Shoppin’ With the Oldies

Funny how different life is when you are no longer shackled to the Monday-to-Friday, 9-to-5 grind.

How silent the middle of the day is after workers go off to work (no doubt to be underpaid and mistreated by their employers) and schoolchildren are carted off to school (no doubt to be confounded by eye-rolling, face-palm-inducing Common Core math problems). The only sounds you hear are the bang bang bang of a nearby condo construction project and the church bells that ring at noon. Around 3 p.m., you hear the harrumphing engines of the school buses as they disgorge their charges. In between, it’s complete, unnerving silence.

Yet, being unemployed, I can run errands and shop whenever I choose during the week. I don’t have to wait till the dusk of 6 p.m. or the weekends, when the malls and roads are packed with gainfully employed people who use their sparse free time to shop and run errands.

What have I noticed as I make my own schedule? Well, you can get some pretty sweet parking spaces at the mall. Doctor appointments are pretty easy to arrange, too.

The other phenomenon I’ve noticed? OMG! Holy Depends! There are a lot of old people out there! Where do they all come from?!

I’m not talking spry 60-somethings (who are probably still working to somehow afford a retirement that is increasingly out of reach for them). I’m talking about 80-year-olds with pale, wrinkled parchment skin, teetering on canes or walkers, and sometimes lugging those plastic shopping carts on wheels or even oxygen tanks.

I see them as they sluggishly shuffle from their ozone-busting Buicks to the store; as they clog up the aisles at Sears and Pathmark on their motorized Jazzy chairs. It’s gotten to the point where I pull out from parking spaces oh-so-slowly lest I bump into one of these meandering oldsters. (I think I annoyed one woman at a mall recently when I took too much time to exit the space she wanted. Hey, I have to be careful.)

Please don’t get me wrong. I respect old people. I hope to be one someday. However, with my checkered health history, that’s probably a pipe dream. And I’ll always let them cut in line in front of me. (It’s the right thing to do and you just look bad if you get into an argument with an old person.) I’m just making an observation here, like why do old people wear plaid so much? Did they all go to Catholic school? And please, please, old people, look before you cross the street. I'm a courteous driver (as well as a slow one) so I'll stop for you. Can't promise the same for other drivers.

Yet, given the aversion people over age 62 have to driving at night, I guess it makes sense that these AARP reverse vampires only come out in the daylight. I do see other “types” of people during the weekday daylights hours, such as those who don’t have traditional 9-to-5 hours like medical personnel in their scrubs. Or young mothers pushing babies in strollers. Are they stay-at-home moms, or on maternity leave?

I do sometimes see people of working age during the week, having a lunch, shopping or sipping coffee in Starbucks by themselves. Are they unemployed like me? Or enjoying a rare day off to themselves?

But mostly I see old people. A lot of them. Which makes me wonder: What do you think of me? A person of employable age out in the middle of the afternoon, scarfing down free food at Trader Joe’s?

What must they think of me?