Let Them Eat Cake (‘Cause They’ll Beat You to Death if you Don’t)
(Just as a forewarning, this essay is about the elderly and their mischievous, albeit humorous, quirks and tendencies. If you are offended by such conversation, might I suggest you grow some balls and pick up a copy of Reader’s Digest.)
There are many things that confuse me. Politics confuses me. Complex mathematical equations confuse me. Trying to understand why the last two tic-tacs are so damn hard to get out of the container confuses me. However, nothing confuses (and entertains me) quite as much as the elderly generation.
Take a gander at the geriatric crowd. The old people. The “our generation is the best generation” people. There’s more and more of them; they flood the aisles of the supermarkets on Wednesdays and cause traffic on the freeway. We all have an old person pet peeve whether we admit it or not (no one is a fan of a granny who takes forever paying for her groceries because she’s talking to the apathetic cashier about her cat Sophie who has the cutest laugh. First cats don’t laugh, second, no one cares about granny’s feline collection.) In this essay, I hope to bring to light the ticks and happenings of the old and infirm, not to make a joke of them or to publically humiliate them into changing their ways, but to acknowledge their behaviors and to say aloud what everyone is thinking (Gone are the days where one could laugh at one another for falling on the sidewalk or for accidentally drinking a spoiled glass of milk. Now we must be respectful and we mustn’t hurt anyone’s feelings. Bullshit, I say.) I don’t feel it has ever been done, and probably because other writers have more important things to write about. Not me.
I don’t mean to be blunt or disrespectful or even rude, but old people just aren’t dying like they used to.
Sometimes I blame technology for this. Modern medicine is such that if we are to get a disease, there are many different medications that not only cure that disease, but prevent another from forming. (One can see the danger in this. You’ll go to the doctor and he’ll prescribe you an anti-inflammatory that also prevents rabies. Does anyone even get rabies anymore? Doesn’t matter, you have the cure.) With the advances in medicine, who’s the first to get inline for new pills? You guessed it: old folks.
I wonder at times why these aged and learned people wait, sometimes for hours, in line to get the latest in say, flu medication. Do they not have anything better to do? I assume that most are retired, and I do see the occasional sickly looking person or child or paranoid redhead in line for above stated meds, but the old people (especially the healthy ones) love to tell people that they waited in line for flu shots, only to complain later that the line was too long (and that they’re getting to old to get shots). Experts say that the only people that should get flu vaccination are those who are very young or very old, so I understand that it is “recommended” to get medications. But does anyone really follow “recommendations?” I have a friend who is diabetic; this does not stop him from eating copious amounts of cake.
In addition to the shots and hospital visits, old people are quite proud of the pill collections that they have developed (I say developed because obviously they were not taking these meds as young children) and how often they need to take them. It’s not unlike doing homework; you have to remember which are the most important and must be taken first, which ones can be skipped (because teacher never checks), and which ones you take just because (extra credit). Many people have pill boxes. I had never heard of a pill box until I was about 15. Until then, I thought it was just a hat style. The boxes are segmented into days of the week, and some hardcore pill takers have them separated by day of the month. (perhaps this is because in addition to reminding which pills to take, it also helps with remembering the day of the month. Bad memory, you know…) I have also seen some rambunctious old persons put all of their pills for the week in a Tupperware, in sort of a grab bag way, and whatever pills they grab when their alarm goes off is the one they take (I am surprised at the age of these people for obvious reasons).
In addition to the pill boxes, or pill grab bags as the case may be, the old also always seem to have eating restrictions. No red meat. No high acidic foods after 8pm. No caffeine between the hours of 11 and noon. No egg on the summer solstice. With all of these dietary restrictions, I wonder when and what these people eat (After doing research, I discovered that many an old person enjoys the buffet, Old Country Buffet (OCB) in particular. Why? Simple: senior discount and it’s dinner anytime, which is convenient when you want to go to bed at 6:30 PM.) There is the occasional senior who doesn’t go out to eat because they are saving money or don’t have money, and they create wonderful dinner dishes at home (case in point: thanksgiving dinner. There is always that one dish that g-ma made that no one has ever seen before but is delicious in taste. Slightly alarming.) And for some families, the grandma always has a plate of baked goods on display that are, “just incase people stop by.”
