"Old Person" is the Ultimate Other

[Editor's Note: below is a post by the editor]

I like this -- a blog post about old bodies from the Poetry Foundation's blog Harriet:

It’s scary to think about what your body is going to look like in forty years

At the swimming pool, I am an honorary old person—I get to swim with the senior citizens, who play volleyball in the shallow end and use the deep end for water exercise.
--snip--
Though at first I felt estranged from (let’s face it: scared of) my swimming partners, I’ve come to treasure being part of the group and making friends across a wide swath of life. The lifeguards sometimes play big band music, which annoys me because most of these people came of age with the early Beatles and Stones.

What I like best is the chance to see bodies. The girls on the synchronized swimming team are in the locker room when we leave, and though they are beautiful their bodies are not as compelling as old bodies, on which you can read the story of childbirth and illness and simply age, which lends interesting variegations and falling-(or-not-)ness to the flesh.

It seems to me that "old person" is the ultimate Other. Old person=not me.

Which, I imagine, is why it's so damn hard to embrace getting old.
(h/t to El Lewis)

--Kavan