So I’ve been thinking about old people. Some of my favorite people are old and I watch the presentation of old people in the media and sometimes I think these fictional old people are like my real old people, or sometimes I think these fictional old people are clearly created by people who have never met my old people or possibly any old people ever.

I am a magic age where I can have friends who are 20 years younger and 20 years older and still have a decent conversation with both ends. Right now I’m focused on the upper end and I am learning a lot. For example I have compared retirement communities to high school and why on earth would anyone want to hang out exclusively with people their own age but high school was a four-year age gap and retirement communities are more like a forty-year age gap so it’s not really comparable. On the other hand the statistics for STDs are similarly intriguing. I won’t write about that. 

Fiction reveals that we want our old women to be wise, saucy, fearless (qualities we don’t really applaud in younger women, but I won’t write about that today). We want our old men to be fixed in their ways, stubborn, so that every time they learn a new thing we can marvel over it like we would if they were children. 

I’m only meeting a small subset, I know this. Some are wise and saucy. Some are stubborn. Some are living in the past. Some are standing on a street corner waving signs which some have been doing for 50 years or more; some continue to believe in a brighter future they probably won’t live to see. I don’t want to say they’re just like everyone, but they are as diverse as anyone and so are the signs they wave. It’s inspirational. It’s sweet. It’s something. I’m glad to be here.