically will provide enough without imprisoning you all over again. Even so, your time off is yours.

You have a vague idea that you have something to offer the upcoming generations and your community with your accumulated talents and wisdom, and you may start to seek ways to share your “gold” by becoming a volunteer or serving on local government.

If you have been favored with an agreeable spouse, you can share hours together without others intruding. Just remember to lock your door because your inlaws like to barge in without invitation or even knocking.

Nonchalantly they ask, “Hey, what y’all doing?”

“Nothing… short of a miracle that is likely to ever happen again!” you respond, the second half being muttered under your breath as they have stopped cold one of those rare and coveted opportunities for “afternoon delight.”

If your spouse is not so agreeable, you can establish your own corners to go to to read or watch your chosen programs, or just be out of earshot of each other. You can each pursue your own interests with your own sets of friends. At any rate, you have as active a life with each other, friends, and community as you care to have, which might be busier than ever!

Full geezerhood may either sneak up on you or happen suddenly. Loss of health or a mate can bring it on. You begin to be aware of personal vulnerabilities. Early signs could be the inability to manage all of the digital devices that your 30-40-some aged children have sent you for Christmas. In fact, half of those presents will age-out in the gift-wrapped box as you cannot figure out how to set them up, or why you should want to.

In the nether regions of your home, your private rooms, that hotbed of iniquity rumbles, shakes, and moans only by virtue of snores and resulting elbows which you each claim belong to the other one. None of this bothers the also snoring Boykin Spaniel and Siamese Cat who are wedged between the two of you.

My observations of male geezerhood are obviously secondhand. But, remember all of that toilet training you did as a young child and how you learned to control your bladder from the time you got on the bus in the morning until you got home at 3:45? Well, forget it. If you are a male geezer, expect to get up to pee anywhere between 3-7 times per night. Oddly, you expect your wife to constantly mop off the walls, toilet rim, and floor because you are not even trying to aim for that water-filled bowl. In fact, I surmise that your eyes are completely closed while you void.

Meanwhile, you have taken up hobbies of saving valuable rusted and nicked things like oyster cans and fishing lures along with intricately carved shorebirds and decoys peppered with buckshot; and you’ve thrilled your wife by placing them around the house where her delicate ivory carvings and cloisonné vases (now missing) had been lovingly displayed.

Your leather belt rides either 3 inches below your armpits or hides invisibly beneath an overhanging stomach. To wear it proudly around your mid-section would call to attention an astonishingly expanded girth.

But you are a loving and kind husband who always tells his wife how beautiful she looks as she trundles down the staircase in her floor-length LL Bean plaid flannel nightgown, hair in haystack disarray around her pillow-face.

She reminds you to put on your glasses.

You share coffee while you solve the problems of the world in your living room.

And then, after about an hour (including lengthy hydro-therapy in the steamy shower) your wife reappears, put together for the day. She can still work something close to magic with all of her lotions and potions and look in the mirror and say, “Not too bad for an old broad.”

I can’t yet describe post-geezerhood because it is in God’s hands.