– by Trysh Ashby-Rolls –
“There’s a 100-year-old man under the counter waiting for pick-up,” the caller said.
“Poor man, he must be very uncomfortable, I’ll come right away.”
Off I dashed to the library to pick up the book, Jonas Jonasson’s The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared.
Allan Karlsson lives in a seniors’ retirement residence, where staff are preparing his 100th birthday. Mr. Karlsson is a spry old fellow – if he’s going to climb out a window he must be – but he really doesn’t want a party. There’ll be speeches and special guests like the mayor and frankly, he either can’t be bothered or he’d rather be somewhere else. So off he goes. In no time he’s having the adventure of a lifetime. In possession of a suitcase full of drug money, the police as well as drug dealers chase after him. But there’s more to the story than that. Karlsson walks across the Himalayas on foot, eats dinner with President Harry Truman, travels on a riverboat with Mao Zedong’s wife, and hitchhikes with Winston Churchill.
Which is all I’m going to reveal about that story. It’s pretty subversive, though, if you ask me.
And, as if The Hundred Year Old Man isn’t enough, there is Harold Fry, an equally ballsy if younger man, who at a mere 65, finds a letter in the mail from a dying friend. Harold writes a reply and goes off to find a mail box. As it turns out, Mr. Fry appears to have lived a small life: going to work, coming home, eating dinner with his wife, going to bed. Suddenly, he strikes out and, after walking from one mailbox to the next, decides to walk all the way from his home in southwest England to Berwick-on-Tweed, the town where his friend is in a hospice. During his 87-day, 627-mile walk, Harold Fry reflects.
These books are wonderful reads. They make a nice change from treatises on taking care of your bones, diets for one, how to prevent falls. A good laugh too, mixed in with pathos – truly stories of the human condition. Yet there seems something subversive about them. Are the authors of these books and their characters inciting we seniors to riot? Or at least rebel? Why?
In our culture, senior citizens are invisible except to each other. The spotlight seems always on the young. It’s easy just to sit back, watch the telly, do nothing, sink into depression. I’m with Allan Karlsson and Harold Fry. Let’s get up, do the outlandish, break routine, boogie. Moses Znaimer appeared to retire in 2003 only to re-emerge in 2005 to start ZoomerMedia, the hub of all things for the over-50 age group. He is still going strong. But then, they do say you can’t keep a good man down. However, you don’t have to go as far as Shigeo Tokuda. Married for more than 45 years and retired at 60, at age 78 he started a new career: He became a porn star.