(This was never the case for my family. My mother’s mom is a gypsy; I’ve mentioned this in previous essays, and so she doesn’t stay put long enough to make cookies or lemon bars or anything of this nature. My father’s mom is, quite literally, a mafia lord. I didn’t realize this until several years ago, but she always pays in cash, generally $100 bills, she always has a table ready for her at any restaurant she goes to without ever having made reservations, and she knows everyone. I realize this doesn’t negate her “grandmotherness,” but being Chinese, she doesn’t really believe in desserts that are not sliced oranges or grapes. And with her mob schedule, where would she have time to make such things? Don’t know. She does, however, always have lo mein on the stove nearly EVERY time I visit her. I don’t know if it’s because she knows I’m coming over, but it’s always there, without fail. So I guess what we lack in sugary snacks we make up for in carb-o-rific dinner dishes at any hour of the night.)
In my observation of old folks, from my booth at OCB, I have noted many eating habits, but the one that fits universally is the love of cake. Like their bathroom schedule, old people have seemingly come up with an alarm type system in which they eat their dessert of choice, which is quite obviously cake. The choice might vary from time to time, but 99% of the time, the chosen sweet is cake (multiple times even). At first I was quite confused as to why this was, and why this eating habit hadn’t been forbidden by one of the old person’s several doctors. I have yet to come up with an answer. I do have, however, several facts (both true and made up) about old people vs. cake that one might find interesting.
· Cake, more so than other baked goods, allows old folks to maintain a regular schedule. Like the information stated above, old people live by their alarms. One for the pills (maybe several for the pills) nap schedules, and now cake, which serves as a friendly reminder that the eating for the day is over. I’ve also noticed that old people depend on naps to tell them information like this as well.
· Cake allows for bonding. The memories of the old are fragile like eggshells, and if it’s not kept sharp, it falls apart. Bonding over cake eliminates this problem as when old people, as well as young people eat cake, they tend to reminisce about the good ole days, when beer cost a quarter and racism was legal, thus keeping them, for all intents and purposes, sane.
· Cake is something that goes well with coffee. And all old people drink coffee after dinner, so why not have some cake? (I mean, I could list several reasons as to why it’s a bad idea to eat cake but this is neither the time nor place for said argument). I once dated a girl whose parents would, regardless of the hour, drink coffee and eat cake after dinner/ before they went to bed. They were strange in this way, as sometimes this meant eating cake at midnight or later.
· They’ve earned it, so why not? I feel that there is no real argument against this without being bludgeoned by a purse or cane, as old folks are ALWAYS correct (sure). So I’ll leave it at that.
· Decorating cakes helps arthritis. This can’t be proven or disproven, but from the limited research that I have conducted, the old people that decorate the cakes they make claim that the decoration part of the cake making process helps them with their arthritis. Why they don’t take a Bayer is beyond me, and I don’t want to argue (see above).
· Cake is the only sugar they eat all day. This also can’t be proven or disproven, what with all the liquid diets that some old people are on because of the state of their teeth and what have you. This may be the only legit fact in this list.
· Size is an illusion. By this I mean that one old person could say that they only want to have one piece of cake. They fail to distinguish how large of a piece however, and because of the reason immediately above this one, we are unable to stop them. (Funny story: I was serving cake at a retirement home once and a lady asked for a small slice, and I gave her what I thought was a small slice. She then told me, “Oh, you can give me a little bit more” six different times, and by the time she walked away, she had taken nearly a third of the cake. Very tricky, that one.)
