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People my age are getting up there

The mail brought notices prompting a you’re-kidding-me kind of reaction from yours truly.

You know how it goes when you’re thumbing through the mail — bills; junk stuff; flyers; money-please appeals; and an occasional honest-to-goodness card from a human being.

Then something stands out, something you weren’t really expecting, beyond the occasional honest-to-goodness card from a human being, that is.

One day’s worth of mail included two gems.

There was a Golden Buckeye card for me from the Ohio Department of Aging, which seems like a funny name for a department, doesn’t it? That it’s a department that takes its time and doesn’t make a lot of fast progress. Or maybe that’s where wine and cheese in the Buckeye State hang out for a spell before they’re ready for prime time.

Anyway, I did a double take with that one. I checked the address thinking this had been delivered in error and was intended for someone else. Someone older.

And Social Security sent one of those estimate reports detailing what I can expect to get monthly when I retire, depending on what age I am when I decide to do that.

It was all very official and frightening looking, not to mention irrelevant, right?

Retire?

A Golden Buckeye card?

At first I’m thinking several N/A translations regarding the correspondence — “not applicable,” “not appropriate,” “not aging.”

Then something clicked inside me. Something registered.

People my age are really getting up there in years.

I’ve had a number of “hmmmm” moments in support of this.

One of them came to mind when I was mailing a package earlier this week to my oldest sister, Linda, whose birthday is the first day of spring.

My older sister as in my older sister over 70.

The thought occurred to me that my four siblings and I, whose ages have spanned three decades, are kind of catching up with each other. Sort of. That age gap is tightening to two decades — the 60s and 70s.

Hmmm.

I had two grandparent experiences recently that were food-for-aging thought.

One of them was when I crossed paths with a high school classmate in the company of this adorable little girl.

My brain, however, can’t wrap itself around the reality that high school classmates are grandmas and grandpas, so I sought confirmation.

“So this is your granddaughter?” I asked, her response a beaming smile and acknowledgment of another grandchild, too. I could feel my eyes widen.

Our newsroom here is home to workers who have been in our own little “Ohio Department of Aging.”

If you added up our years of newspapering service, it’s more than 200 years of being on the job. Yikes!

I guess that’s proof that people my age really are getting up there.

And my guess is that they’re probably getting disturbing mail, too.

(Kiaski, a resident of Richmond, is a staff columnist and community editor for the Herald-Star and The Weirton Daily Times. She can be contacted at jkiaski@heraldstaronline.com.)

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