Here Come the 70s

Earl Fowler

Seventy signs that at 70, you’re older than dirt:

• Think DoorDash is making it home just in time with a bursting bladder.

• Can simultaneously read cursive and figure out in your head how much change you’re owed at the supermarket.

• Still call it a supermarket.

• Keep all the elastics that arrive with the daily newspaper in a dish while knowing perfectly well that your kid will make a face while throwing out the clustered, semiliquid globular cluster when you die.

• Willing to pay what is after all a trivial amount for accurate, trustworthy news.

• Read, period.

• When asked by laboratory diagnostic services to provide urine and/or stool samples, save time by handing over your shorts.

• Regularly perform such multitask geezering feats as ironing button-down plaid shirts while watching hockey on TV. (Hold my beer.)

• Nod off between the second and third periods, sometimes scorching shirt arms and collars. This also happens occasionally during power plays by the Seattle Kraken or the Utah Whogivesatoss. Ever notice that there hasn’t been a decent professional sports team name or logo since Stan Mikita packed it in and Indigenous people started complaining about cultural appropriation?

• Have 13 partly scorched button-down plaid shirts older than Farrah Fawcett, nine of which are gathering dust in the closet on standby for when the other four on regular rotation duty finally crumble and turn to dust like mummies at the end of horror movies. Or the crusty underwear you’re wearing right now.

• Take inordinate pride in sneakers so old that they were called sneakers when you bought them. And you’d have several more pairs, too, if your improvident better half hadn’t sneaked them out in a garbage bag between the second and third periods.

• Use archaic terms like “better half.”

• Switch weekly between two pairs of jeans whose frayed bottoms and trendy tears were earned through honest overuse and grim putrefaction (with gusts to fermentation), not purchased that way at a soul-sucking mall for $250.

• Keep one pair of khaki dockers on hand from your working days for formal occasions (might have thin patch and barely noticeable hole in seat from short snooze while ironing). Also a Christmas-themed tie, a talking point at funerals of friends and former colleagues.

• Transfixed and depressed by the stunning decline of the United States of America into a corrupt idiocracy run by the billionaires for the billionaires, find comfort in the old-time religion of the kindly grandfather who left you with such estimable proverbs as “booze in the morning, tulips in the autumn” and “two beatings will cause you harm, not two eatings.”

• Can no longer have sex when drunk out of your mind. Get drunk out of your mind because you can no longer have sex. (Sort of a turkeyneck-and-egg thing. Which came first? Neither.)

• Stick with cable because you can’t figure out how to use the Roku thingamawhatzit that your 11-year-old grandson installed over the holidays. Also, there doesn’t seem to be a slot for the Betamax, which is too bad because you recently found the VHS cassette of Bikini Carwash that the obsequious clerk at Blockbuster Video had always insisted you hadn’t returned. Boy, that Pia Zadora was something else!

• Involuntarily emit sea lion mating barks while trying to get up from a chair and walrus death metal grunts while endeavouring to sit back down. (Not exclusively from your mouth.) What time is Mannix on?

• Are taken aback by the ease with which kids now swear in front of grown-ups. (In our day, it was more fun to whisper imprecations and epithets at the adults behind their backs.)

• Are equally taken aback by the ease with which kids now vape cannabis in front of grown-ups. (In our day, you had to pry open the washroom window at school.)

• (And speaking of our day) still sneak the occasional sip from the garden hose on a hot summer day when no one is watching. Rubbery but oh sooo satisfying. Best accompanied by full sunshine and a freshly pulled carrot.

• Dance like no one is watching, unless someone in the room is a medical professional conversant with the five warning signs of a stroke.

• Rinse out Ziploc bags for reuse (a technique based on the time-tested reusable tea bag model, only in reverse).

• Store lightly used Ziploc bags next to the elastics in a drawer that smells of raisins from the Eighties.

• Can once again visualize your kid’s look of absolute grossed-out revulsion as he cleans out this drawer after your death … and smile.

• In one of life’s greatest post-retirement triumphs, always squeeze an additional week’s worth of toothpaste from a flattened tube.

• Keep a year’s stockpile of toilet paper on hand in case of Apocalypse. As a revered epigram has it, better “on hand” than on hand.

• Are familiar with the words “please”, “thank you” and “excuse me.”

• Occasionally handwrite “thank you” notes.

• Handwrite anything.

• OK, maybe the TV is too damn loud, but that’s because they all mumble on The Weather Network. So get off my back.

• Persist in referring to country music as country and western.

• Have never successfully resolved the eternal question: Hush Puppies or Crocs?

• Also still to be decided when gardening: Do you want to wear gloves … or do you just want to tool around?

• Remain fiercely loyal to tighty whities. Silky froufrou designer underwear can eat your shorts.

• Stick with double spaces after periods because that’s how we learned on manual typewriters. Us and Miss Grundy.

• While hitting the space bar twice, proudly lift your fingers in triumph like Franz Liszt teaching piano performance theatrics to Liberace.

• Still find it hilarious that it never occurred to your mom’s generation that Liberace was gay.

• Choke up sentimentally over mundane memories like that and cheesy lines in movies and songs, which you never had time for before.

