The other day I received another AARP card in the mail. Immediately my shoulders rounded a bit, I felt an irresistible impulse to hitch my trousers to nipple height, and I developed a keen interest in the weather.
I’ve gotten AARP stuff in the mail before. On your 50th birthday, you inevitably get an AARP application as a special birthday treat. At 50, you can laugh it off — but the AARP is persistent. They keep sending you stuff, and sending you stuff, until they wear you down. There is a certain grim inevitability to the process. Once the AARP decides you should be a member, there’s nothing you can do about. You are caught up, inexorably, in titanic forces beyond your control.
This latest card is heavy cardboard and has the whiff of permanence about it. Its arrival moved me to verse:
My hair grows grayer
My face is lined
I’m looking older
But I don’t mind.
I ignore the years
Avoid my reflection
As my denial of age
Won’t bear close inspection.
But today my denial
Is impossibly hard
I’ve sadly received
An AARP card.
