Noah Joins the AARP

Here's something you may not know. When you turn 50, you start getting some very interesting invitations, many of them legal.

To be sure, there are other fantastic advantages to growing old, like outbreaks of persistent eyebrow dandruff. I'm still a bit unclear as to the beneficial function of this particular bodily activity, but I'm someone who likes to believe that all things happen for a good reason, and that makes me stupid, which is another advantage to growing old.

But at the onset of age fifty, there's a sudden perverse and pervasive interest in you, from various parties that never bothered to speak to you before, or haven't noticed you since you were in your twenties and immortal. Once again, you've become a target audience to marketers, and not just manufacturers of anti-eyebrow-dandruff miracle creams. Of course, marketers can easily find you now, due to things like the IRS, the US Census, and the fact that you were stupid enough to tell the truth in your Facebook profile.

For example, when you hit 50, Facebook starts targeting dating ads at you. The ads make the dubious claim that, somewhere out there in cyber-land, there are teeming hordes of young women, with names like Minky and saddled with serious glandular imbalances, desperate to meet you. These in-your-face ads feature oddly-positioned young women who, quite frankly, look like they're smuggling traffic cones, and they're all staring at you while inordinately leaning forward, as if they'd just dropped something on the floor (probably your eyebrow dandruff elixir).

The eager young Minky, of course, can't appreciate that your current Sowing Of Wild Oats status is somewhere south of "clinical coma." Remember, you've hit that age where simply sleeping on a lumpy pillow will malform your entire spine for the next 72 hours.

At this age, you no longer worry about appearances - you worry about appliances. At this age, you no longer try to stay awake all night - you try to stay awake all day. At this age, you're too jaded to want to be immortal, and too tired to want to be immoral.

And then, of course, there's the AARP. When these staggeringly relentless maniacs discover you've hit the Bea Arthur milestone, they lurch into a printing/mailing frenzy that would shame Publisher's Clearing House. Before you can even blow out that 50th candle, the AARP are shipping you temporary membership cards, and you need to know that they will keep sending them, approximately every eleven minutes, until that post-formative day when your family, friends, and the IRS show up to comment on how natural you look, lying there in the penultimate parlor.

You can also look forward to being pleasantly mail-bombed by many of the planet's finer pharmaceutical companies, which for some reason all seem to be based in Canada, or former Russian republics. You can generally recognize the unsolicited emails from these entities by the screaming virus alerts that fire off when one of their 'buy now!' teasers show up in your e-mailbox. These helpful homeopaths automatically assume that, at your advanced age, you have surely succumbed to the standard set of age-based ailments: you know, loss of hearing, more trips to the 'reading room,' a mild inability to consistently make Minky levitate, etc.

And these invaders will practically demand that you let them help you with what, in my opinion, is the single nastiest word in the English language. I won't ruin your afternoon by using that word here, but it rhymes with "Swimmer Droids."

It gets better. You may be contacted by molded young sales professionals with wind-tunnel-proof hairdos and permanent lockjaw who would like you to consider a 'reverse mortgage.' As best as I can tell from my extensive research in the reading room, this is a clever arrangement in which you un-buy the house you've worked your whole life to buy. Apparently, if you manage the timing just right, you can arrange to be Potter's Field fodder exactly 30 seconds before Minky sues you and your estate, claiming "irreconcilable differences."

(Since time is limited - mine, not yours - I'll glide past the relentless mailings you'll inevitably receive from funeral homes, graveyards, crematoria, and pro-choice groups telling you that it's never too late to abort yourself.)

"Old," of course, is a relative term, unless you're an older relative. According to the Bible, people used to live much longer than we do now. Or maybe, given some of the stories I've read about life during the Old Testament, life just seemed longer.

Imagine it. You're Noah. You're 945 years old. You've memorized every tired rerun on CBS (Central Broadcasting Scroll). Your eyebrow dandruff is flaring up. You're still recovering from that whole Ark episode, you've been hanging up on persistent AARP marketers for over 7 centuries, and you've got Pharisees crawling all over you about fathering a child with Minky when you were old enough to, well, to know better. Prophets and seers are running about, making snide Strom Thurmond comparisons. And if that weren't enough, you may need to visit the red tent to get some advice on Swimming Droids. You decide to duck out for a quick nosh.

But then that nudnik, Methuselah, the deep-fry guy and counter clerk at Baal Burger, cards you before honoring your Senior Discount.

And now you know what finally killed Methuselah.