· Breaking tradition, like masturbation, is the work of the devil. Her mother ate cake after dinner. Her mother’s mother ate cake after dinner. Her mother’s grandmother ate cake after dinner. Break the chain, and you make several generations turn in their grave.
It recently occurred to me that this, or rather old persons eating an over abundance of cake, would imply that there is constantly a large supply of cake on hand at any given moment. I don’t mean to suggest that they carry around cake in a large Ziploc to munch on during the day (like the pills) but just cakes upon cakes in the refrigerator, freezer, etc. for consumption at a later time. Being a broke college student, I am appalled at this spendthriftness. (I realize that this is their money and that they can do whatever they want with it, but after all the lectures about, “wasting money on all that damn technology” you would think that they would practice what they preach. I’m not surprised, however.)
I have never really liked cake, to be perfectly honest. But in my experience it is never ever polite to turn down cake, or rather not eat the cake that is put before you. Not only will the host most likely never offer you dessert again, but also they might hit you (I have become increasingly scared of people hitting me lately…).
(It’s not that I can’t take a beating from an old lady; quite the opposite is true actually. I’m fairly good at putting up with being beaten by oversized bags filled with Ziploc bags containing “take-home” goodies from OCB (this only happened once). I think that being hit by old people only bothers me because I hate to disappoint old people. I mean, it’s inevitable that it will happen, but if I can prevent further catastrophe, I will. I’m ok disappointing my parents for some reason, with grades or whatever, because I think that they realize that I am nearly a lost cause. But to old people, it’s like I can make a fresh and new impression each time I meet them because 90% of the time, they have forgotten who I am.)
Old people and sports confuses me as well.
Not individually of course, but combined, I think that it’s a bit of an odd coupling. Did you know that there is a festival called the Golden Games? Imagine if you will a large gathering of athletes past their prime, or at least they should be past their prime, competing against each other in events that their bodies should not be participating in. Events like, say, high jump.
I don’t think the inventor of the high jump was very smart, to be honest. I believe he sat in his office thinking, “you know what would make a great spectacle? Seeing how far away from the earth people can get!”
“But papa, people can only get their feet so high off of the ground. How will this sport progress as time goes on?”
“I’ve thought about this: they’ll land on their backs.”
You can only understand my confusion as to why one would want to (A) want to see how high they can jump and (B) why they would want to land on their back; injury or even death would be a deterant for me, but I suppose some are more audacious than I.
I bring up the case of the high jump in relation to the Golden Games for one reason alone. Why? Why do they, they being the old persons, want to subject themselves to activities that people half their age don’t even do? I’ve pondered long and hard about this, and the only logical answer that I can come up with is that they do it because they can. No one can tell them what they can or cannot do (just as above no one can tell them, really, what they can and cannot eat.)
This in turn makes me wonder about the families of these golden oldies who are pole vaulting their way to victory. Do they have no concern for one another? If I saw my gypsy grandmother on TV with a limited amount of spandex on (bless her soul that she does not) running around a track or heaven forbid diving off of a high dive, I think I might legitimately have a heart attack. One’s body ages as if to tell the person, “Hey…maybe there are things that we shouldn’t do anymore.” So why then do they do it? Perhaps it’s not unlike a middle finger to society, albeit very politely.
(This brings to light the animated feature, Hoodwinked. More than just a great film, the characters in this particular piece of art are extremely dynamic, and I choose my words here selectively in as much as the grandmother figure, of Little Red Riding Hood fame, is a competitive, athletic, extreme grandmother who is tired of the conventions of getting old. She spends her days snowboarding and hang gliding and things of this nature, all unknown to Little Red. Not that this is realistic, nor should it even be considered possible as after all it is a cartoon, but still.)
I do believe that the elderly should remain active though. While running marathons may be good for some, perhaps it’s not for anyone. Some might say that golf counts, but I fail to see the athleticism in a sport where most people look forward to drinking after it’s all done. In recent years, water sports has become quite popular amongst the 50+ crowd, and most notable of which, in my opinion anyway, is water aerobics. Essentially a giant pool party, the persons involved follow a set of movements as dictated by the instructor (generally an altruistic, Lutheran college girl) and everyone goes home smelling like chlorine.
