Dave Barry Turns Fifty Read online

  “SURE TO PLEASE HIS FANS.”

  —The New York Times

  Barry “will prompt most baby boomers to laugh out loud … His chapters on retirement planning and facing mortality are not only funny but right on. ‘Right on’—you remember that phrase, don’t you?”

  —Atlanta Journal & Constitution

  “Barry’s light-hearted, Everyman humor and what-me-worry grin have evoked comparisons with Mark Twain and Will Rogers, and earned him the Washington Post designation of America’s Humorist.”

  —San Francisco Examiner

  “With age comes wisdom, among other ailments. [Barry’s] no longer the happy-go-lucky, long-haired weirdo of his youth. Now the long hair sprouts from his ears. Getting older may be inevitable, but as Barry shows, there’s no reason to take it with a straight face.”

  —BookPage

  “It’s the look back at TV commercials, politics, inventions, and attitudes that really makes those who have seen it all (much of ‘it’ through trifocals) chortle out loud. It’s not unlike an archeological dig through an attic, choking from laughter rather than dust, as familiar and forgotten memories are refreshed and taken for a satirical synaptic spin by a master humorist.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Guess you’d better buy this book now while you can still read the print.”

  —Library Journal

  “A bushel of chuckles for readers.”

  —Booklist

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1998 by Dave Barry

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada, Ltd., Toronto.

  Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-90674

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77804-8

  This edition published by arrangement with Crown Publishers, Inc.

  v3.1_r1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1. Introduction: It’s Great to Be 50!

  2. The Early History of the Boomers: Hey, the World Wasn’t Exactly Perfect When We Got Here.

  3. The Fifties: Domestic Prosperity. International Tension. Buffalo Bob.

  4. The Sixties: Hell Yes, We Inhaled.

  5. The Early Seventies: Maturity Rears Its Ugly Head.

  6. An Invitation to Boomers Reaching 50: Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose But … But …

  7. Tips on Looking Young (Fact: Dick Clark Actually Died in 1972.)

  8. 25 Things I Have Learned in 50 Years

  9. Sending Your Child to College (Remember: You Don’t Need Both of Your Kidneys.)

  10. Planning for Your Retirement: A Sensible Proposal

  11. 10 Signs That You Might Be Losing It

  12. Confronting the Inevitability of Death: You Go Ahead. I’m Gonna Watch The Simpsons.

  13. Conclusion: Looking Forward to a Brighter, Better Future. Or Whatever.

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  1

  INTRODUCTION

  It’s Great to Be 50!

  Right. And Herbert Hoover was a rap singer.

  I am NOT going to whine.

  Yes, I have turned 50.

  Yes, this is an age that I used to consider old. Not middle-aged, like Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore in The Dick Van Dyke Show; but actually old, like Walter Brennan as Granpappy Amos in The Real McCoys, gimping around cluelessly in a pair of bib overalls and saying things like “Con-SARN it!”

  But I do not choose to dwell on the negative. I choose to be an optimist, like the great explorer Christopher Columbus, who had a dream that he could sail a ship all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. People said he was crazy, but Columbus did not know the meaning of the word “discouragement.” (He also did not know the meaning of “nostril” or “weasel,” because he spoke Italian.)

  And so Columbus boldly set out and discovered the New World, and then he went back to Europe, where he died in obscurity at age 55, which is only five years older than I am right now! OH GOD! MY LIFE IS OVER!!!

  No, scratch that. I really am going to be positive in this book, instead of dwelling on the negative aspects of turning 50, such as that you get wrinkled and forgetful and achy, and you gain weight merely by watching food commercials, and the warranties are expiring on all your remaining teeth and internal organs, and your idea of a big night is to stay up late enough to see the previews for Letterman, whose actual show you have not watched since the Reagan administration.

  I am not going to dwell on those things, nor am I going to mention the fact that when you get to this age, you discover random hairs sprouting from unexpected sectors of your body, so that, in addition to all the other little maintenance tasks you’ve always performed each day, you find yourself asking questions like: Did I remember to pluck my ears?

  And I am not going to even mention the word “prostate.”

  Instead, I’m going to talk about the good things that happen to you when you turn 50, such as …

  Okay, give me a minute here …

  All right, here’s one: You can’t read anything. At least I can’t. Actually, this started happening to me when I was 48; I started noticing that when I tried to read restaurant menus, they looked like this:

  Entrees

  Broasted free-range fennel shootlets with modules of prawn — $19

  Pecan-encrusted apricot-glazed garlic-enhanced shank of frog — $27

  Liver “en Fester” dans une bunche de crème de corne — $21

  At first I thought that this had nothing to do with me—that, for some reason, possibly to save ink, the restaurants had started printing their menus in letters the height of bacteria; all I could see was little blurs. But for some reason, everybody else seemed to be able to read the menus. Not wishing to draw attention to myself, I started ordering my food by simply pointing to a likely looking blur.

  ME (pointing to a blur): I’ll have this.

