Bits And Pieces

Your Age Is Showing

     One thing I've learned from female association is that if you keep refusing to tell your age, chances are the gals will figure you're older than you really are.

     Child brides are rare and if you've children the ages of the rest of the club members they'll have you pegged almost to the year and date of birth; but they'll add on a few years to inflate their own ego.

     Women, until they reach the tiresome thirties or fickle forties, will be just as frank as men about the years.  But comes a day, a grey hair or two, a whisper of age to  chin line and we desperately attempt to knock off  a few years.

     Haven't you heard the statement, "Why she's forty if she's a day," being said about an acquaintance who protests too much about age.  Or take that person who constantly declares she can't remember that song or movie as it must have been popular before her time.  Now your son dates her daughter occasionally so give or take a year or two she certainly can remember back to just about the same antiquity as you.

     Why is it some gals refuse point blank to tell their age?

     I remember a friend of the family, a special "go shopping--weep on the shoulder" type older friend of my mother's who would never at any time divulge her years.  True she never seemed to change in looks from one year to the next, but the speculation over her oldness must have added, not subtracted actual time because she would have been over one hundred at her death.  Now her obituary never remarked over this unusual fact or even made mention of her birth date.  Everyone had just figured because her age seemed to be a forbidden topic that naturally she was a lot older.

     One of my friends declares her age is her own business and she's going to keep it that way.  Now I have trouble remembering my actual age until I subtract the birth date from the present year and come up with a number which constantly surprises me.

     Maybe it's because we've all put such importance on being young.  Youth is to be so desired over age that we don't want to be reminded of the years speeding by.

     That neighbor who is thirty-nine when she moved in and remains thirty-nine is kidding herself into the delusion that if she doesn't admit to her actual age, mysteriously she'll remain thirty-nine.

     Along with Jack Benny there are few men who are reticent about adding up the years.  Maybe its business competition with younger men though, which has them falsifying their age.  Generally though, a man won't hesitate when confronted with the age question and some will even say with pride, "Not so bad for an old guy of fifty."

     The teenager feels it is  great compliment to be taken for twenty-one or to be accepted into an older group.

     The five year old has a game he plays called "When I grow up," and as parents we can hardly wait for that baby to walk, talk and start school.

     It's rather fun to be the youngest couple in your bridge club, or the kids of a young married group.  But suddenly, almost within an eye wink, we're classed in the older group.  We can rebel, falsify our age to others but it won't help one little bit to hold the years stationary.

     Everyone desires to live  long time and never grow old during the process.  Haven't you scanned the obituary columns only to sigh in relief when the death notices are in an age bracket older than your own decade?

     I guess it is no crime to falsify your age and more power to that gal who refuses point blank to state hers.  After all, looks at the words which mean age.  Declining years, the shady side, senility, waning, fading and wrinkled.  While youth is springtime, flower of life, golden season or sweet sixteen.  No wonder we gals hate to admit to the years when it places us in the first category. 

      It's as Pop says.  "We're really not getting any older; it's just that they're graduating kids awful young from high school these days."

Written January 30, 1964