• Landline, baby! We’ll see who has the last laugh when the Ragnoräk rolls in.

• Borrow CDs from the library.

• Know what a library is.

• Wear an analog wristwatch that ticks just one box: telling time.

• Do not share Gen Z conviction that a clock or watch with hands and Roman numerals is a hieroglyphic, time-travelling Rosetta stele of incalculable antiquity from the lost civilization of Lemuria bearing arcane instructions in the secret language of Senzar for assembling Stonehenge or the pyramids or possibly a millennial who still listens to Drake.

• Speculate that naan-binary is a type of flat bread used to scoop up aloo gobi at Indian restaurants.

• In a similar vein, remain utterly at sea as to why fenders suddenly need fluids.

• Call me Amab, but still flummoxed as to why anyone would be assigned mail at birth. Babies can’t read.

• Consistently unable to make head or tail of Microsoft’s spreadsheet application, particularly when parked in a front-wheel-drive Hyundai while munching on a bun bought yesterday at the supermarket. (This condition is known to medical science as dysphoria in Excels with day old.)

• Fumble for the Costco membership card (land sakes alive, if all these durn cards don’t stick together), then struggle to put it back in the correct wallet slot, pay with cash by slowly counting out the correct change — which, you will surely have noticed, no cashier under the age of 50 is capable of doing any more — then slowly bag your groceries, painstakingly peruse your receipt and never once notice that the line behind you is now longer and fiercer than an entire Wehrmacht Panzer division.

• Get into a friendly conversation with the cashier (how is their day going?) and embellish pointless details of a pointless story for the express purpose of further enraging the Wehrmacht Panzer division. (Maybe you did notice them after all.)

• On those rare occasions when you feel mischievous enough to test the limits of the self-checkout area, take even longer by punching the wrong buttons, standing befuddled and tying up more staff, thus facilitating the ongoing shoplifting spree at the other stations. The chain store cheese-parers who bought into this system to screw clerks out of their minimum-wage jobs must have been half in the ten-cent bag.

• Not sure but suspect that fibre optics means being seen eating Shredded Wheat.

• Enjoy preening in comfortable cargo shorts, socks with sandals and bent baseball cap brims. While birding.

• Enjoy even more coming up with snappy comebacks when basement-dwelling Gen Z-ers make fun of you for paying with cash or telling the same story you told 15 minutes ago. For example: “Well Mr. Smarty Pants, just remember that I was the one who taught you how to use a spoon.” Or: “I know but the story’s so good I thought I’d tell it again.”

• On the basis of a wealth of experience over the years in dealing with morons, as one inevitably accumulates en route to the biblically warranted three score and ten, have perfected a saintly and compassionate expression that wordlessly conveys the following simple but elegant message : “You’re not going to understand this because you’re a moron, but you’re a moron.”

• Drive a practical, mid-sized sedan — a 1998 Excel, say — whose only two high-tech features are a radio and a heater. Three if you count the original windshield wipers.

• Take it upon yourself to enforce traffic safety rules by camping in the left lane on busy highways, 5-10 km/h below the speed limit. You’ll be making a left turn 20 km farther down the road anyway, so a few brake checks along the way wouldn’t come amiss.

• Would exchange your new CPAP machine and miscellaneous mobility aids in a New York minute for either a 1991 Buick Park Avenue or a ’93 Ford Crown Vic with a CD player and a cigarette lighter (not because you smoke, but because you could use the ashtray slot to stuff in half-sucked Werther’s Originals disposed of in Scotties, which you still call Kleenex).

• Know how to drive a stick and unclog a carburetor. With the same finger.

• Write down directions from Google maps. In cursive.

• Wait until you’ve backed out of the driveway to put on your seatbelt because you’d have to be Houdini to turn around while strapped in like Yuri Gagarin re-entering the atmosphere in Vostok 1.

• Talk to yourself in the bathroom. I mean, you always have. But now that you’re spending half your night in there, you’re starting to reply.

• Remember the bitter taste of castor oil and preferring it to Thrills, “the purple gum that tastes like soap.”

• Recall that you chewed Thrills anyway because a whole package cost five cents.

• Easily call to the mind’s tastebuds the flavours of jawbreakers (periodically removed from one’s mouth with sticky fingers to study the colour changes), Popeye candy cigarettes and those godawful liquorice cigars that blackened your tongue.

• Postulate that the pink granulated substance that passed for soap in high school washrooms half a century ago was actually ground-up Thrills.

• Realize that this whole Thrills riff is one of those rambling stories old guys tell to unenthusiastic strangers in supermarket lineups that have no relevance to anything at all.

• Know that you won’t remember telling the story the next time you tell it. No later than Thursday. Possibly to the same random victim.

• Dimly remember the opening scene of the CTV documentary series Here Come the 70s in which a nude blonde woman, seen from behind, walked from a beach into the surf until she disappeared under the water as futuristic electronic music played and other scenes such as a fiery plane crash and a starving child with a begging bowl were double-exposed over her and … hey, wait a minute! Did I just sleepwalk through half a century?

• Take solace in the hard-won knowledge that whatever the problem is, there’s a nap for that.