Women have clichedly (new word?) been famed for "untold ages". Nothing takes as many years off a woman's age as the woman herself! In fact, about the only time a woman wishes to be a year older is while she's having a baby.
As a single senior I dated a single senior lady who was in an intriguing dilemma. She didn't want to have any more birthdays, but she didn't want to give up getting birthday presents either. Like so many ladies, she wanted to stop telling her age about the same time her age started telling on her. About all men could know then was that she was between the ages of consent and collapse.
Every woman seems to know inherently that the secret of everlasting youth is to lie about their age. That way, via planned forgetfulness, they can age gracefully through all the latter of seven stages: infancy, childhood, adolescence, junior miss, young woman, young woman, young woman.
Lying enhances the self image, I've been told, and, in some special instances, it can even become economically logical. Like in the story a census taker in Serman, Texas, once told. She was doing her duty all morn in one of the less entrancing sections of town and, having just finished an interview, she was leaving the building to go for lunch. Surprised, she heard, then turned to see the interviewee trotting pantingly down the sidewalk, calling after her.
"Lady, I done made a mistake," the interviewee greets her. "I done give you my insurance age, 36, but I should of give my government old-age pension age. That's 42."
Fine As Wine
We would all like to believe that, like wine, we improve with age. But we have to face facts ultimately. That's only true if the grapes were really good in the first place.
The other side of this subtractive (another new word?) thought, however, is that many women could add years to their lives if they would simply tell the truth about their age. Some get around to that radical idea eventually, about the time, as I stated earlier, their ages starts telling on them.
This is when math gets a working over. Women get a passion for tinkering with the rules of progressive arithmetic. They have their own "new math". According to the distinguished French playwright Marcel Archard, women will divide their age by half, double the price of their clothes, and always add at least five years to the ages of their best friends. That may be where Dr. Robert W. Williams, when associate professor of medicine at Boston University, got his proferred definition of middle age: "Someone 10 years younger than you are."
This touchy problem of age attribution is tougher on men than on women, of course. In discussing self-preservation methods with another single senior-dating male, I asked, "What do you do when a woman asks you to guess her age?"
"I guess my real guess to myself," he grinned slyly back, "then I knock off about 30% and, generally, come near to making myself adored."
Wisdom like that does not automatically come with old age, though. Nothing does, except wrinkles.
Age is, after all, relative. No two people age at the same rate, anyhow, other than mathematically. Thus, a woman should be only as old as she feels and looks - to herself, not to how she looks to another woman - mathematics be damned.
All of us should remember -that, no matter how old we are, we are younger than we will ever be again!
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