By Anita Garner<\/p>\n
I liked\u00a0old people even before I became one. Younger friends say hush, you\u2019re not old.\u00a0\u00a0Well I\u2019m certainly older than I was<\/em>,\u00a0and I\u2019m not that upset about it anymore.<\/span><\/p>\n Becoming a grandmother (\u201dHammy\u201d to our toddler, Caedan Ray) isn\u2019t what made me realize I\u2019m aging.\u00a0It started when my last parent passed. That\u2019s when I first heard a whisper about my own mortality, a reminder that I haven\u2019t been able to ignore.\u00a0 Every day I think or say to myself – better get moving.<\/span><\/p>\n Occasionally I forget,\u00a0and when I wake up and parts of me don\u2019t work as well as they used to, (knees, I\u2019m talking to you) at first I\u2019m ticked off, but by the end of the day, I ask myself, what did you expect? Things aren\u2019t brand new anymore.<\/span><\/p>\n I learned nothing from my upbringing about aging gracefully. My mother\u2019s only advice about the passing years was to encourage the use of more moisturizer so boys will like you. She considered all men boyfriends and in her teens she married a man who, through some combination of mercy and grace, turned into a grownup husband who behaved like her sweetheart all the days of their lives. Daddy raised his wife along with us kids, and she clung tenaciously to the role of teenager, even in the face of some gritty realities.<\/span><\/p>\n As a southern preacher, he didn\u2019t consider old<\/em> a condition that needed fixing.\u00a0 He believed in keeping one\u2019s old people at home\u00a0alongside the halt and the lame and the merely odd. Most houses in my childhood had a back bedroom occupied by someone who fit at least one of those categories. <\/span>Our California Gramma, the one we spent the most time with, smoked and drank and danced and cussed and sang and bet\u00a0the horses \u2019til the end. There wasn\u2019t any talk of age at her house either. And Paw Paw, the southern grandparent who lived into his 90\u2019s, didn\u2019t pass along that gene to his son, because Daddy left us way too soon.<\/span><\/p>\n If\u00a0we\u2019re lucky, we\u2019ll all keep getting older. When I got my first mailer from AARP, I jumped right into their arms. It felt like a kind of freedom. That was probably the year I began telling people my real age, even before they asked. There I was coasting along in the vague category of \u201csomewhere past her mid-forties\u201d and as long as my grown daughter, Cathleen, maintained her looks (and she does) then nobody knew for sure how old I was. Then came that AARP card and full disclosure set in. <\/span><\/p>\n AARP will catch up with my buddy across the page soon enough. I\u2019m a few years ahead of him and I\u2019ll be waiting right here to vouch for all the services AARP has to offer, the interesting publications and the discounts. I\u2019m seriously grateful for the research they do and their fights to help our aging population learn how to make all of this work out as well as it possibly can. <\/span><\/p>\n