The Green Red Green (16 page)

Once you hit the age of forty, take one afternoon a week off work and go sit in the park. When you have a meeting, don’t make any suggestions or comments, and when you’re asked for
an opinion, just shrug. Come in late and leave early. Never answer your phone. Read novels at your desk. Avoid responsibility. You may take some flack, but when your retirement comes up—and it may happen sooner than you expect—you’ll be ready.

I
have a couple of friends my age appearing in big network television shows, and they’ve each had to dye their hair to keep their jobs. Apparently the television execs don’t think the audience can stand to see a grey-haired man on a primetime series. Maybe it’s because these execs are twenty-three years old and don’t want men who look like their dads to be stars. But what a horrible message it sends to those of us who have grey hair.

Is it over for us? Will it come back with a bottle of Grecian Formula? I’m not sure that would work for me. My face and hair are roughly the same age, so they kind of go together. I wouldn’t look right with Russell Brand’s hair, and he wouldn’t look right with my face.

When I look at myself in the mirror, I kind of think this is the way God wanted me to look, and if it’s good enough for him, it’s okay with me. But God doesn’t run the TV networks. That becomes more obvious every season.

Y
ou can pretty much tell how old a driver is by examining the contents of his trunk.

L
ife is so much more difficult because of the conflicting messages that bombard us throughout each day. And the frequency of these messages has a great impact on our decision-making process. If you get bad advice ten times more often than good advice, your chances of making the right decision are extremely remote.

The recommendations I get in church on Sunday morning are in direct conflict with the ones I get from the bartender and his able-bodied assistants on Monday through Saturday. And church doesn’t have a happy hour. You get the same ratio from TV commercials. For every one promoting diet and fitness, there are a hundred pushing burgers and fries. What chance do we have against these kinds of odds? Maybe that’s what happens to the president. Maybe he’s got one guy telling him to do the right thing and a hundred others advising him that it’s business as usual.

So here’s an easy solution that we can all live by: listen to everybody’s opinions but take your own advice.

N
ow that I’ve got a lot more white hair in my beard and a lot less of any coloured hair on my head, I can’t help noticing that people look at me differently. I know what they’re doing. They’re pigeonholing me. Stereotyping me. Classifying me as a burnt-out old guy who should be dead soon. Maybe I’m oversensitive, but I resent that.

I had a guy tailgating me because I was driving pretty slowly in the passing lane. I like the passing lane. No ramps. No trucks. And I’m closer to oncoming traffic, which helps keep me awake. Finally this guy swings around and passes me on the right, and as he does, he looks over at me to express some type of four-letter critique of my driving. But then he sees my old face and makes a gesture that says, “I should have known it would be an old guy.” That bugged me, so here’s what I decided: Think of your self-image as a flashlight. Think of other people’s opinion of you as another flashlight. If their flashlight is brighter than yours, you have a problem.

I’m working hard to make sure that doesn’t happen to me. I hope I don’t run out of batteries.

R
emember rear-engine cars? The Volkswagen Beetle? Or the Chevy Corvair? You didn’t need to be speeding to get a thrill out of one of those, especially the Corvair. That car was unsafe at any speed. But let’s drive down memory lane by turning a front-engined/front-wheel-drive car into a rear-engined/rear-wheel-drive classic.

If you think you have to take the engine and all the peripheral equipment out and remount it in the trunk, think again. All you
have to do is reverse the interior: turn the seats around, move the dashboard to the back, and rewire the controls.

To remove the seats, you’ll need some tools and some oil, or else just a big hammer and an attitude. I prefer attitude to tools. I lose tools.

Once you’ve removed the seats and the old upholstery, which you wanted to replace anyway, open the hatchback and mount the driver’s seat facing backwards. It has to be held in place by bolts or heavy clamps, or if you’re thinking like me, duct tape. (A tip: duct tape makes great car upholstery. Install it sticky side out and you won’t need seat belts.)

Now, rather than moving all the controls to the back, connect them to a second set of controls from a boat. It should be a boat you no longer want, or one someone you know no longer wants, especially when he finds out it doesn’t have controls in it anymore.

Rig the boat’s steering wheel to the car’s steering wheel and the boat’s hand throttle to the car’s gas pedal. And for the car’s brake pedal, use the anchor rope.

The only remaining problem is that the white headlights are at the back and the red tail lights are up front. Easy to fix with a large screwdriver. Take the screwdriver and smash the red lenses of the tail lights. Then go around the back (formerly the front) and turn the headlights into tail lights by clipping red plastic bowls over them.

It’s just that easy to turn a front-engined/front-wheel-drive car into a rear-engined/rear-wheel-drive car. This is the best of both worlds. Looks like a car and drives like a boat (the
Titanic
).

I
was sitting in a train station last week and saw, over in a corner of the waiting area, a couple of teenagers sleeping on the floor.
They were using coats as blankets and backpacks as pillows. And nobody was bothering them or even making comments. It was just accepted that these were a couple of normal sleep-deprived kids off to see the world. But I couldn’t help wondering what the response would be if they were middle-aged men, rather than teenagers. I’m guessing not good. Society doesn’t approve of men sleeping on the floor in a public place. Not even married men. It’s a question of leeway. As we get older, our leeway shrinks. A teenager with the crotch of his pants down around his knees is a hiphop happening. When a middle-aged man does it, it’s a citizen’s arrest. Try to imagine a middle-aged guy hitchhiking. Or caddying. Or dating your daughter. There’s no leeway.

