Growing old

NO, it does not have anything to do with graying hair. Our good friend Lincoln Baluyut, once The Voice publisher now Canada resident , had a shockful of silver streaks in his early twenties.
Nor does it concern an expanding forehead. Sun Star photographer Boy Sagad had always had that shining pate since time immemorial.
Yes, the physiological changes become more pronounced. The second or third chin and the mid-section bulge become great sources of jokes for the kids. The specs get either thicker or duo-fold – doble vista, that is. Tiredness comes easy. Sleep, even at mid-morning, even easier.
But the greatest changes that come with ageing are on the emotional plane. It simply is very difficult to let go. And grow gracefully and act graciously old.
Holding on to the last vestiges of youth, you still treat your prep-school kid as an infant and your junior high daughter as a baby. To their consternation both.
You start growing your thinning hair long. Vainly trying to recapture your flower-power psychedelic rage. At one point, you even consider reviving your horticultural talent with the beloved herb of your youth, the five-fingered cannabis sativa.
Finding no solace there, you turn into a curmudgeon. Fixed one-track mind. Fast in judgment. Faster in forgetting. Slow to forgiveness. Easy to resentment. Hard and obstinate in opinion of others. The kids grimacing every time you shout “Stupid monkey!” at just about every driver on the road.
A digression. No gender discrimination here. But one point has to be cited on the great divide between men and women growing old.
An ageing woman finding herself unattractive to men turns to God. See the number of manangs going to early morning Mass?
An ageing man finding his ageing wife unattractive turns to young sweet things. See the world full of DOMs with willing YDGs, that’s young golddiggers, dummy. In the States, they call them trophy wives.
In recent years though, the gender chasm has narrowed. The ballroom dancing craze and its resident DIs or “attorneys” serving as the equalizers. Wrinkled matrons tripping the light fantastic with dashing swains. Toupeed chaps swinging, sashaying with succulent young things.
Back to track. Shucks, if this is any way of growing old, who would not want to die young?
I remember an essay I wrote in college – more than 20 years back – on my greatest obsession in life. To die at an early age, I penned. So that I could taste the ultimate in greatness: To be young, gifted, and dead.
I am not young anymore. I have wasted a lot of talents. And I am not even dead. But only coming to grips with ageing.
It is not all bitterness there is to growing old though. So long as one also grows up. As that clichéd birthday wish says, “May you grow in grace, as you grow in age.”
Despite the years, I still greet myself a happy birthday then. Thanks to those who remembered. And find me still one chap to be happy with.
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WOW. Seems only yesterday, but that piece was written 11 years ago, appearing in my Golpe de Sulat column in the Sun Star Clark issue of February 12, 1997.
God, I did not grow old. Alas, I just stayed old.