Memphis Tobacco Bowl

« G'day mate! | Main | Top 5 Selling Cigars, July 23 2005 »

Am I Old Yet?

I’ve been keeping up with a discussion in the on-line forum area at pipes.org on the topic of young people who are of age being “too young” to smoke a pipe, and when exactly you start feeling old. It’s got me to wondering at what age a person considers himself old. I’m not talking about the AARP’s or the Social Security Administration’s definition of old because I believe that old age, and many of its limitations, is largely a mindset. I’m less than a month away from my 35th birthday and I remember feeling a definite change at 25. I’m not saying I was old at 25, but something felt different – new aches and pains, longer recovery from a night of drinking, and a sense of urgency about life, career, family, etc. I feel some of those aches and pains now, when I check a young customer’s ID here at work only to find that, yes, they are old enough to purchase tobacco and, yes, they were born in 1987, when I was staring at the light at the end of the tunnel that was high school.

Today, at the round table here at the shop, we had a conversation about the bedroom furniture of yesterday and I waxed nostalgic about the futon I slept on in my early 20s. This would be the prehistoric ancestor of today’s fancy, high-dollar futons with their armrests and their ability to keep a person’s ass above their feet when using it as a couch. I’m talking about a platform on the ground made of pine planks and a mattress roughly the thickness of this Apple laptop I’m typing on right now. Its one special feature was that one end could raise up in an incline like a piece of lawn furniture for reading or sitting up in bed to eat your Ramen noodles. Scattered around the room as well were the requisite candles, posters hung as art, cassette tapes, and bookshelves built of cinder blocks and one by eights. I believe the block and wood shelves stood at the head of the futon even, which would have left me dead in the event of something as slight as a 4.0 magnitude quake.

Remembering all of this seemed quaint, and almost had me longing for 1990, and then when I got home and stepped on the little pedal to open the kitchen garbage, I found myself staring down at an entire Pop Tart, minus one little corner chewed off. I stared down in disbelief before turning to my three children, ages two, four and seven, and explained to them that one day they would all owe me money. Why? they asked. Not for the food they eat, I assured them, for I recognize it as my duty to keep them fed, but for the food they don’t eat. They’ll owe me for the food they unwrap and almost immediately throw out or, more often, leave laying around, just like the entire package of strawberries I found later on in the living room as I was heading to bed. And for the food they order when we’re out that goes untouched while they play with condiments on the table and request a trip to the bathroom for the fourth and fifth time. And I’ll want cash, I told them. I don’t want them coming to me one day with grocery bags full of food. I’ll be able to make it to the market just fine on my own, even in my old age, which I feel is rapidly approaching. My oldest said he had some money now if I wanted it but I told him I wouldn’t dream of taking any birthday moneys received as gifts in childhood, but that one day, when they are established with careers and regular paychecks, then I would present a bill to them and I expect to be paid. And I will need that money when I “retire” from owning a small business, because I plan to sit in my rented room, on my futon, eating Pop Tarts covered with strawberries.

Posted by Richard Alley at July 23, 2005 12:30 AM

Comments

Post a comment