How dare the City of Lynn exercise the affrontry required to deliver to my doorstep a “Survey of Residents 60+”
Who the heck do they think I am? For the record, I’m 63. I’m also the guy who still sings “Rebel, Rebel” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” unbidden at the top of my lungs. I’m the guy who jumps up and down when the weathercaster announces, “plowable snow.” I’m the guy who throws himself on the floor and crawls and rolls around with his granddaughter.
OK, I’m also the guy — thanks to a lifetime of poor posture and arthritis’ onset — who looks like he’s 90 for a minute or two when he stands up after sitting for too long, and who, with increasing frequency, gets asked, “Why are you limping?”
But those are minor inconveniences. I look in the mirror and I don’t see a mostly-bald man looking back at me. My foibles and ticks that irritate others are amusing to me, and the fact that it took a week for me to remember Frances McDormand starred in “Fargo” is just proof that I have too much useless information stored in my head.
I guess what frosts me about the city’s undoubtedly well thought-out “Needs Assessment” is the realization that I am a subject of interest to the city’s survey partners — the Gerontology Institute at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the Center for Social and Demographic Research on Aging.
Like a fossil unearthed on a Wyoming hillside or petrified mastodon femur discovered in the African veldt, my age makes me interesting to academics.
Don’t get me wrong: I think the survey is a well-intentioned effort to help people; although I would like to know how much it’s costing the city — aka taxpayers.
I skimmed it and immediately concluded that I would be doing the city and the institute a disservice if I didn’t hand the survey over to my wife to fill out.
Question 14 addresses home repairs. Her reply outlining my ability in this area would make for lengthy and humorous reading.
Question 22, relative to “driving status,” would elicit her pithy description of me as “the youngest 90-year-old behind the wheel.”
If I do fill out the survey, I’m strongly inclined to substitute coherent answers to the questions with brief descriptions of my more memorable life experiences.
I’m sure the Gerontology Institute would be much more interested in knowing what it is like to be awakened by a French woman sweeping out a park in the shadows of the Sorbonne.
It’s hard to imagine a UMass researcher not being enamored with a blow-by-blow account of how I am eternally grateful to the Canadian guy who told me to get lost just as a knife fight broke out somewhere outside Fort Frances.
And who wouldn’t want a summary of what it was like to land in the Guatemalan jungle in a single-engine plane piloted by a guy who was so short he had to strap wood blocks to the plane’s foot controls?
I guess the point I’m trying to make in a typical, rambling senior-moment kind of way is that “life-lived” is what is on the minds of most people my age. As to the quality-of-life questions included in the survey, they are sure to elicit answers that will intelligently inform city policy regarding the, uh, elderly.
I think most people my age would tell you we are getting along the best we can and the best thing the government can do for us is to stop taking money out of our pockets. Uh oh, that sounds like something a grumpy old man says.
