Retirement Planning

On my way to satisfy my falafel problem today at lunch, I witnessed a very elderly woman helping an incredibly elderly woman up the curb. The sight stopped me dead in my tracks. I'm not ashamed to say I may have even shed a tear at this touching scene.

Now before you chalk me up as some Tuesdays With Morrie-toting fruitcake, I've got some 'splaining to do. You see, I've always maintained that there are certain benefits to having your children at a younger age. For instance, the increased likelihood you may grow up to be a MILF (like me!). However, when I overheard Elderly #1 call Elderly #2 "Mom", a certain facet of early reproduction that had never before occurred to me jumped up and bit me on the face.

Hence the tear.

Studies addressing the demographic consequences of early primiparity do exist, and while some of them have focused on large iteroparous mammals, precisely none have considered the day approximately forty years hence when a seventy-year-old me helps my ninety-year-old mother cross the street. Perhaps we'll be accompanied by my middle-aged daughter trundling her hundred-and-four-year-old great-grandmother in a wheelchair, because surely the woman has been so thoroughly pickled in cigarette smoke and Pil that she'll still be around at that time.

We will be the Golden Girls, all by ourselves.

(Lord, please let me be the horny one.)

I raced back to my desk to email my mother but surprisingly, she took my curbside revelation in stride:

I've already thought of that, dear. You can come with me and the book club ladies. We're all going to move to the same nursing home and spend the rest of our days baking hash brownies and playing crib. TTYL.

Well, then. Now that my future is settled, I've only got one thing to say:

I'll bring my apron.