  WAITER: You’ll have “We Do Not Accept Personal Checks”?

  ME: Make that medium rare.

  Pretty soon I started noticing that everything I tried to read—newspapers, books, nasal-spray instructions, the United States Constitution—had been changed to the bacteria-letter format. I also discovered that, contrary to common sense, I could read these letters if I got farther away from them.1 So for a while I dealt with the situation by ordering off the menus of people sitting at other tables.

  “I’d like to order some dessert,” I’d tell the waiter. “Please bring a menu to the people at that table over there and ask them to hold it up so I can see it.”

  Eventually I had to break down and buy those reading glasses that are cut low so you can peer over the top. The first time you put on a pair of those is a major milestone in your life. Because there is no question about it: This is the start of your Senior Citizenship. The transformation is comparable to the one Clark Kent goes through: He takes off his glasses and becomes Superman; you put on your reading glasses and become … Old Person.

  You find that with your reading glasses on you behave differently. You become crotchety and easily irritated by little things, such as when the supermarket runs out of your preferred brand of low-fat, low-sodium, vitamin-fortified, calcium-enriched, high-fiber, non-meat “breakfast links” made from tofu and compressed cardboard. You become angry at the radio because it keeps playing songs you hate, which is a LO
T of songs, because you basically hate every song written since the Beatles broke up, and you’re sick of the Beatles, too, because you’ve heard every one of their songs 900 million times on “oldies” radio, which is all you’ve listened to for over twenty years. You feel that everybody except you drives too fast. You think of people under the age of 30 as “whippersnappers,” and you get the urge to peer over your glasses at them and tell them how tough things were during the Great Depression, even though you personally were born in 1947. Sometimes you are tempted to say, “Con-SARN it!”

  So, to avoid transforming into Old Person, you tend to wear your reading glasses as little as possible. You lose them. You go out without them. The result is, much of the time, you can’t read anything printed in letters smaller than Marlon Brando.

  But what I’ve discovered—this is the positive aspect of aging that I’ve been driving at—is that very often not being able to read is a good thing. For example, without my reading glasses, the only part of the newspaper I can read is the headlines, so my front page looks like this:

  FIGHTING ERUPTS YET

  AGAIN IN MIDDLE EAST

  Historic Peace Accord No. 2,965,978 Goes Down the Crapper

  This doesn’t say anything. This is just a bunch of words I wrote here to make it look like there’s a story under the headline. If you have gone to the trouble of blowing this up so that you can read it, let me just say: Congratulations, you have even more spare time than I do, which is saying a LOT.

  But seriously, I really have absolutely nothing to tell you here, unless you want me to solve some mysteries that have totally baffled the human race, such as what is the true meaning of life, and whether there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and which, really, is the best long-distance carrier for you. Would you like me to tell you those things? You would? OK! I will, then! But first I want to tell you exactly who was responsible for the Kennedy assassination. Ready? Here goes: The Kennedy assassination was committed by

  This doesn’t say anything. This is just a bunch of words I wrote here to make it look like there’s a story under the headline. If you have gone to the trouble of blowing this up so that you can read it, let me just say: Congratulations, you have even more spare time than I do, which is saying a LOT.

  But seriously, I really have absolutely nothing to tell you here, unless you want me to solve some mysteries that have totally baffled the human race, such as what is the true meaning of life, and whether there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and which, really, is the best long-distance carrier for you. Would you like me to tell you those things? You would? OK! I will, then! But first I want to tell you exactly who was responsible for the Kennedy assassination. Ready? Here goes: The Kennedy assassination was committed by

  This doesn’t say anything. This is just a bunch of words I wrote here to make it look like there’s a story under the headline. If you have gone to the trouble of blowing this up so that you can read it, let me just say: Congratulations, you have even more spare time than I do, which is saying a LOT.

  But seriously, I really have absolutely nothing to tell you here, unless you want me to solve some mysteries that have totally baffled the human race, such as what is the true meaning of life, and whether there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and which, really, is the best long-distance carrier for you. Would you like me to tell you those things? You would? OK! I will, then! But first I want to tell you exactly who was responsible for the Kennedy assassination. Ready? Here goes: The Kennedy assassination was committed by

  SOCIAL SECURITY

  SYSTEM COLLAPSING

  You, Personally, Will Never Get a Cent HAHAHAHAHAHA

  This doesn’t say anything. This is just a bunch of words I wrote here to make it look like there’s a story under the headline. If you have gone to the trouble of blowing this up so that you can read it, let me just say: Congratulations, you have even more spare time than I do, which is saying a LOT.

  But seriously, I really have absolutely nothing to tell you here, unless you want me to solve some mysteries that have totally baffled the human race, such as what is the true meaning of life, and whether there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and which, really, is the best long-distance carrier for you. Would you like me to tell you those things? You would? OK! I will, then! But first I want to tell you exactly who was responsible for the Kennedy assassination. Ready? Here goes: The Kennedy assassination was committed by

  This doesn’t say anything. This is just a bunch of words I wrote here to make it look like there’s a story under the headline. If you have gone to the trouble of blowing this up so that you can read it, let me just say: Congratulations, you have even more spare time than I do, which is saying a LOT.

