Leslie Handler
As I age, I see myself looking in the mirror and wondering why my mother’s face is looking back at me. I wonder because although I know I’m getting older, nothing else seems to change.
I remember when I used to get free stuff. If I filled up at the gas station, I got a free glass. Six fill-ups and I had a set. The kids today get free stuff too. If they participate in an event, they get free “swag,” and if they do a few “mentions” on their blogs, they get free product.
Anybody out there remember record subscriptions? We used to get a batch of free records when we subscribed to a monthly service to get new records mailed to us every month. Today, kids also have subscriptions. They pay every month to put things in the cloud. I’m not sure why it’s only one cloud, and I’m not sure how they get their stuff back, but I do know that they pay a fee every month, and they get stuff…just like we did.
Lately, there’s all this talk about creepy guys doing creepy things to women. A lot of the talk is about guys who did this stuff decades ago, but again, I can tell you that not all that much has changed. I recently took my Facebook page from private, to public. I did this because my following is growing and with my first book coming out in March, I want to get the word out. But ever since I did this, I’ve had all these guys coming out of the woodwork to “friend” me. Not only do they “friend” me, they send me messages telling me I’m beautiful, and they include emojis of flowers and hearts. This is just creepy, cheapy, and lazy. Creepy because, well, just ‘cause. Cheapy because they’re too cheap to pay for a dating app, and lazy because it would take them all of two seconds to read my profile to see that I’m happily married. I’m older, and even though things are different, they’re really still the same.
Here all this time, I thought as I got older, I’d get wiser. I thought that wisdom would be the one thing that would definitely change in my life, but I don’t think it was meant to be. You see it used to be that I never ever saw a doctor who was younger than I was. Now, all my doctors are younger than I am. They know more than I do, and they’re younger than I am. Another reason I know I’m not getting wiser as I get older is that every time I have a problem, I have to ask someone younger for help. I ask them how to do something on my computer, my TV, and my phone. They know about these things. They are the wiser ones.
I clearly remember a time recently when my mom put some frozen veggies in a pot to boil. I asked her why she didn’t just pop them in the microwave. She said she just hadn’t thought of it. Now if I complain to my kids that it took me half the day to run a bunch of errands, they ask me why I just didn’t order everything online. I tell them I just hadn’t thought of it.
So I guess that even though I’ve gotten older, everything else has really stayed the same. My reflection is different, but my mind, well it sure doesn’t seem to be wiser. It’s still the same. So if you’re younger than I am, whatever you do, please don’t call me ma’am, because that would make me feel older and wiser and it’s just not polite to tell half-truths to your elders.