Saturday, October 11, 2008

"Blonde Senior Moments"

(I'm going off track a bit here from the art/craft thing, but it's sometimes good to know that you're not the only one who can do something incredibly dumb or embarassing. So I offer up this little tale as a public service to those suffering from age-related foot-in-mouth disorder.)
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Ok, so I'm not exactly 'senior' and while my hair may be 3 or 4 different colors, blonde isn't one of them. But, the 'moments' are.
I'm sort of watching this aging thing happen from the sidelines as if it's not happening to me, but to someone who looks and sounds like me. The reason for this could be one of two things: denial, or the more interesting choice: the soul watching the body. Yes, that one fits better, I think. I'm much too realistic to be in THAT much denial :-)

I always tell young people, especially the ones who think 'old people' (as in over 30) are from another solar system, "Just wait, you'll find out that no matter how old you get, you're still you. You're the same person with one exception: random body parts start hurting for absolutely no reason and it's very confusing."

I can look at anyone, no matter their age and regress them in my head. They're 70, then 40, then 20, then 12. It's something I learned to occupy myself with while on buses when I was a kid because where I lived, if you looked at someone in what they thought was the 'wrong way' you could get beat up or worse.

So I concentrated on the old folks and it worked.

Anyway, what brought all this about is something that happened the other day. I sort of take pride in the fact that there are very few times I've really put my foot in my mouth and it hasn't happened in years, until this past Thursday.

There's a great Italian deli right around the corner and I go there a couple of times a week to reinforce my 'roots'. This place is the real deal, just like the markets my grandmother brought me to when we lived in Jersey, where the owners thought I was 'too skinny' and wanted to fatten me up.

By the time I was 12, I must have eaten thousands of dollars (by today's $20 per pound standards) worth of prosciutto, roasted chick peas ('cheechee beans') and pepperoni. The owner would hand me a huge chunk of meat or cheese, or bag of chick peas and while he and Gram were chatting, I'd walk around eating and staring at the piles of homemade pasta in wooden boxes, barrels of dried beans and that strange board-like stuff called baccala.

The deli here is kind of like that: hard cheeses in ropes hanging from the ceiling, every type of salami one could ever imagine, lots of different olive oils and vinegars, fresh pasta and mozzarella made in the store, anchovies in bulk, an amazing bakery area (the real thing, not the crap you see in supermarkets), 10 kinds of espresso, loads of olives, hot pickled peppers and those weird, greyish-tan cherries in a jar that have been sitting in brandy since Mussolini was in power. About 80% of the packages are printed in Italian--this is the good stuff.

The shop is run by a bunch of guys, all 'familia' (of course), and they remember what each customer likes, who wants their sopressata cut on an angle, who doesn't want seeds on their bread and if you get there at the right time, you can taste things the second they come out of the kitchen--you get the idea.

Joe is the boss, a real nice guy; a rugged looking, sturdy, grey haired man with a gravelly voice and thick accent. I'd guess he's in his early/mid-60s or so. His is the classic New York immigrant story: born in Italy, came over as a kid, worked his butt off his entire life and will never retire because working is just 'what you do'.

So I went in there on Thursday and as usual he asked about my mother, work, whatever and we drifted into a discussion about the current situation here and in the world in general. He said even with all the nutty things that go on here in the U.S., it's still THE place to be, and he beamed with pride while talking about being a citizen. It was nice to see.

He then told me about a time when he was in the service and got stuck in France overnight, then stuck in Germany (some kind of red tape problem), and I blurted out:
"When was this Joe, World War 2?"

This no sooner came out of my mouth than my foot was firmly implanted in it. In a nanosecond I saw his face, heard my words, my brain rewound and I felt like the biggest idiot on the planet. The man is maybe only 10 or 15 years older than me! My father was in WWII and if he was still alive he'd be 94 years old, so it's not hard to figure out.

Thing is, since I don't 'feel' like I'm 51, I responded like I wasn't. He was the 'older person', not me.

So I had one of my first Blonde Senior Moments--God forbid it continues; I'll go live in a cave to spare people from dealing with it, and me.

Poor Joe. Of course, he was polite and said 'nahh, it was way after that' and laughed. That's how these people are: gracious, friendly and everybody's like 'familia'. They yell sometimes, but it's more of a way of communicating rather than out of anger. You have a problem, it ends, you laugh, and then you eat.

Ciao.