This was the heading that screamed from the top of an advertisement for a local retirement community. The picture below the headline showed a gray-haired woman in a beret (a beret?) playing a lute while a goateed gentleman leaned on a railing looking on admiringly. They were smiling at one another in mutual admiration.
What can one take away from this picture with its heading? Have we older folk lived a lifetime of 55 plus years and never been unique? Is old age our only chance to live it up, and gratify our secret desire to play the lute which we have repressed all of the decades that preceded this moment? Or is it a statement that we can kick over the traces of the younger generation’s stereotyping of us as grandparents, rocking quietly on the porch as we gently glide into senility? Is it now our moment to learn to tap dance, to become the next Monet, or to star in the yearly musical?
And there is yet another problem with the advertisement. It pictures one man and one woman. To be accurate it should have at least seven lute playing, beret-wearing women to the one man. And we all know why he is smiling. As one older gentlemen told me once in a retirement home as the ladies flocked to sit at our table, “The secret to success with the opposite sex is to outlive your competition.” Is that picture meant to represent a married couple, (and after 50 plus years of marriage that man cannot be that enthralled with the lute), or is it meant to represent the possibilities of being collected together in an age-appropriate dating pool.
I suppose that picture is dreamed up by some forty-year-old advertising executive who has perhaps left all those various possibilities out there for the prospective residents to imagine. But there is one thing I know for certain. If you have not figured out that you are unique by the age pictured in the advertisement, where you live will not make that any clearer.