Pre-Boarding

My struggle with accepting senior perks

Photo by Irham Sahbana on Unsplash

A scrum began forming at the gate for the first leg of our flight to Italy. The decision to limit ourselves to carry-on luggage — freeing us of the specter of clothes disappearing into the bowels of Heathrow — now seemed questionable. The carry-ons felt like containers of Carrara marble we were returning to its homeland. We worried whether there would be space for them in the overhead bins. We worried that we could even lift them up there.

“Ask that attendant about pre-boarding,” my wife said. “I read that my Parkinson’s qualifies us.” I hesitated at first. It had been only a year since her diagnosis, and her symptoms were not yet apparent. And I have long been in denial about my own aging and growing infirmity. I appreciate the senior perks that come with this time in life, but some exact a price, an admission of one’s diminished state, which I am loath to make.

I have no problem clicking on “senior fare” at the movie theater’s self-service ticket kiosk. There’s a certain anonymity with that transaction. It’s just between me and the theater owner. The same with a bump to my standard deduction when filing my taxes, not to mention getting social security, and other government benefits. They’re between me and my government.

I do play the forward “senior” tees in golf, which one might say is a visible admission of decline. But I do that to play with my age-peers. I’m good enough to play from the regular tees. And I’m getting better. I may start playing the back tees with those cocky 20-year olds who spray the ball all over and three-putt every green.

And I will accept the help of a young, strong male flight attendant when trying to wrestle a bulky suitcase into an overhead bin. No shame there. It’s his job.

But one time a young, Twiggy-like female passenger offered to help me lift a bulky carry-on, and I viewed it as a challenge to my manhood. And on boarding a crowded bus, I will walk right past an empty row of seats labelled “priority seating,” even if it means sharing a seat in the back with the left butt cheek of a burly fellow who smells like he’s just finished a shift slinging garbage cans on to the back of a rear loader. Leave those other seats to blind people and pregnant women, I say.

When I turned 60, I consoled myself by saying the 60s are the new 50s. When that decade passed (sadly), I latched on to saying the 70s are the new 60s. But I must confess that my bravado took a hit one recent morning. I woke up and I was 80, an event that seemed to be celebrated by all my body parts groaning together, like dissonant notes of a Schoenberg piano concerto. Eighty, I discovered, is not the new anything.

I acceded to my wife and approached the attendant. She approved my request, though far too quickly to my liking. She took just one look at me. I had not even gotten to the “wife has Parkinson’s” part. She unfastened a rope from its stanchion and led us around the scrum. My reddening face and cast-down eyes revealed my self-consciousness about this special treatment.

It didn’t help that the only other person in our pre-boarding group was an Indian woman with a cane who looked to be 102 and spoke only Telugu. My wife, meanwhile, chose this moment to put a spring into her step and marched straight through like she was heading out to play a couple of sets of tennis. I felt the icy stares of the other passengers. I looked up and started to mouth the words “Parkinson’s Disease” in defense.

By the time regular boarding had begun, we were in our seats, our carry-on bags safely stored. I was lost in thought — wallowing really — thinking about a busy executive who traveled by plane to meetings to which he was invited to give talks to important and well-connected people, who felt at times he had the responsibility for society’s well-being on his shoulders, those same strapping shoulders that would occasionally elicit a flirtatious smile from one of the female flight attendants. What happened to that guy?

I was now one of society’s “cared-for.” I felt I had just passed through another veil of clouds, that I was one step closer to my own final descent.

My wife had a different take on the situation. “It seems the least I should get for having to take this bushel of pills every day,” she said, as she leaned back on her head rest and sipped her complimentary glass of champagne.

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