Circled in Red
Somewhere there is a calendar with my name on it, and somebody has circled a date in red.
I know this because the mail told me. About six months before my sixty-fifth birthday, the mailbox at the end of the driveway began filling the way a gutter fills in October. Medicare Advantage plans. Medicare Supplement plans. A plan that appeared to supplement the supplement. Term life insurance, offered in the gentle tone people use when they’re talking someone down off a ledge. AARP, which had been circling for a decade, landed on the porch rail like a buzzard that had finally done the math.
Then McDonald’s offered me a senior discount on a sandwich. A company has looked at my birth certificate and decided the humane thing is to mark down the item most likely to finish the job.
The phone joined in shortly after. My feed, which used to be mostly golden retrievers, now shows me a woman in her seventies doing chair yoga in matching athleisure, smiling as if she’s just heard about my knees. The caption says I could look like THAT. I’ve had five surgeries on my shoulders and knees. When I rise from a chair I sound like someone stepping on an aluminum can. The chair has not been the obstacle.
I began to suspect coordination. I spread the evidence across the kitchen table the way television detectives pin photographs to a corkboard. Winston walked straight across it and lay down on the term life offer. Winston has never respected an investigation.
The evidence kept arriving. Knee braces, modeled by a man who wore his like a championship belt. A back support promising I’d feel twenty again, an age I remember mostly for the rent. Balms for my “active days,” which assumes facts not in evidence. And the serums. So many serums. Each one came with a before-and-after photo of a stranger whose face had been pressed like a dress shirt, and each one asked whether I was ready to turn back the clock.
I have been back. The knees came with me.
Every one of these ads works from the same assumption: somewhere inside me a twenty-five-year-old is pounding on the glass, desperate to get out. I’ve met that fellow. He was certain about everything and right about very little. He owned one good shirt and wore it to every occasion, including two funerals and a job interview. He could not have written a decent paragraph about a dog. I would not hire him, and I am not inclined to give him the house.
The wrinkles have provenance. The furrow above my nose came from thirty years of reading other people’s speeches at two in the morning. The lines at the corners of my eyes came from laughing, usually at the wrong moment and usually in church. The gray showed up the year Connor learned to drive. The knees I spent the way a man spends money at a county fair, freely and with no regrets until the next morning.
The kitchen table has rings from thirty years of Diet Sundrop and tea. Nobody has ever mailed me a coupon to sand them off.
So I’ve decided to cooperate. This morning I sat down at that table with a pen and a book of stamps and answered every one of them. Yes, I would like to look twenty-five again. Please send him at your earliest convenience. He can carry the dog food.
Belinda read over my shoulder, set a bottle of vitamin D on top of the stack, and went back to her tea. Captain lifted his gray muzzle to see what the fuss was, decided it wasn’t worth getting up for, and went back to sleep.
