Some Signs You’re 50:
– Never heard of Grammy winners.
– Branson, Mo., vacation.
– Fall asleep (rather than pass out) at parties.
– Ear hair.
– See withered old codger on street and realize he was one year ahead of you in school.
From “The Big Five-Oh!”
———-
Bill Geist, who once wrote a very funny suburban column for this newspaper, then wrote a very funny column about New York City for The New York Times and is now a very funny national TV correspondent for CBS News and its “Sunday Morning” show, has written a book about turning 50. The title is “The Big Five-Oh! Facing, Fearing and Fighting Fifty” (Morrow).
Like his other four books, it’s incisive, hilarious and wonderfully subversive.
In “Little League Confidential,” for example, his 1992 account of coaching his son’s Little League team, Geist merrily undermined the notion that parents have a beneficial effect on kids’ baseball.
Now at age 52, he turns his irreverent attention to our culture’s obsession with trying to remain young and the lengths we will go to keep from growing old gracefully.
It’s a zeitgeist that incites Geist, which is to be expected. After all, it’s his calling. He’s a humorist, and humorists are contrarians.
Much of his skepticism is directed toward what he views as today’s prevailing mindset about advancing maturity. To wit:
Thanks to regular exercise, the right foods and the wonders of medical science, the five-decade mark no longer heralds the beginning of the end but rather the start of a long, vital and fulfilling new stage of life.
He thinks this is wishful thinking, although this rosy view of the golden years is certainly pervasive — and available in the Aging section of any neighborhood megabookstore under titles such as “1,003 Great Things About Getting Older.”
It is also a staple of periodicals. Typical is a Special Report in the Sept. 22 issue of Time magazine, whose headline asserts, “Most people 50 or over say they feel at least 15 years younger than their chronological age.”
Not Geist. “I feel like I’m 15 years in the other direction,” he says.
He’s particularly peeved by Gail Sheehy’s book, “New Passages,” in which she redefines middle age as between 60 and 75, and declares that growing older means “becoming better, stronger, deeper, wiser, funnier, freer, sexier.”
Geist’s reaction? “The only `new passages’ my aging friends are experiencing involve the passage of the occasional kidney stone or passage into The Great Beyond.”
Symptoms of `Middle-aged’ Grumpiness:
– On first-name basis with your proctologist.
– Open child-proof aspirin bottles with hammer.
– Tell teens `rap artist’ is an oxymoron.
.–“The Big Five-Oh!”
For Geist, the 50th birthday is the onslaught of geezerhood, a period of accelerating decline leading eventually to you-know-what, the condition that leads to burial and cremation.
And is there a term he prefers for post-50 folks? Senior citizen? Older adults?
“How about predeceased?”
Not one for keeping his troubles to himself, Geist laments each and every sign of slippage, no matter how personal.
He hates having trifocals. He hates that his libido has gone south and that the only things that arouse him are buffets and early bird specials.
He hates getting a gut and being 40 pounds heavier than he was three decades ago, which, he writes, is “like walking around with a good-sized child dangling from your neck.”
Indeed, he thinks the best he’s looked lately was when he delivered a commencement speech: “The academic gown was extremely flattering. I wish I could figure out a way to wear one every day.”
Then there are the terrible new sounds: “Your knees crack when you stand up, and you grunt when you put on your socks. There are all sorts of little noises when you’re elderly.”
Over 50 Sex Tips
– Remove your glasses. Gives blurry, soft focus that enhances looks of partner.
– Practice safe sex. Have oxygen tanks and nitroglycerin pills at bedside.
.–“The Big Five-Oh!”
Geist was born in 1945, on the cusp of the Baby Boom.”The fact that a Boomer is now turning 50 every 7 1/2 seconds, which figures out to 11,000-plus every day for the next 17 years, has nothing to do with the reason I wrote this book,” he says. “This is literature!”
Maybe so, but the CBS camera crew that followed him around Chicago to tape a segment about his book tour for this week’s “Sunday Morning” show suggests he has at least a small appreciation of marketing.
And for those folks who are not especially fond of the Baby Boomer generation?
“They’re right to see it as another whining Baby Boomer book. I agree that Baby Boomers are whiners who want to get everything our way. We’re going to get new hearts, new limbs, new hips, new this, new that. And live forever.”
During the course of his book, Geist visits a skin salon, a health spa, a plastic surgeon, a liposuction specialist, a health club, a Memory Loss Center and a meeting of the Red Hot Mamas, a national organization of menopausal women, and he also examines the vast array of diets, exercises and products that feed the need to remain young.
He takes a dim view and thinks he can explain why.
“I grew up in a small town in the Midwest — Champaign, Ill. — and when I moved from there to Evanston in the 1970s, I looked at it and all the Chicago suburbs as a whole other world. And when I moved to New York in the ’80s, I felt the same way about it.
“I look at the values I got growing up in Champaign in the ’40s and ’50s as the norm, the way the world should be.”
Take the matter of diet and exercise. “They’re good ideas in theory,” Geist says. “But I’m abstaining. I still eat the ideal breakfast my high school health class teachers recommended: Eggs, bacon, whole milk, toast and butter. I still like meatloaf and mashed potatoes for dinner.”
He’ll never have cosmetic surgery, never compensate for graying or missing hair, never wear padded underwear to enhance his buttocks. . But he does drive a red convertible.
His final thought? “I think it would be a lot easier if we’d stop all this superficial nonsense and just get on with it.”
What a guy!
“But talk to me in five years, and see if I feel the same way.”
