DONUT shop cashier: “ID, Ma’am.”
My thought bubble: Huh? I need an ID to buy donuts?
Cashier, upon realizing I didn’t understand what she meant: “Senior Citizen ID, Ma’am?”
My thought bubble again: I’ve lost weight, colored my hair, I’m wearing sneakers, I just bought cinema tickets for “The Little Mermaid,” and I still look like a senior citizen?
This convo with the cashier happened right after my going back to the cinema counter because I forgot to bring the tickets with me. Haha! I took a photo of the tickets, sent that photo to a friend, and instantly forgot about them while taking selfies with the cinema’s “The Little Mermaid” décor.
Perhaps cashiers have a checklist for seniors: white roots, turkey neck, crow’s feet, bat wings, wrinkly hands, loose skin. My score: a perfect 100 percent.
Before going home, I dropped by a resto to buy my favorite no-sugar-added chocolate ice cream, and on my way out, I bumped into its glass door while texting.
So, it’s my brain that “deserves” a senior citizen ID.
These senior moments began a few weeks ago when I received this text:
“Hello. Ready for pickup na po ang cash grant for senior citizens. Pa-message na lang po ang office-in-charge sa (their email ad) ASAP.”
Obviously, the text sender was clueless about my age.
While attending a 60th birthday party, I took a breather after some line dancing. I was sitting there, looking at those who were still on the dance floor and realized, Oh, my gosh, we are old. There’s no way anyone would believe we’re still spring chickens unless the term “turkey neck” would morph into “spring chicken neck.” We were not dancing but merely following that saying, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
A friend doesn’t like line dancing—she likens them to Zumba classes. The first time she told me that, I didn’t agree with her, but now, yes, they do resemble Zumba classes, and there will come a time when you’ll see me joining such sessions at the mall because they’re fun! But for parties, to each his own.
I do see the logic behind line dancing. It’s exercise after the feast. And it encourages people with two left feet to join the fun. These are the people who would step on your toes, and push you off the dance floor because they’re going left instead of the choreographer’s right, and their arms are everywhere, unknowingly hitting a face here, elbowing a torso there.
There’s this production number where a dancer would go to the front of whatever side the other dancers were facing. Say, if they were facing the right side, she would move fast to the front of that right side. The choreography happened to have steps that would make them face right, left, and back, aside from the front, so she was running all over the stage. It was only when their performance was over that I realized she always had to stay in front of the other dancers so they could follow her dance steps. Apparently, only she had memorized the choreography. Or she was the choreographer?
With or without a choreographer, the best part of parties, though, is the people who are there. Not the dancing, not the food, not the venue. Still, we can always hope that the dancing will put some spring in the chicken.
