Old People Like Floral Patterns

It is not an entrenched holdover from the glory days of the Old Person in which floral prints were popular. Floral prints were never popular. When you become an Old Person, you simply like stuff with flowers all over it. It calms the blood.

Old People Have Type 2 Diabetes

…and continue to eat the rich, heavy foods they always have. And really, why should they stop now? They’ve gone this long.

Old People Love America

They fought in the war and stuff, so they deserve some damn respect. However, seeing an extremely Old Person in their old military uniform, hunched over, walking down the street every so slowly in a parade, pausing only to shakily salute the flag is pretty much the saddest thing ever.

Old People Hate Cellular Phones

Like debit cards (see previous entry), Old People vehemently loathe and distrust cellular phones because they are a technology that dared to exist after they turned 35. Old People like things the way they are, and for them, that means the inconvenience of tethered, dialed telephones rented from the phone company with cost-prohibitive long distance. Old People like and nostalgize things “the way they were,” even if they were rotten. So there is no chance they will use a cell phone. Also, like debit cards, Old People will claim not to use their cell phone (usually procured as a gift by a well-meaning but naïve Young Person relative) because, “nobody told them how to use them.” Nobody told the Old People how to use their cellular phones because 1) it’s a telephone, 2) the purchase of a cellular phone includes a gigantic manual, even though it’s just a telephone. The manual contains extremely small print, which Old People, who have terrible vision, will refuse to read. And Old People do not ask for help, ever: they are the proud generation who fought off Napoleon and Red China and can do very well for themselves thank you very much, if you will excuse them while they get lost on the way to the grocery store down the street and run over a tree in the process because they are blind and also forgot to eat today.

Or, it’s because the lack of a dial tone confuses them and goes against everything they’ve ever understood about the way phones work. Also, they think it will somehow cost $1,000 a minute, even if they call you on the weekend.

Old People Like Mall Walking

Not only does walking around the perimeter of a mall burn a gut-busting 10 calories an hour, but it allows Old People the privilege of being out in public. It’s a pretty sweet deal – for free, Old People get to “exercise” in what they think are gorgeous shoppng pavilions, but because the mall walking occurs before business hours, the Old People may avoid teenagers, gang bangers, loiterers, high-pressure salesmen, and all other unsavories that populate shopping malls. The early hour is also handy if the Old People get lost – they are much easier to find in an empty mall than a full one. And as a benefit to the rest of us, they are gone and back in the Home Van by the time the mall opens at 10. This is necessary to the survival of the shopping mall, and thus the economy as a whole. Those engaging in retail therapy  are looking to buy stuff to fill the void in their souls caused by aging, mortality, and their own failings. They don’t need a (barely) living, haunting reminder of all that – Old People – when they’re trying to buy khakis, ankle boots, and horse-sized cinnamon rolls.

Old People Write Checks

• Old People hate modern technology, such as debit cards, which they don’t use because “nobody told [them] how to use the darn thing.” This is something Old People say a lot when they don’t know the ins and outs of something incredibly basic – nobody taught them how to use self-explanatory technology (see also: cell phones, video devices).

• The handful of Old People that may have once used a debit card don’t anymore because their money got stolen because they used “1234″ as their PIN.

• Old People like cursive writing, and checks are one of the few opportunities where it can be utilized.

• In the olden tymey days, where Old People once lived, only really fancy rich people had checking accounts. Everybody else paid for things with coins, buttons, and livestock. When they write checks today, Old People feel like really fancy rich people.

• Checks are a great way for Old People to kill a few more minutes of their tedious, waning days while simultaneously fostering a false sense of importance by taking forever to write a check.

Old People Like to Tell Everybody That They Are “A Senior Citizen”

Because otherwise, how would we know?

Old People Anachronistically Like Lawrence Welk

The Old People of today grew up in the ‘50s, so theoretically they should be forever attached to the pop culture of that time, things like poodle skirts, Pat Boone, and cheerful segregation. And yet, the easy listening stations still play Glenn Miller and your local PBS affiliate still runs The Lawrence Welk Show every Saturday night. Because Old People, who enjoy public television because it is both free (like other network TV), and incredibly slow-paced (unlike other network TV) enjoy Glenn Miller and The Lawrence Welk Show. But no matter their precise vintage – 70 years old, 80 years old, 81 years old – Old People will always do and like the same things done and liked by previous generations of Old People. The Old People of three decades ago would claim that ice cream once cost a nickel. It did. Today’s Old People do the same – but ice cream has cost well over a dime since the late 1940s. Similarly, Old People enjoy this bizarre, pastel-colored, German-laced polka-and-standards show out of nostalgia. That may be, but if so, it’s out of nostalgia for watching it with their grandparents. And so, today’s Young People will one day watch The Lawrence Welk Show, simply because they will be Old People. Perhaps it is because Death is nigh for Old People, and Heaven probably looks a lot like the set of The Lawrence Welk Show.

Old People Are So Proud of You for Graduating

Now, you’re not such a bigshot that you can’t come over here and give your Grandpa a nice, firm handshake, are you, Young Man?

Old People Love Hard Candy

The usefulness of the taste buds of an Old Person have dwindled to near zero at this point in their lives, lo, these same taste buds that once tasted ketchup-soaked porterhouse steaks, the glorious defeat of Tojo, and the supple, milky breasts of Maragaret Truman. The closest an Old Person can get now to enjoying the taste of something, anything, is with the powerful, near painful (to the Young Person) sweetness of hardened, sticky, individually-wrapped butterscotch discs. Also appealing to Old People are that they are a bargain, as a bag of 500 butterscotch candies costs about a dollar, lasts forever, and don’t have to be stored in that pesky electronic thugamaboo – a pocketbook or porcelain dish will do nicely.