  But seriously, I really have absolutely nothing to tell you here, unless you want me to solve some mysteries that have totally baffled the human race, such as what is the true meaning of life, and whether there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and which, really, is the best long-distance carrier for you. Would you like me to tell you those things? You would? OK! I will, then! But first I want to tell you exactly who was responsible for the Kennedy assassination. Ready? Here goes: The Kennedy assassination was committed by

  This doesn’t say anything. This is just a bunch of words I wrote here to make it look like there’s a story under the headline. If you have gone to the trouble of blowing this up so that you can read it, let me just say: Congratulations, you have even more spare time than I do, which is saying a LOT.

  STUDY: EGGPLANT

  CAUSES CANCER

  Same Study Also Shows That Lack of Eggplant Causes Cancer

  But seriously, I really have absolutely nothing to tell you here, unless you want me to solve some mysteries that have totally baffled the human race, such as what is the true meaning of life, and whether there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and which, really, is the best long-distance carrier for you. Would you like me to tell you those things? You would? OK! I will, then! But first I want to tell you exactly who was responsible for the Kennedy assassination. Ready? Here goes: The Kennedy assassination was committed by

  This doesn’t say anything. This is just a bunch of words I wrote here to make it look like there’s a story under the headline. If you have gone to the trouble of blowing this up so that you can read it, let me just say: Congratulations, you have even more spare time than I do, which is saying a LOT.

  But seriously, I really have absolutely nothing to tell you here, unless you want me to solve some mysteries that have totally baffled the human race, such as what is the true meaning of life, and whether there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and which, really, is the best long-distance carrier for you. Would you like me to tell you those things? You would? OK! I will, then! But first I want to tell you exactly who was responsible for the Kennedy assassination. Ready? Here goes: The Kennedy assassination was committed by

  This doesn’t say anything. This is just a bunch of words I wrote here to make it look like there’s a story under the headline. If you have gone to the trouble of blowing this up so that you can read it, let me just say: Congratulations, you have even more spare time than I do, which is saying a LOT.

  GIANT ASTEROID

  WILL SMASH EARTH TODAY;

  HUMAN RACE DOOMED

  Professional Baseball Players Strike for Higher Salaries

  This doesn’t say anything. This is just a bunch of words I wrote here to make it look like there’s a story under the headline. If you have gone to the trouble of blowing this up so that you can read it, let me just say: Congratulations, you have even more spare time than I do, which is saying a LOT.

  But seriously, I really have absolutely nothing to tell you here, unless you want me to solve some mysteries that have totally baffled the human race, such as what is the true meaning of life, and whether there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and which, really, is the best long-distance carrier for you. Would
you like me to tell you those things? You would? OK! I will, then! But first I want to tell you exactly who was responsible for the Kennedy assassination. Ready? Here goes: The Kennedy assassination was committed by

  This doesn’t say anything. This is just a bunch of words I wrote here to make it look like there’s a story under the headline. If you have gone to the trouble of blowing this up so that you can read it, let me just say: Congratulations, you have even more spare time than I do, which is saying a LOT.

  But seriously, I really have absolutely nothing to tell you here, unless you want me to solve some mysteries that have totally baffled the human race, such as what is the true meaning of life, and whether there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and which, really, is the

  See what I mean? I don’t want to read those stories. I’m glad they’re written in bacteria letters. This is also how I feel about the long, scary Consumer Advisories that appear on virtually every product I buy, advising me how potentially deadly it is, like this:

  WARNING: Use of this product may cause nausea, insomnia, euphoria, déjà vu, menopause, tax audits, demonic possession, lung flukes, eyeball worms, decapitation, and mudslides. We would not even dare to sell this product if we did not have a huge, carnivorous legal department that could squash you in court like a baby mouse under a sledgehammer. We frankly cannot believe that you were so stupid as to purchase this product. Your only hope is to set this product down very gently, back slowly away from it, then turn and sprint from your home, never to return.

  Back when I could read without reading glasses, I would glance at this information, and it made me nervous. But now, thanks to old age, it looks like this:

  WARNING: Here we go again: But seriously, I really have absolutely nothing to tell you here, unless you want me to solve some mysteries that have totally baffled the human race, such as what is the true meaning of life, and whether there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and which, really, is the best long-distance carrier for you. Would you like me to tell you those things? You would? OK! I will, then! But first I want to tell you exactly who was responsible for the Kennedy assassination. Ready? Here goes: The Kennedy assassination was committed by This doesn’t say anything. This is just a bunch of words I wrote here to make it look like there’s a story under the headline. If you have gone to the trouble of blowing this up so that you can read it, let me just say: Congratulations, you have even more spare time than I do, which is saying a LOT.