I'm traveling today. Back to my hometown. Each time I make this trip, more and more about Long Island seems foreign to me. More traffic than last time. Not much chance I'll see someone I knew once. And if I do, will we recognize each other?
On the back of the women's room stall at the airport, at just the right height for reading, is an advertisement for a new adult diaper. I commend the marketing genius who put this here because I'm betting that most of the women sitting here fit the demographic. And I know from a lifetime of being every corporation's target audience that -- for a few more years at least -- Baby Boomers will still be where the numbers are.
I study the woman in the ad, who has clearly never tasted red meat in her life and has to be a former runway model turned yoga practitioner, without a wrinkle or a gray hair. And no surprise that she is half of a great looking couple, on a beach. They are holding hands and skipping along, their bare feet remarkably four inches off the ground.
It's the perfect message, and this marketing wunderkind saw me coming: You can still look like a million bucks, and there's no way you'll pee down your leg when you cough! And as if that's not enough, later you and a ridiculously handsome man will check into an ocean-front room where he won't be able to take his eyes off you. You, my dear, still got it. You, my dear, will have it forever.
Diaper or not, I want to be her. I'm sucked right into the message, and then I smile at the last phrase, at the bottom: Located in the Incontinence Aisle. I wasn't aware that incontinence now had its own aisle, but I know my generation had everything to do with that.
Incontinence was nothing special until we started to gush when we sneezed. You're welcome, America.
As I board my plane, I begin to wonder how much time I have left before I have to shop in the Incontinence Aisle. I've been using the phrase "at my age" for a while now, and that's probably not a good sign.
There are more. They're subtle but piling up.
I can't remember the last time I got caught in the rain without an umbrella.
Or ran out of aluminum foil, or dryer sheets, or flour. I stock up on everything.
When I bend down now, I always look around carefully to see if there isn't something else I should be doing as long as I'm down there. I hope the cheerleaders from high school also have to do this now.
I'm not sure I'll ever remember to cough or sneeze into my elbow. And why did the coughing rules have to change?
I am still waiting to take a successful selfie.
There's a 100 percent chance I'll never use Uber.
I totally missed the demise of phone booths. One day they all just seemed to have disappeared from the landscape.
In his later years, every morning and every evening, my grandfather wrote down the weather in the little boxes of the free calendar he got from his newspaper boy. I'm happy to report that I'm not even close to doing that. But really, isn't the world spinning so much faster than it used to?
And for anyone keeping score (not me!) the weather sucked today. But I don't remember what it was like yesterday because I don't keep track. I swear I don't.
Earlier on Huff/Post50:
