For a while now—OK, for years—the bimonthly magazine AARP has been arriving in my mailbox. But surely it was meant for my father. (I’m a Junior, after all; same name.) And, since opening another person’s mail is a federal crime, that periodical—it targets old people, no?—went right into the circular file. Never looked inside.
Until just now (and I’ll get to that).
Humorist Bill Geist, I read somewhere, described his original post-marked greeting from AARP—at 50, everyone becomes eligible for membership—as receiving the most feared piece of mail that a person can get since the end of the Vietnam War draft and the arrest of the Unabomber. (Ask your grandmother.)
Not that there aren’t plenty of other hints when one is inexorably approaching geezerhood. Being addressed as “sir.” Having to ask one’s wife to identify those people winning movie and music awards on television. Checking the calendar for this month’s doctor’s appointments (plural).
It’s just that hearing from AARP seems an announcement that you’ve really turned the corner. You’re a fossil. A museum piece. Possibly in need of a phone call from the governor.
To look on the bright side, though, I have now lived a couple of years longer than both Albert Einstein and John Updike did; 11 years longer than George Washington; 17 more than Hemingway and 36 more than Elvis. If I hang on, I could pass Mahatma Gandhi later this year (not that I have a vote on that). With life expectancy in the United States having crept above 78, I’m beginning to play with house money.
Well, then. Let’s have a look at that magazine.
The cover story for the December/January issue is on actress Michelle Yeoh. (Have to admit the name didn’t ring a bell, though my wife provided an ID on Yeoh and her key roles.) There is a related piece on “Movies for Grownups,” and that too was informative because the films cited were mostly news to me. I have heard about one of the pics noted, about Bob Dylan—”A Complete Unknown.” It’s on my to-do list.
And I lately have become aware of movies and books featuring what might be defined as “elderly” protagonists, including the entertaining Netflix series, “A Man on the Inside,” with Ted Danson playing a retired professor hired by a private investigator to go under cover in a San Francisco retirement home.
Coming soon to Netflix is a show based on British author Richard Osman’s 2020 novel “The Thursday Murder Club,” about a group of pensioners who set about solving a case at their luxurious retirement village. That’s the first of three Murder Club books and, in a rare instance of Keeping Up, I’ve read all three. (Again, tipped by my wife.)
The latest AARP mag, by the way, quotes a D.C. neurologist’s recommendation for –ahem, “mature” folks—to read a novel, because he says fiction “is a challenge to your working memory,” requiring one to follow a plot and keep track of characters. Nonfiction, he said, isn’t so helpful, allowing the reader to skip around and skim.
Some more of my AARP current-issue discoveries: There is a fun interview of Danny DeVito; health tips on keeping limber in icy weather; money-saver ideas that financial ignoramuses like me could use (if I could pay attention to the subject for the first time in my life); an article on aging survivors of mass shootings; suggested travel destinations “for older Americans;” and the predictable ads—for hearing aids, cruises, life insurance. And one for a “safe walk-in tub.” (There’s a new trick for an old dog.)
All in all, it’s a publication I shouldn’t have been ignoring all this time. As someone who made a living as a journalist, I appreciate AARP’s tailored reporting and fact-checking, the bits of revelatory insight.
Also, its endurance: It’s 67 years old.