The Uninvited Discount
Well, it happened. I knew it was bound to happen. I could feel it right around the corner. That didn’t make it sting less.
I was given a Senior Discount. And I didn’t ask for it. It was given on sight. I was given a price for my sandwich in a drive through, but when I pulled around to pay for it I saw the window person look at me and then hit a couple of buttons on her register. Then the total she gave me was less than the total she gave me at the menu speaker.
Why do we have Senior Discounts? Is it because getting around is supposed to be harder for us so we get a little break at the till?
“Aw, look! The old man made it out of the house today, and he seems to be walking and driving almost like a normal human! It looks tough for him, though. We probably ought to make him pay less for his meal.”
Maybe it’s because we remember what a pound of bacon cost in 1974.
We give first responders and military folks discounts, but that’s because they’re not getting paid what they’re worth.
Maybe it’s sort of a prize? For avoiding all of the things that could have or should have killed me long ago.
I know what I look like, but I don’t know when that actually happened. I do get startled every time I accidentally pass a mirror. My reflexive thought is, “Who’s the old dude staring at me?”
But I don’t think it’s right to give someone a discount based on observation alone. Just like you don’t ask a woman how far along she is without having prior knowledge that she’s carrying a child.
We don’t even assume genders or pronouns anymore, but it’s OK to look at a guy and guess his age? Are the rings in my tree trunk that obvious?
Correlated, and this didn’t help matters, I recently saw a picture of my Dad from around the turn of the century. I remember the picture, and I remember the time. And at the time I thought of my Dad as old. Since he was born in 1940, that makes me the same age as him in the picture. Which makes me wish we could go back to my grandparents time and only take about two pictures our whole life.
Can someone please tell me what’s next? Are people going to start holding doors open for me? Are family members going to start making sure they get a photo with me? Is the funeral home going to start cold calling me? No pun.
Here’s an agreement we ought to have with servers: If we want a discount, we’ll ask for it. Otherwise, please charge us full price. I promise the ones who want it won’t be shy about asking for it. We’re not a shy bunch.
Before I got “here” there was a thing I noticed about the older crowd. I noticed, and maybe you did too, they seem to not have much of a filter. And I always thought it was because they were just too tired to keep up a social charade.
Now that I’m “here,” getting senior discounts on sight and all, I realized it’s not because of fatigue. Although I do take a little bodily inventory when the feet hit the floor each morning. But the filter doesn’t die with fatigue. The filter begins to die because we have figured out that everything will be OK. That nothing is really as important as we think it is in the moment. We have figured out, just based on the number of days on the planet, that all those times we thought our lives were over, well, turns out that was a myth.
All those times we thought we couldn’t survive, we did. All those times when we took appraisal of the situation and thought the devastation was irreparable, the wound healed. Scars, for sure. But healed nonetheless. And all of those times we thought we screwed up so bad that we couldn’t recover, well, here we are in a drive through ordering a discount biscuit.
