It was the unkindest cut of all. Being mistaken for 65 when I was miles – make that months away – from my birthday. How dare they?
It seems just yesterday when I was 10 for three years in a row.
It was the late 1950s and although the country was going great guns, my mother was stuck mentally in the Great Depression (the historical, not the psychological one) which meant that she saw no reason that she should pay full price for her son’s movie tickets, train passes, or admission to just about anything just because he had arbitrarily passed his tenth birthday.
“Remember,” she would whisper to me as were standing in line waiting at the movies and shamelessly announcing to the ticket seller, ‘One adult and one child.’”
“If anyone asks, you’re 10.”
And so I was, straight through my 11th and 12th birthday and was spared further ignominy only by reaching bar mitzvah age, whereupon the rabbi pronounced to the entire congregation that “today you are a man,” but I thought to myself, “I’ll never pay child’s price again.”
And so began my adult life and many years of proudly disclaiming discounts whenever they were offered. Buy one get two free, no thanks. One will suffice. Apply early and save, never. Cheaper after 5 p.m., I made a point to arrive at 4:59 just so I could say proudly: “One adult. Full price.”
I wore my commitment to full-price shopping like a badge of honor. In penance, I stopped claiming the half-price discount for my own children even when they were entitled to it.
“Why does daddy want me to tell the ticket lady I’m 12 when I’m only 11 and three quarters?” my eldest once asked.
“It’s a long story,” my wife said. “But the short version is, your father is crazy.”
And that explanation seemed to suffice until the day recently when I walked into my neighborhood coffeeshop, ordered my usual $2 coffee and received 20 cents change.
“What’s this?” I asked the clerk.
“Senior discount,” she said. “You deserve it.”
Now actually, in this case, I didn’t. The proffered discount stemmed from the small print at the bottom of the menu which no true senior could make out stating that “Senior discounts apply to those over 65.”
And that wasn’t me. Not by a long shot.
OK, maybe not such a long shot. Maybe more like a stone’s throw. Still, I stood my ground.
“Just take the discount,” my wife said. “You’ve earned it.”
And just how had I done that, I wondered. Simply by putting one foot in front of another in my march toward the grave?
Was I suddenly too feeble to pay my own way for an ice cream cone, or a merry-go-round ride? What is a senior citizen coffee anyway? I asked to no one in particular, a sure sign of the dotage that entitled me to one. Has it been standing around too long?
And now the unkindest cut of all. Being mistaken for 65 when I was miles – make that months away – from my birthday. How dare they?
“Where are you going?” my wife asked.
“Back to the coffee shop to return the 20 cents,” I said. “It’s the principle of the thing.”
“And what principle is that?” she asked annoyingly.
“That I don’t want the first thing that someone thinks about me to be that I’m a senior citizen. If some clerk wants to give me a dad’s discount, or a journalist’s discount, or a cool guy discount, OK. But a senior discount? Never.”
“Good luck on that,” she said. “Although I doubt there is an 18-year-old in the world who is going to offer you a cool guy discount. I’m sure she was just trying to be nice.”
“That’s the trouble with getting older,” I said. “Everyone is so nice that it hurts.”
Robert Chipkin can be reached at rchipkin@repub.com