Senior Moment

I had an experience at the grocery store yesterday that really threw me for a loop.

I had just dashed in on my way home from Rotary to pick up a couple of items, including a twelve-pack of Yuengling, and was at the express checkout. As I swiped my debit card, the cashier, dragging my beer over the scanner, said, “Are you over 60?”

What?! I haven’t been carded for alcohol in a looong time, but this was my first reaction, followed by the immediate realization that surely the drinking age hadn’t been raised to 60 while I wasn’t paying attention!

Belatedly it dawned on me. The supermarket I patronize has changed hands several times in the last few years. Grocery stores in general are struggling in competition with Wal-Mart and other superstores, and this store, originally owned by a local family company, has been lucky to survive at all. The most recent new owners had just celebrated a Grand Reopening last week (to coincide with the Grand Opening of a new Publix), boasting hundreds of price reductions and other new features, including a senior discount (2½%) on Wednesdays.

Although it took just an instant for the penny to drop, and I immediately gabbled that yes, in fact I’ll be qualifying for Medicare in just a couple of months, I was so rattled by this blip in my routine that I momentarily forgot my PIN and had to actually think before punching in the numbers, usually a purely reflex action.

As they say, getting old is not for sissies—but it does have its perks. Now I just have to figure out how I’m going to squander the fifty-two cents I saved with the discount.

Beyond Comprehension

“How great is our Lord! His power is absolute! His understanding is beyond comprehension!
Psalm 147:5″

These were the words I read on the card.

When I went out to get the paper this morning, I discovered that sometime during the night someone had also delivered a new phone book. An orange plastic bag on our front porch contained “The Real Yellow Pages” (does anyone else think this is the tail wagging the dog?). Inside the house, removing the phone book from the bag, I also found this card, presumably inserted by the contractor who delivered the book.

I turned the card over and saw this:

Words (almost) fail me. This seems to me the ultimate illustration of why copy editors are needed for everything, no matter how small.

The first thing to strike me, of course, was “You are going to like are work.” I confess that I don’t always distinguish “our” from “are” as carefully as I should in speaking, but I certainly know the difference in writing!

Then I was struck by “Mr. & Mrs. Smith Granicrete.” After some consideration, I came to the conclusion that “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” must be the name of the company (analogous to “Smith & Sons Tile”) rather than of the contractors, but it still has an odd ring.

Passing over such minor technicalities as the superfluous period after “installer” and the defective spacing of the phone number, the email address is just sad. Quite aside from the misspelling, its inappropriateness for a countertop installer is pathetic. As far as I know, Yahoo email addresses are free; why not get one just for the business?

It is beyond comprehension to me that someone would try to promote a business with these cards. The telling detail here, though—which shows up better in the scanned image than on the card itself—is the perforated edge. The cards are homebrew, printed on a desktop inkjet printer. There is no shame in that: I print my own business cards as well. One reason I prefer to print my own is that I can print a single sheet of ten and, when they are used up, change the content as needed. In this instance, I would say several changes are needed before another batch is printed.

A Million Little Pieces

Although I haven’t read James Frey’s book, I am aware that the “million little pieces” of his title have to do with the fragmentation or splintering of his life. In my case, what is fragmented is the record of my life.

As I was writing in my (paper) diary the other morning, it struck me how little is really recorded there. The day-to-day details of my life are more often found in my emails, newsgroup posts, blog entries, Web pages, and the like. To add to the fragmentation, I recently joined Twitter, mostly just to see what it’s all about. If this keeps up, before you know it I’ll have a Facebook page, too!

If I were to die today, my survivors would find a couple of file cabinets full of mostly outdated paper, a dozen or so file boxes of old letters, and many years’ worth of Day-Timers (in which I keep my diary), but unless they looked at my hard drive, they would have very few documents from my current life.

In a way this is a good thing: while there would be plenty of other stuff to dig through (I inherited my parents’ packrat tendencies, not to mention their accumulations of paper), my heirs would not be faced with the quantity of memorabilia I inherited from my parents. All the documents I have created since 1992 can still fit quite comfortably on a relatively small and portable removable drive. And they would already be reasonably well organized.

But would they provide the same sense of discovery, excitement, and satisfaction I have derived from reading letters and diaries written, some of them nearly a century ago, by my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, in their own (sometimes indecipherable) handwriting? Somehow I doubt it.

Worse still, would anyone care? Would anyone really wade through the overwhelming volume of material to find the few documents that really matter? One of my “customers” at my monthly Word Q&A sessions at our public library wanted to learn how to set up a folder of documents for her son to find easily in such an event. We created a Word folder for these documents and put a shortcut to it on her desktop labeled “ATTN: RICHARD,” in hopes that her son would spot it if, in his grief, he fired up her computer (presumably she will alert him to this while she’s still this side of the grass).

Still, this reflection reinforces my sense of the need to organize my own memoirs (by writing a coherent autobiography) before I kick the bucket. Certainly I have a wealth of source material!