By Edward H. Garcia
You get to my age and you start worrying about decrepitude. That’s not the same as getting older—which is inevitable, and it’s not the same as looking older, which in spite of Ginger Roger’s best efforts, is also inevitable. But I’m hoping that decrepitude is not. That got me to thinking about geezer voice and geezer walk. Geezer voice is what old people in the movies sound like, sort of Walter Brennan and Gabby Hayes. It sounds old. On the phone, you would not mistake someone with geezer voice for anything but, well, a geezer. Without taking any particular pride in the fact, I believe that I don’t sound like an old guy. And that’s true of the Men of a Certain Age I have breakfast with on Friday mornings. One of our number is a mere pup in his fifties, but the rest of us are on the downhill side of 60 (you talk about slippery slopes). We might all be gray and have to haul ourselves out of our chairs with a little effort, but we don’t have geezer voice. I’m beginning to think it’s a myth, sort of like the Texas accents you hear on television. Surely none of the very rich people in Dallas really sound like that.
Geezer walk is another thing altogether. We don’t walk like that character Tim Conway used to play on the Carol Burnett Show, the old guy who walked by sliding his feet ahead a half-inch at a time, but I do notice some stiff backs and creaking knees and wincing when some of us walk. For me it’s every morning when I wake up. I wake up a definite geezer and slowly warm up into what I hope is a reasonable approximation of my old pre-geezer walk. Wanting to “walk young” is not about vanity—well, not just about vanity—it’s about not looking like an easy target for a mugger. I haven’t noticed a lot of mugging happening on the Upper East Side of Texas, but one of these days I might find myself in Dallas, and I want to be ready.
None of my efforts will keep me from getting old. (My kids might amend that to “haven’t kept me from getting old,” but is that kind?) It won’t work any more than Grecian Formula or a toupee would. But I think I’ll settle for avoiding decrepitude.
