Presidential First Just Another Sign We’re Getting Old

It’s taken what seems like forever, but we have a black president. Many people have uttered the following statement over the last day or so: “I didn’t think it would happen in my lifetime.” And while we may not have dreamt of it, it has certainly come to pass.

But for all of the cultural and socio-economic implications of an African-American president, there is one implication that cannot be overlooked or understated. And that is this: my generation is getting old.

Granted, we knew this. We’ve known it since we took on our first mortgage, since we got married, since we started having kids of our own and suddenly found ourselves morphing into the parents we said we’d never become (”Because I SAID SO, that’s why!”). But there’s something about the historicity of this latest election that cements the fact that we are now old in this world.

So, now that you know you are no longer the whippersnapper you used to be, here are some other signs of your advancing age (and please, don’t try to deny it – we’re all getting there eventually…):

EAR HAIR – Have you noticed that you have the Hanging Gardens of Babylon growing in your auditory canals? When you’re a kid, you never think of stuff like this unless you’re spending a lot of time around old people you don’t really know. When you’re in company of the elderly, unless it’s your granparents, you tend to notice all of the little things that are the Line of Demarcation for aging – liver spots, wrinkles, specks of gray in the hair – but none is so obvious and discomforting as ear hair. I always imagined that crap didn’t start growing until you passed 60, but guess what? It starts when you’re 30. THIRTY!!! One day, you look like you’ve always looked, the next day you have an anaconda snaking out of your ear and towards the heavens. Who knew ear hair grew up towards the light?

NOSE HAIR – Might as well stay on the hair theme. Now, we all knew nose hair was part of the game, ever since we were taught in school how valuable it was as a filtration system for the body. But who knew nose hair would become so annoying that you would actually spend several minutes of your life standing in front of a mirror with a pair of tweezers in one hand, a tissue in the other, plucking out strand after strand of obtrusive nostril fur? And Lord help you when you forget to trim. Inevitiably, one of the wooley boogers will begin to tickle the edge of your nose, causing you to scratch at it repeatedly like a dog with OCD, until you finally run screaming to the nearest restroom to uproot the sucker and find some sense of relief.

And secondly, does anyone ever think of people like George Clooney doing this themselves? The only thing more awkward than pulling your own nose hair would be having someone else pull it for you. Talk about intimacy…

BACK PAIN – One of the classic signs of aging, all though you can certainly throw in any kind of joint or body pain that seems to have no cause, yet stubbornly appears at inconvenient times. By now, we’ve all endured the frontline signs of this – random joints and bones popping when we move – but the persistent pain bumps us into the big boy club. The pain is normally accompanied by immediately grabbing the inflamed area and groaning as if mortally wounded. It normally kicks in when we’re supposed to do something we enjoy, or, if you’re male, whenever you’ve actually scheduled to do something athletic that you were previously good at doing. Raise your hand if you or any of your buddies has ever stood on the tee box, or the service line, or the free throw throw line and whined about how much the ol’ back was hurting. Yep, once the back starts, we’re that much closer to the wheelchair and warm afternoons eating tapioca by the bay window in the clean dining room of the “home.”

IRRITABILITY – You can call it many things – grumpiness, annoyance, intemperance – but no matter how you slice it, when things get under your skin that used to roll off your back, you’ve officially shuffled one step closer to becoming an old fart. While we all lose our temper from time to time, irritability has truly set in when we notice that things we once enjoyed are now annoying when others do the same, or we notice things that have never bothered us before but have suddenly become deal-breakers in our presence. Like the kid next to you in his Honda Civic with the Nopi muffler and 4,000-Watt stereo system, bumping out the bass line to the hip-hop hook du jour. Or the person who scratches his nose while filling up your iced tea glass at a restaurant. Or the woman wearing clothes 10 years too young for her. Or the man who dates progressively younger women, so much absurdly younger that you swear he’s going to ask out a fetus. Or cold weather. Or hot weather. Or just weather in general. Popular music. Popular movies. Fashion. Television commercials. Hair styles. Hair colors. Body piercings. Tattoos. People who vaguely smell. People who pick their nose in public. People who can’t color coordinate. And so on…

TALKING ABOUT THE GOOD OLD DAYS – Perhaps the greatest sign that you’re getting older is referring to your childhood in glowing terms. You suddenly don’t remember how much of a tool you were, or the fact that you hated your schoolmates, or the fact that you got wedgied everyday in the locker room as you were changing for gym. You don’t remember the bad clothes, bad hair, bad music, or Bad, the album, as being bad. You use terms that nobody remembers, and you lament about the rapid changes in technology. Yes, once you’ve reached this point, there’s no going back. When you can fondly recall things that, at the time, you dearly wanted to forget, then you have officially jumped the shark into old age. This happens mostly at parties, or whenever you find yourself surrounded by whiny children and teenagers who don’t appreciate how good they’ve got it. Why, when you were a kid, you had to ride a bus that got 9 miles to the gallon and smoked like a California forest fire. Not to mention that you didn’t have the iPod or gadgets like that; no, you had a 45-lb. Sony Walkman with the song-sensing fast forward and rewind buttons. Oh – and you also had…

Well, you get the point. My grandparents had the depression and Great War. My parents, a man on the moon and Kennedy. We had the Challenger and the Berlin Wall. And now, a new generation is rising, one that will know a future where a black man can be president.

Pretty soon, we’ll have those Jetson cars that we all thought we would have…