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Not as far back as childhood. In Disney World, I had my picture taken with Minnie Mouse. It's part of my father's collection of slides, never to turn up again. As you can see, finally meeting Pluto in Disneyland was one of life's milestones. |
I was born in Hamilton, Ontario and grew up there until the age of thirteen. Situated on Lake Ontario, the city was considered part of the “banana belt” in the southwestern portion of the province since we got less snow than places like Buffalo, New York which was sixty-five miles away on Lake Erie. Still, the predominant Ontario mindset was to book vacation time during winter to head south, most commonly to Florida. Sun! Beaches! Pluto and Goofy!
Every March, my family loaded up the station wagon and headed for cities like Sarasota and Fort Myers on the Gulf Coast. These were excruciatingly long trips for a kid. How many times did my brother, sister or I ask, “How much longer?” or more naively, “Are we there yet?”
My parents learned the best way to make the trek tolerable was to set me up in “the very back,” in the section behind the rear seat where two little seats popped up, facing one another. Luggage and coolers were stacked between my spot and the rear seat where my siblings sat. This reduced my opportunities to pester everyone which I’d discovered was a highly entertaining way to pass the time. Every time my brother or sister shrieked my name, I felt deeply rewarded.
With me being barricaded away, I had to find less interactive entertainment. Books seemed like an ominous undertaking, too long, too many extended descriptions about kitchens and pond algae. Every time we pulled into a rest area, I stocked up on tourist maps and pamphlets. I grabbed one of everything, a boy of indiscriminating taste. (Has that changed?) My father’s driving itinerary was always ambitious so there was no chance we’d stop at the ghost town in Findlay, Ohio or a Kentucky ventriloquist museum, but I could read about these spots, gaze at the photos and count the number of exclamations that dotted the descriptions of things to do there. Oh! What! Fun! It was more interesting than reading about what a fictional character name Albert noticed in Aunt Mildred’s mason jars. (Always berry preserves, never fingers suspended in formaldehyde.)
My pamphlet collection grew exponentially as the drive dragged on, each place overhyped to such a degree that I wondered if there were any standards for allowing a roadside stop to declare itself “WORLD FAMOUS!” How does a small chain in Florida gain such renown for plopping sauerkraut on a hotdog? Did people in Australia really talk about it? In Turkey? (As an eight-year-old, I thought a lot about a country named after a bird stuffed with cornbread.)
One pamphlet-harkening destination in northeastern Florida randomly popped in my mind again this past week, an attraction in the town of Saint Augustine, billed as “the nation’s oldest city.” I don’t know if the Medieval Torture Museum, the Oldest Wooden School House or St. Augustine Shipwreck Museum existed way back in my days of being barricaded. What piqued my interest then, and does so exponentially more now, is Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth. There was no picture of this place, but I imagined something stately, one of those garden features but supersized with carvings of flying fish and lions and a long line of people waiting to drink from it as others jumped in and splashed about, their wrinkled skin becoming smooth, hair growing back on aging men’s scalps, none of it gray or white. This was why so many seniors flocked to Florida! I couldn’t understand why my grandparents, who stayed six months every year in a mobile home farther south in Lakeland, returned every April looking more like Jed Clampett or even Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies, not having transformed into Elly May or Jethro. Wrong priorities was all I could come up with.
At eight, the Fountain of Youth wasn’t a draw. I didn’t want to look four again, with grownups plopping back on a tricycle and clapping as I reverted to assembling ten-piece puzzles of fruit. Still, I knew I’d head to St. Augustine and the Fountain of Youth when the time seemed right. And, by golly, the time is now. Let me splash in it, swim, snorkel, scuba dive, float, drink from it and gargle with it. So long saggy bits! Begone, Santa beard! Vamoose, age spots! Hello again, boyish skin…without, fingers crossed, the accompanying zits.
If only I still had an eight-year-old’s imagination…and gullibility.
Like most of us looking at middle age in the rearview mirror—hell, that period’s long out of frame—I’m facing a comeuppance every time I glimpse any part of me in a mirror. Certain lyrics from Neil Young have new meaning as they pop into my head, like a most unwanted earworm:
Old man, look at my life,
I’m a lot like you.
God lord, it doesn’t help that I’m conjuring up a song that was released fifty-one years ago. My only other pop culture reference thus far in this post is a TV show that’s even older. Why can’t I come up with a way to weave in TikTok, Doja Cat and some new series on a streaming channel that I refuse to pay for because I grew up in a time when watching The Carol Burnett Show and The Waltons was free? (I canceled Netflix after finishing all of Grace and Frankie.)
I’m at that awkward stage where I haven’t yet surrendered to complete irrelevance and dinners at three in the afternoon. I consider it a small victory that AARP, which had been popping up in my spam email folder during COVID, The Early Years, has lost my scent. Maybe my L’Oréal Revitalift eye cream is having a better result than I think. Maybe the dark bags I continue to see under my eyes are ghost imprints. After two decades of hanging out there, I can’t help but see the illusion of the pesky buggers.
Aging is supposed to help us evolve, doing away with vanity, letting others take their moment in the limelight and paring our lives down to the things experience tells us are more important. As someone who has spent a lifetime beating myself up over my looks, letting go of all that misery would be a blessing. It’s a relief knowing that self-criticism is quieter, the swells passing more quickly. I step away from the mirror the second a negative notion surfaces, I don’t glance in windows to gauge my weight as often anymore…something I learned is very common for people with eating disorders. I can settle with a shrug as my self-assessment for the day, a teenager’s ennui (Yeah, whatever) without the youthful complexion. (Oily, Pimply…stop romanticizing it!)
Still, I brace for the onslaught of wrinkles and age spots. I worry about my face being pulled down by prominent jowls. I wonder how I’ll be able to handle seeing my skin turn as thin as crepe paper, every bumbling bump commemorated in red blotches. Sure, vanity will fade to nothing, but I feel that, for myself, despair will move in.
Could have bought that Porsche
if I hadn't invested so heavily
in false hope.
Like red Porsches, life’s lessons are wasted on older folks. Why couldn’t I have accepted my younger self? Why didn’t I embrace it, knowing that was as good as it would get? Why did I put so much hope into the radio commercial testimonials about Clearasil? Why didn’t I extend college another year or three? Why didn’t I fight back, blaring the Donna Summer cassettes in my Chevette every time someone had the audacity to say disco sucked?
I feel an inkling to fly to Tampa, rent a car and head two hours northeast. I’ve Googled the Fountain of Youth and I see no fountain at all. It’s just another schmucky attraction where people will happily my $17.79.
But I won’t be a sucker.
If I wait another year, I’ll get the senior’s discount, coughing up only $15.92, the savings getting me a sauerkraut-laden hotdog, once I peruse old pamphlets to find a time machine that’ll take me back to 1978. Ah, forget it. They didn’t have veggie dogs back then. Sauerkraut in a bun isn’t worth the effort.
And so it goes. Life. No brakes. No turning back. Maybe it’s another one of those indignities that comes with aging, but the future seems to be approaching at greater speed. I’m buckled in. Ready. Or not.
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