Revealing My Age: All Kinds of Factors Are Blabbing My Age to the World at Large

by Rose Madeline Mula Winston Churchill and fiance Winnie

As if my wrinkles aren't enough of a giveaway, all kinds of other factors are blabbing my age to the world at large.

Winston Churchill (1874-1965) with fiancée Clementine Hozier (1885-1977) shortly before their marriage in 1908; Wikimedia Commons

One stool pigeon is America Online. Yep, that's still my internet service provider, which apparently immediately labels me as a codger. I love my AOL! As far as I'm concerned, it still beats some of those upstart ISPs like Yahoo and Gmail. (Yes, I know. They're not exactly cutting edge either; but comparatively speaking they're pretty avant-garde — well, to codgers anyway.)

My choice of music is another dead giveaway. The lyrics of my favorite songs tell sweet, romantic stories. No political statements, no anti-establishment rants, and not a single obscenity. Furthermore, the singers can actually sing — no screeching., whispering, or special-effect enhancements, I can understand the lyrics, and the melodies are melodic.

My clothes are another clue. No holes in my Mom jeans, no crotch-length skirts, no ridiculously tight dresses wrinkling across the tummy or behind (which definitely doesn't protrude, by the way — a flat rear end has always been my goal). Add to that my lack of tattoos and piercings (except for one —and only one — discreet hole in each earlobe. Then there's my hair, It's not purple, pink, or green; and it doesn't stand up in spikes all over my head.

Perhaps a less-obvious harbinger of my advanced years is any Word document on my computer. If you'll check closely, you'll find two spaces after every period I type. I know that's no longer a thing, but I've been doing it since I learned to type eons ago on a clunky Royal manual typewriter (remember typewriters?). Hitting the space bar twice at the end of a sentence is such an ingrained habit, I physically can't not do it. OOOPS, a double negative —which reminds me of how grammar rules have changed since I was young. In fact, my inability to let go of many of these now-obsolete directives is the biggest betrayal of how long I’ve been taking up space on this planet.

For example, I was taught to never split an infinitive — so I now force myself to always do it (twice in this sentence alone!) to indisputably prove (Hey! I did it again!) that I'm not an old fogey. I am trying to accept that it's perfectly okay to boldly go where no well-educated person had gone before. But it's hard for me.

That's another thing — starting a sentence with "But" or "And." GASP!!! Is it really okay to do that now? As for sentences, we don't even need to use complete ones anymore. Like this one. Very confusing (yes, that one too). That's still so foreign to me that I often resort to using dashes to make the fragmented phrase part of the preceding sentence, rather than send it to the page to stand alone (as I did in the first sentence of this paragraph).

And if you're as old as I am you'll remember Winston Churchill's proclamation that trying not to end a sentence with a preposition was "the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put."

After all, what are rules for? To be broken sometimes. (Did you notice that I ended the first sentence in this paragraph with a preposition and followed that with another incomplete sentence? I'm on a roll! Drunk with power!)

And what's with the rule that all forms of the verb "to be" take a subjective, rather than objective, pronoun. If someone asks you on the phone, "Who is this?" Do you respond "It’s me" or "It's I"? The former, though grammatically incorrect, certainly sounds less awkward than the latter — which you would use if you wanted to let your interrogator know that you went to college.

But none of this matters. Try though I might to look and sound hep (OMG, I'm sure that word has been obsolete for decades), one of my accessories gives me away. No, I no longer wear a fanny pack (though it sure was handy); but I'm afraid there's one thing I can't give up that broadcasts my age to all — my cane! It's gold. And it's glitzy. And it's pretty. And I hate it.

Is a walker next?

Hopefully, I'll be wearing wings before that happens; and they will be all the support I need!

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Revealing My Age: All Kinds of Factors Are Blabbing My Age to the World at Large

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