I Am Officially Old

As we celebrated out 24th wedding anniversary last month, Tim held my hands, gazed deeply into my eyes and said, "Do you realize that your parents were only two years older than we are now when we got married?"

And they say romance is dead.

Thinking he couldn't possibly be right, I did some quick mental calculations, pulled out our wedding album, double checked our birth certificates, and registered at Ancestry.com.  I vividly remember my parents being old when we got married.  There was no way they could have been as young as we are now.

I remember them regularly falling asleep on the couch, staying home on Friday and Saturday nights to watch TV, and needing glasses and a 3000 watt bulb to read anything. They didn't "get" why everyone from David Cassidy to Don Johnson was cool and Frank Sinatra and Van Johnson weren't.  (Really?!  Frank actually had teenage groupies?  Aww.  C'mon.  You're making that up.)  And they absolutely, positively did not share our appreciation of Aerosmith, Meatloaf or anybody who recorded a song after 1963.

I mean, yes, maybe we occasionally might possibly rest our eyes for a few minutes while watching TV, but we don't ever fall asleep.  And perhaps we don't feel a pressing need to be out every weekend, especially if there is some kind of showdown on the Food Network or a really cool item shows up on Pawn Stars.  As for reading glasses?  Well, if they would stop "Micro"-ing everything these days, we'd be fine.  Just because the microchip caught on doesn't mean they have to print everything in minuscule font.

We are still young, hip and cool.  We not only know who Lady Gaga is, we have her on our ipods and at least one of us knows who Selina Gomez and Demi Lovato are.  We still go to concerts (Okay, so our last concert was Marvin Hamlish and the last movie we saw starred the Chipmunks, but that still counts.  Right?)

I actually had myself convinced that, despite hard evidence to the contrary, Tim was wrong, wrong, wrong.  And then I went back-to-school shopping with our niece last weekend.

Now, years ago when the older kids first discovered Abercrombie and Fitch, I gritted my teeth and went with them.  (Seriously?  You want how much for a shirt that looks like the one I threw in the rag bag last week?)  Ten minutes later, I stumbled out with a migraine and severely irritated nasal passages, swearing I would never, ever subject myself to that again.

But that didn't mean I was old.  Sure the music was loud and the staff all between the ages of 16 and 16 1/2.  Yes, the scent they pumped out with each beat of the music was nauseating, but that irritated lots of people, not just me.  Pretty much every parent felt the same, and they were not all old like my parents were when I was in school.

So this weekend, when we took my niece to the mall, and she wanted to go to Abercrombie Kids, my initial instinct was to recoil violently and make Tim go it alone.  Then I reminded myself that I am not old.  Besides, this was the young kids store, so surely it would be more user friendly for parents and young aunts and uncles.  So I grudgingly, but hopefully went in.

And that is when I discovered that I was old.  Very old.

Not only did they play the worst music I have ever in my life heard, they played it at ear-splitting volume through sixty-seven thousand speakers that were tucked into every nook, crevice and corner.  Standing next to a jet engine during take-off would be quieter. 

Did they not realize that while that may be acceptable in their teenager store where the kids don't want their parents helping select clothes, it was the parents who were doing the shopping here?  Seriously, who is going to give their eight-year old a credit card and say, "Go for it kid."?

I lasted as long as I could.  Honestly.  And it was the longest thirty seconds of  my life.  As I bolted for the door and the lovely, quiet heavy metal music playing throughout the mall, one of the sweet, young twelve-year-old sales clerks asked if she could help me find anything.  (Of course, she had to repeat the question several times, finally using a megaphone before I could hear her over the cacophony of sounds).

"Yes," I bellowed back, without stopping my mad dash for freedom, "my sense of hearing."

We went to GapKids and finished shopping.  Then, I picked up some brochures on retirement communities for Tim and myself.