Coprolite Newsletter, April 2007

When I was a kid, my mother often told me "act your age." I soon figured out that she didn't mean that I should act my real chronological age. I was already doing that, which had led to the trouble in the first place. I think she really wanted me to act like some more dignified age — probably about thirty.

Now that I'm approaching the other end of the age continuum, it seems that similar rules apply. It's not proper to behave in a way that reflects your actual number of years. But this time, you're supposed to act younger instead of older.

Acting "old" has come to mean being cranky, narrow minded, and set in your ways. I recently heard a twenty-something guy described as an "old man" because there are very few kinds of food he is willing to eat.

Being something of an old man myself, I don't exactly appreciate that my group has become the symbol for undesirable traits. You no longer hear very many jokes about stingy Scots, drunken Irish, dumb Poles, and so on. Other than Jay Leno's continuing jokes about bad teeth among the British, people have drifted away from that sort of stereotype. Except when it comes to elders, apparently. We're still fair game.

One solution is for us not to act our current age in public. It should actually be easy for us to pull it off. We know how to act every age, since we've already been through all the stages. At any moment, we can choose whether to act with the enthusiasm of a teen, the ambition of a young adult, the dignity of a middle-ager. We've been through all that and should be expert at it.

But still, we should occasionally be entitled to act our own age, and do it with pride. Of course, we may have to do it at a time and place when no other age groups can see us.

Recently, I had a chance to do just that. My wife and I drove to Scottsdale, Arizona, to visit with a group of people with whom we went to high school in Robbinsdale, Minnesota. Although the others at the gathering have all become seasonal or permanent refugees from the cold, we still had a great deal in common with everyone. And one of the neat features of this reunion was that, in the privacy of our group, we could act any age we chose without anyone criticizing us.

We started out sitting on the patio talking. Yes, there was a certain amount of complaining about physical infirmities, grousing about the state of society today, and praising the good old days. And it was all okay. We could cut loose and act our age with no youngsters there to hear and poke fun at us.

Later, to show our versatility, we enjoyed reliving some of the other ages we've gone through. We had a big pot-luck dinner just like middle-aged people habitually do, and then plunged into lavish amounts of cake and ice cream like a bunch of kids. It was great.

I think this is exactly what all us older people need to do: Get together with our peers. Act our age all we want, with nobody younger around to see and hear. Then, to ease our way back to the way we must act in front of the world, we can conclude the session by moving backward in time through some of our younger stages.

Maybe we should start having meetings of The Coprolites in every town. It'll be like a secret society. People will wonder what rituals go on during our ceremonies. We'll never tell them that we're doing something forbidden — acting our age.

––Wayne Adams
wayne@coprolites.com

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