Backhanded compliments get old fast

It might not be the last thing you want to hear while helplessly supine, open-mouthed and drooling, but it’s surely in the top 10.

“Good job.”

That’s what the dental assistant kept telling me while I was getting a crown placed on a cracked tooth the other day.

With the rubber dam splayed over my mouth like an octopus condom (do not even try to visualize said state of affairs), my only viable reply was to drool a little more out the side and down my neck.

But from her lively conversation with the dentist, I drew two undeniable conclusions: a) her parents are younger than my children, and b) I am an old poop who will never be reconciled to dental assistants with more tattoos on their arms than Popeye.

Being spoken to as if you are a child is one of the infantilizing signposts of aging.

And like most things in life, it kind of sneaks up on you. No one sits you down and says, “Congratulations, you’ve reached the age where strangers will begin addressing you as if you’ve just mastered the use of a spoon.”

Instead, you start to notice little things.

The woman at the pharmacy hands you your prescription and says, “There we go, hon!” in the same tone she’d use when returning a preschooler’s lost mitten from a snowbank.

A cashier asks if you found everything OK, but speaks so loudly that people three aisles over turn around, wondering if someone has just been rescued from a well.

Then there is what I call the Encouragement Economy.

“Perfect!”

“Excellent!”

“Ah! Wonderful!”

These are the things people say when I successfully sign a credit card receipt.

Not forge one. Sign one. With my real name and everything. Always draws an appreciative crowd.

I recently bought a bag of birdseed and, after managing to insert my debit card into the machine unaided, was rewarded with a cheerful, “Look at you!”

Look at me doing what? Participating in commerce?

I half expected a sticker. Came to me in the parking lot that I should have asked for my change in coppers. You know. For the gum machine next to the cigar store Indian.

The strangest part is that everyone means well. No one is trying to be insulting. If anything, they’re attempting kindness.

Trouble is, kindness delivered in the wrong tone can sound remarkably similar to the way you speak to a golden retriever who has finally dropped the dead squirrel.

“Yes! That’s it! Good boy! Who’s a good boy?”

My favourite version occurs at airports.

Young gate agents have a special voice reserved for older travellers. It is warm, patient and one step removed from someone explaining shapes to toddlers.

“And where are we headed today?”

Eternity, I think. Unless we’re pretending to be a choo-choo conductor.

When they hand me back my boarding pass, there is often an expression suggesting they are proud of me for having retained the concept of flight.

You made it all the way through security! You kept track of your shoes! Missed only a couple of loops while putting your belt back on. Outstanding! Might want to pull that fly all the way back up.

I want to say, “For your information, I piloted Submarine Spitfires during the Battle of Britain before your parents had tricycle licences.”

Instead, I smile and shuffle forward, because apparently that’s what my character does now. And also because they’d think the Battle of Britain has something to do with a spat between Dua Lipa and Harry Styles. They don’t know Agincourt from Adele.

My daughter and her husband have noticed this phenomenon as well. Whenever we go out together, younger service workers frequently direct complicated questions to them.

“Would he like fries with that?”

He would. He would also like you to stop discussing him as if he were a rescue dog from Costa Rica.

The irony is that people spend the first half of life being told they are too young to know anything and the second half being treated as though they have forgotten everything.

Somewhere around 70, society quietly decides that every task is either heroic or suspicious.

If you climb a ladder to clean your own gutter, you’re inspiring. Clear a neighbour’s sidewalk after a snowfall and you’re a great humanitarian.

If you buy concert tickets online (to that Gerry and the Pacemakers tribute band you’ve been hankering to see, say, with the hot Lulu lookalike as the opening act), you’re a wizard. But how do you thank someone who has taken you from perfume to crayons? It isn’t easy, but I’ll die.

If you know how to connect Bluetooth headphones, you stand an excellent chance of being written up in a medical journal.

Another expression of this discouraging encouraging arose a few weeks ago when a young woman watched me navigate a touchscreen kiosk. After I’d completed the transaction all by myself, she beamed and said, “See? That wasn’t so hard.”

It was like being congratulated for locating the moon in the night sky. I thanked her, because what else do you do?

The truth is that one day, if we’re lucky, we’ll all arrive at that peculiar age where complete strangers express amazement that we’re X “years young” — a truly heinous expression — and applaud our ability to remain upright.

Truth be told, I’ve already been there.

My wife has Parkinson’s and the last two years we’ve marched (well, swayed) along downtown streets in the Parkinson’s fundraiser held each year in British Columbia’s capital before the Victoria Day Parade. Both times, eager parade-goers vying for choice curb space cheered our progress.

Last month, we perfected the highly stylized “hoity-toity toff acknowledges adoring hoi polloi by polishing an imaginary airborne lightbulb” gesture used by the Royal Family to avoid straining their wrists during tedious but compulsory appearances before the awed rabble.

Still, there is one consolation.

Whether one interprets the actions or comments of younger people as deliberately patronizing or condescending, inadvertently belittling or coddling, or carelessly demeaning or overprotective, you don’t have to submit to the attendant disempowerment without the occasional triumph.

Just before he got to me, I heard my dentist loudly explaining to a patient in the next pod that although the filling he had just done for her should last five or 10 years, a crown would be a wiser way to go in the long term. (I presume she was hard of hearing but he might simply have been making an assumption.)

After she finished giggling, she said: “Dear, I’m 89 years old. For me, long term means getting out of bed and going for lunch.”

I just hope that when I’m 89 and successfully remove my own sweater, someone at least has the decency to give me a juice box.

(Wait, what? We haven’t had to sign credit card receipts for decades? That might account for some of the interest in my penmanship evinced by smiling passersby. Any idea where I hid that wad of Thomas Cook traveller’s cheques?)