The Old Coot Weighs in

I really am an old coot. It’s now been certified. First, I took a trek to Florida with a flock of snowbirds and I’ve just now finished a cruise loaded with seniors - 2,000 passengers in all - 1,900 older than me. I loved it! For once, I wasn’t the "old" guy. I was the kid - the young lad - the boy - the rookie - the brat – the buckaroo - all the nicknames that have eluded me for decades.

I learned a lot from my elders. For example: I didn’t know it was fashionable to wear white, knee-high support hose with black socks and sandals, or that green and red striped ties went with pink and yellow Hawaiian shirts. Now I do. I also learned that it was "cool" to wear red suspenders with elastic waist walking shorts. I’m up to snuff. I can’t wait to show off my new look when I get back.

The number one activity on a senior cruise is eating. The passengers on mine ate seven or eight meals a day and still had enough appetite to stampede to the feeding trough on the eleventh floor for a midnight buffet. They gained weight, a lot of it, and it caused serious problems with the elevators. The cars are equipped with mechanisms that determine if they are overloaded. When they are, an alarm sounds and the doors won’t close until some passengers get off. The mechanism didn’t kick in the first few days of the cruise, even though a dozen or more of us squeezed in at a time. After several days of continuous grazing, the alarm started going off. The capacity dropped from 12 to 8. As the week wore on, the number of people the elevator would carry got lower and lower. By the last day, it would only carry a single passenger.

Most of my shipmates headed to the Miami Airport to catch a flight back home. My wife and I were going by car. Dealing with the extra weight was easy for us; we just put an extra twenty pounds in the tires. It was a lot harder for the old coots that went by plane. They had to pay extra for their luggage; it was loaded with souvenirs from the Caribbean Islands (mostly cheap booze and cigarettes, from what I saw). Then, they had pay for seatbelt extenders since the normal ones wouldn’t accommodate their expanded girth. A few had gained so much they had to pay for two seats. One of our fellow cruisers sent us an e-mail after he made it home. He reported that the group he was traveling with had to switch seats on the plane. The stewardesses moved them around, putting two "regular" passengers on one side of the plane, for every overweight "cruiser" on the other side. It was the only way they could balance the load. And, it wasn’t easy. The cruisers had trouble getting up and moving because the weight they’d gained put undue strain on their artificial hips and knees. His flight took off late and he missed his connection in Atlanta. It happened all up and down the east coast, thanks to my fellow cruisers, making their way home. The news media never got wind of it. They thought the snarled airline traffic was caused by bad weather, the snowstorms that blanketed the east. But, it was really a large group of overweight, senior cruisers that did it. Thousands of people were inconvenienced, from Georgia to Maine. But, don’t blame me! It was a bunch of old coots. I’m not one of them. Remember, I’m the kid! (at least for a few more days).

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