Our family was celebrating my seventieth birthday when my son, Kurt, asked, “How does it feel to be seventy?”
“It all depends on your health. The other day I came out of the store carrying a plastic bag of groceries in each hand on my way to walk the six blocks home. I passed your high school basketball coach struggling to get out of his car parked in a handicapped spot. We’re about the same age.”
Apparently in government, voters equate age with wisdom. Five of the candidates for president in the November election are at least seventy years old: Bernie Sanders, 78; Mike Bloomberg, 78: Joe Biden, 77; Donald Trump, 73; and Elizabeth Warren, 70. Those seeking office are trying to convince the American people they’re capable of running the country. The politicians aren’t cracking jokes like, “I think a lot about the hereafter. Every time I go into another room, I wonder, ‘What am I here after?'”
Dr. Daniel J. Levitin, neuroscientist, cognitive psychologist and author, said, “The difference in a short-term memory lapse in a 70-year-old and one in a 20-year-old isn’t what you think. The difference is how we self-describe these events. Twenty-somethings don’t think: ‘Oh dear, this must be early-onset Alzheimer’s.’ They think: ‘I’ve got a lot on my plate.’ The 70-year-old observes these same events and worries about brain health.”
Today’s females in their seventies don’t look like the pictures from their grandmothers’ era when ladies wore frumpy house dresses, wound their long hair in a knot at the back of their necks and eschewed face paint. Modern older women don fashionable pant suits, visit their hair stylist regularly and wear make-up sparingly. Cover Girl’s spokesmodel Maye Musk, 71, states, “They say at a certain age you stop caring. I wonder what age that is?”
How do you envision 70-year-olds?