Terry Prone: Don't tell me age is just a number — it is an assault on the body

Without warning, my legs failed. They seemed to fail at the knees, dumping me on my ass in a puddle

'It takes me a minute to cop to his message. He is offering to assist me across the road. No, take that again. He. Wants. To. Help. Me. Cross. The. Road.'

Glorious summer day, the warmth of the sun on my shoulders as I cross Adelaide Road in Dublin. I wait for the line of cars coming from the city to pass. Then one driver, infused with sun-kindness, halts and gives me a little beep when I send her a surprised thumbs-up.

Up to the traffic lights, then, feeling positive towards the world, as one has to on a good day in Dublin. From somewhere in the middle distance comes a random collective shout that has to be located in the Viking Splash vehicle filled with horn-helmeted visitors. A rolled eye from someone standing waiting with me to cross. That knowing self-affirming cynicism that’s a speciality of this country: Sure God help them, doesn’t take much to amuse a tourist.

A bunch of foreign students with roller bags are on the other side of the road, their Spanish trilling over the traffic. A sallow-skinned young man in his very early twenties, on the other side from the eye-rolling local, gives me the look that indicates he needs something from me. I generously nod go ahead, expecting him to ask me how to get somewhere. Why I am encouraging him, I don’t really know, given that I don’t know how to get anywhere other than Seusy Street, the restaurant just up a bit from our offices. I’m ridiculously confident in my direction-giving despite an unbroken record of failure. As I beam upon him, the young man begins to speak  — more urgently to get in what he wants to say before the light changes.

It takes me a minute to cop to his message. He is offering to assist me across the road. No, take that again. He. Wants. To. Help. Me. Cross. The. Road.

I was sorry, at that moment, that I was not carrying a handbag, ideally filled with lead pipes, because I would have felled him with it. Even surrounded by hundreds of witnesses who might put me in prison for common (or even uncommon) assault, I’d have belted him right in the kisser with it. Even if it had caused a diplomatic incident between Portugal, which seemed to be his country of origin, and Ireland, I’d have made a punishing connection.

The insult. The insult of him deciding that I was past it and needing help. Of course, I had not been moving that fast, but four-inch heels dictate a certain level of caution. 

Nothing to do with old age. Nothing to do with needing help. The very idea. I wafted him away with an effortfully casual smile and got moving, life’s internal commentator rabbitting the truth inside my head. He thought you were a little old lady. Because you are a little old lady. He was being kind. His mother would be proud of him. His nation, even, could be proud of him. The EU, possibly, could be proud of him. Grand lad, altogether.

Because I have a good aggressive internal commentator, it speedily began to answer back. Hell with him, his mother, and his nation. 

Insulting ageist little sod, and me prepared to give him bad guidance around the city. How dare he. He may have meant well, but that’s no excuse.

 Sweet Jesus, he thought I was a little old lady needing the assistance of his elbow to cross the street. I’ll never get over it. When l’esprit de lescalier kicked in, I swear I considered running after him and telling him my gait is dictated by a car crash thirty years ago, not age. Never age.

I much preferred the version of kindness-to-strangers encountered last year in New York. After a long day filled with meetings, I was headed for my hotel when halted by one of those walk/don't walk pedestrian lights. Along with at least twenty others, none of us looking at each other. Without warning, my legs failed, the way you hear reports of airplane engines failing. They seemed to fail at the knees, dumping me on my ass in a puddle. Before I could come to terms with this, a guy on my left and a guy on my right each hooked an arm under mine and pulled me back up. Not a word was spoken, other than by the traffic sign, which changed to a green instruction to walk, and off the whole lot of us went, the Manhattanites either not noticing or not caring about the incident. Neither guy looked at me, spoke to me, or wasted any more time on me. Job done. Job done, the way it should be done. Well-meaning Portuguese, take notice.

There’s no consolation for the damage done by kindness. Some kindness.

And don’t tell me age is just a number. Just don’t. Age is an ambush, a constant assault on hearing, eyesight, and balance, an accumulation of bureaucracy as you’re forced to prove you can still walk upright. 

The cliché about it being just a number is so immediately, provably false, its users need to check their own facts and intelligence.

 Nobody has ever said “youth is just a number” or “middle age is just a number.” Nobody tells a child toddling into Junior Infants that their age is just a number. That child knows right well that the reason she’s in Junior Infants while her brother is in Senior Infants is their relative age. Age matters.

Ever since the days of the Mods, the Rockers, and the Teddy Boys, we have herded young people into cohorts, all the better to stereotype and humiliate them. Today, one of those cohorts is the Millennial. They’re dubbed “snowflakes”, having taken on an image that is the polar opposite of that of groups like Teddy Boys, which relied for part of their identity on being vaguely threatening. They shared haircuts, wardrobes, and attitudes. Millennials share haircuts, wardrobes, and attitudes, too.

But for young people, those are recurring choices. For older people, none of it is a choice. The commonality of the old is created by surgical procedures specific to their age: mainly hip replacements and cataract removals. Almost every other procedure, including knee surgery, carpal tunnel rescue, and LASIK, exists without automatically herding those who undergo it into an age cohort. The fact is, however, that once you have to get the hip done or cataracts removed, in at least one area of your life, you stop being an individual and belong to a tribe with whom you have damn all else in common. Before the surgeon even gets to you with their marker to make sure they don’t attack the wrong hip, you’re age-tattooed by the very procedure, marked like those sloppily paint-slurped sheep on the side of a Kerry mountain.

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Hip replacements and cataract removals are among the most frequently performed surgeries and up top-of-the-class-kiss-teacher in terms of their success rates. They take years off your life.

The thing is, they simultaneously rejuvenate you while stamping you with your age — a double whammy.