M
y whole life can be traced by people and places I wanted to live close to. As a kid, I wanted to live close to the playground. Then I wanted to live close to the friends I made at the playground. Then my girlfriend. Then the tavern. Then my job. Then my kids’ school. Then the golf course. Then the doctor’s office. Now the hospital. And finally, the funeral home. (I’m counting on a big turnout.)

M
y wife and I had a little disagreement the other night, and afterward, I was sitting out in the garage trying to figure out where we went wrong. I decided it was during the Industrial Revolution.

Up until then, men and women were on a pretty equal footing. Men worked in the fields while women worked in the home. After the big I.R., the women still worked in the home, but the men were now working in mines and factories. This was a huge setback. When you’re working in the fields or in the home, you can think about things. Doing the laundry or bringing in the sheaves are jobs that don’t require much of your mind, so you can be forming theories or examining relationships while you’re working. But when you’re setting off a dynamite charge or working with a two-hundred-ton punch press, you’d better give the task your full attention.

That’s why during the Industrial Revolution, men stopped thinking. At first it was just a work thing, so they could keep their fingers. But eventually it permeated all phases of their lives. Meanwhile, women just kept thinking and thinking. And by the time we hit the twentieth century, women had been thinking for so long that they couldn’t stop—whereas for men the exact opposite was true.

M
any experts advise us to fight the aging process. They say we need a disciplined diet and a rigorous exercise regimen, and that will somehow keep us young. This to me is fighting the fundamental laws of nature. The world does not need you to stay young. We have young people who are much more willing and able to do that job. So instead of trying to take the place of a younger, healthier person, why don’t you try to find the place that has been reserved for you?

You can find that place by looking at yourself and focusing on your strengths. You may not hear very well, and that’s nature’s
way of telling you to listen more. You may not see very well, and that is nature’s way of telling you not to look. You may have lost a lot of strength and speed, which is nature’s way of telling you to sit down before you kill yourself. Maybe you could even cheer somebody else on.

Your memory is fading, which is nature’s way of preventing you from holding a grudge. Sure, you’re getting older, but you can also get better. You just can’t get younger. Step away from those Rollerblades. Now.

D
on’t let fertility fool you. Just because you’re still capable of producing offspring, that doesn’t mean you should. Here are the signs that it’s time to hang up your guns:

I
guess the Space Age is to blame for the worldwide desire for miniaturization. Scientists can get the entire encyclopedia on the head of a pin or something. And everything from phones to cameras to cars is getting smaller. Can we just stop and think about this for a minute? I don’t want things to get smaller. When things get small, I lose them. Some days I can’t even find my car keys, so can you imagine me trying to locate a pin that has the encyclopedia on it? I think they’re just making things smaller so we can fit more useless technology into our homes. I say we go the other way: maximization. Give me a wall-sized TV screen, a great big clunky phone, and a two-foot-thick phone book in an eighteen-point font.

W
hen I was younger, I would make friends easily and drop them the same way. I was easy-going then. Not so judgmental. And anybody who says otherwise is a moron. But now that I’m a little more experienced—or “previously enjoyed,” as the used luxury car salesmen say—I’ve changed my whole approach toward friends. At my age, I don’t want to make new friends. I want to keep the old ones.

With the old friends, I don’t have to waste precious time explaining things like how I got that scar or why I’m not allowed to cross the border. In Hollywood, they call it backstory. I don’t have the time or energy to go through my backstory. I want to be with friends who already know it and are sick of hearing about it, and who would rather pretend to have forgiven me for it than force me to bring it up. And I know a few embarrassing things about them too, so it’s a level playing field.

My advice is that if you have old friends, stick with them. They are a great source of comfort for the rest of the trip. And the fact that somebody who has known you for a long period of time still finds you tolerable is both a great compliment and flies in the face of many of your wife’s theories.

I
know I’ve been somewhat critical of technology from time to time, but when it comes to email, all is forgiven. Email is the greatest form of communication since the wink. It’s quick, it’s effortless, it’s free, and you don’t have to lick anything. There is no better way to contact people, even your mother.

For one thing, email is undaunting. It’s a small space to fill. By the time you say hello and mention the weather and your bursitis,
you only have room left to say goodbye. And it’s the best part of communication—the transmitting part. It’s every man’s dream: a one-way conversation.

Sure, people can email you back, but you can delete those messages without reading them. Is this a great thing or what? If any of you disagree with this, please send me your comments. My email address is likeIcare@I’llgetrightonthat.com.

W
e have a tendency as we get older to spend too much time looking back. It’s natural. When you’re older, your life is like looking at yourself naked in a mirror: the biggest part is behind you. A little reminiscing is okay, but you’re better off staying focused on the future. And the shorter it is, the more attention you should pay to it. The trick is to stay optimistic, so here’s a list of things you can look forward to in your declining years: