On Being Seventy

I closed out my 69th year by taking a short trip to Walmart and wearing my T shirt inside out. I wouldn’t even have noticed if the cashier hadn’t yelled across the store after checking me out….”Hey Ruth! Did you know that your shirt is inside out?” I looked down and saw the seams that should have been inside. My first thought was “Great… now everyone who was behind me knows that I wear a size Mammoth Petite.”

Years ago, I remember watching a movie called “Splash”. One of the supporting characters was an absent-minded, aging secretary who one day wore her bra on the outside of her blouse to work. It was a ridiculously funny moment in the movie. Obviously one of the writers of the script was an aging woman like me. I can also remember going to work and laughing with a coworker about wearing unmatching shoes. We chalked it up to getting dressed in the dark amidst the confusion of getting ourselves and 3 kids out the door on time.

There are days that I feel seventy and days that I do not. At this point I would say its about 50/50. There are also days I forget that I am seventy and that’s where things can get a little dangerous. Climbing into the back of a pickup truck and then jumping down from the tailgate. Trying to lift a bag of softener salt. Bending over to pick something off the floor. My body screams at me… Don’t do that anymore!

I find that I am not so good at realizing where I am in position to other things. I open the refrigerator door and bonk my forehead while the cereal boxes on top of the refrigerator fall on my head because I hadn’t pushed them back far enough from the door. A gallon of milk falls out of my hand to the floor because my arthritic hands cannot grasp as they used to. Coming up from the basement, I put both feet on each step like a toddler learning to walk.

Being seventy also means that in any survey you decide to take you are in the last age category listed in the drop-down box, or sometimes even in a category labeled “other”. I am always afraid the year I was born (in a similar drop-down box) will no longer appear at all.

I’m thankful to be beginning my seventies. It certainly has it drawbacks, but there are a lot of things I can still do on my own. I can still do housework (what fun!) although not as fast as I used to. I have a lot of common sense knowledge that I would gladly share with younger folks, but they better hurry because some days I forget most of it. And while there are times when I may wear my shirt inside out or backwards or have shoes on that aren’t quite matching, I have not yet worn any underwear on the outside of my clothes.

At least, not that I know of.