While I have never partaken in said water activity, I have observed it many times. (Not of my own volition of course. I believe my family was attending a funeral or a wedding [essentially the same event if you really think about it] and the hotel that we were staying in had a water aerobics class and I just happened to be in the pool area while it was taking place. I thought at first that they might be learning pool semaphore, the way that they were wildly waving their arms and such, but much to my surprise they were working out. Who knew.) After asking around, I discovered that this activity is popular amongst the old folk because the water allows for the “slightly larger” individuals to float and be just as weightless as the skinnier old people in the pool, thus leveling the “athletic” playing field.
(On an unrelated note, have you ever noticed that old persons come in one of two shapes, big or deathly skinny? I find that if you haven’t been eating away your age – as in the example of the large, pasta loving grandma – than you are the frail, elegant, would-be-queen-of-some-foreign-country, and deathly skinny, the grandma that eats a side dish of green beans at six in the evening and calls it dinner. I understand that as old people age even further, bone starts to deteriorate and one can shrink and odd body things begin to happen. I did not know, however, that the grandma that always forced you to eat extra food whenever you were over for the weekend would become the same frail woman that you are afraid of bumping in the grocery line.)
I also believe that there are many activities in which old persons participate to help their longevity that are age specific. By this I mean that there seems to be a bunch of things that old people do, that ONLY old people do. Examples of this includes knitting, crocheting, puzzles, baking tasty goods (see above), gardening, bingo, and playing with an abundance of cats. Notice the dexterity required to do these tasks. (with the exception of playing with cats, as you can just as quickly bust out a laser pointer and have a blast making Sophie chase after an unattainable red dot on the wall. I like to do this to my aunts cats. She hates it, but then again she hates when you don’t address the cats by their full names, so we know where her priorities are now don’t we…) having a large amount of dexterity is good for old people; those meds won’t pick themselves up, after all. Furthermore, dexterity allows for the elderly to have false hope about their abilities as they age. Sure they may not be able to rollerblade anymore (honestly, why would one start in the first place) nor are they able to ride in the Tour de France, but damn it, they can play a mean game of BINGO. And it’s what makes them happy, or so they say. (I sometimes question the validity of old people who say they’re happy one minute and then scream at the neighborhood kid selling magazines for his school the next. Hypocrisy knows no age line, I suppose.)
I don’t mean to lessen the amount of things that the elderly have accomplished; far from it. I just feel that once one knows they’re on the way down (in other words, dying) they should try to live it up. I sort of wish that there was a sort of “senior living” resort and casino in
(I have heard of such buffet actions on cruises, specifically Princess cruises. For whatever reason, the old people like to take pictures of everything; lamps for example. Why? Are you really going to look at this lamp later and say, “this was a good picture!” Doubt it. Further, I don’t understand why cruises -which are appealing to old folks as they are all inclusive vacations- haven’t gotten hip to the idea that old people eat at obscure hours, and it would behoove them to cater to these hours. They could all eat dinner and be in bed by 7 PM and then there would be no hold up when the rest of the ship comes in to eat. One more old person problem solved.)
We need old people; not in the way that we need money or worldly possessions or food, but we need them in the way we need, say, woodpeckers. We don’t really know what their function is- that is woodpeckers/old people- and it’s not our job to know. Sure they might make some noise every now and again, or maybe they surprise us by waking us up with their rumpus noises at early hours of the day, but their main focus is to bring a bit of happiness to our lives. This happiness is essential for people like you and me, who, at times can’t find anything funny or confusing in the world, and then we look over at an old lady in a park, talking to a squirrel, feeding it part of a Reuben sandwich. This kind of happiness.
Happiness, and a whole lot of laughter.
-t.
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