I recently had the opportunity to take my 11-year-old granddaughter to her softball tournament in Des Moines, Iowa. Just me and her for the weekend. Most of the grandparents reading this will know why I am smiling.
Because of a confluence of scheduling problems, I was the only one in the family who could make the trip. At my stage of life, hanging out with my granddaughter for the whole weekend was certainly a gift, even with a five-hour drive to Iowa. Part of conscious aging is recognizing not just the losses in growing older but also the opportunities.
My granddaughter’s team drew the 8 a.m. game, Friday morning, which means arriving at the field by 7 am. It was a really nice eight-field complex, well kept, well organized and surrounded by cornfields. As we arrived, one of the cornfields was being bulldozed.
I’m not a coach, so I had to buy a general admission ticket. As I paid my entry fee for the weekend, the two young volunteers sitting at the ticket table informed me of the 50% senior rate. I thought “Sure, why not?” and inquired whether I got any discounts at the concession stands. No, all I got was the half-price admission fee. I paid my money and they carefully and competently placed the neon-pink band around my wrist that I would wear for the next three days.
Players and coaches didn’t have wristbands, but the hundreds of parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles and friends all had them on for the weekend. It wasn’t until Friday evening that I noticed most of the hundreds of wristbands were neon-yellow. At that moment, I realized that my wristband was different, that I was visibly identified as old and having paid half-price. There was no difference between a yellow or a pink wristband except for the entry fee amount — no reduced prices for food or drink, no entry into a special raffle, etc.
I didn’t feel any different than the hundreds of other spectators wearing yellow wristbands. I felt like I knew the game of softball and that, like everybody else, I was there to root on my team and my player. But I did feel a twinge about being different every time I looked at my wrist. Part of me felt like old people got pink wristbands, regular people got yellow wristbands. This “being othered” is another example of the unconscious bias of ageism.
I don’t have any data regarding how many other spectators noticed or cared about my neon-pink wristband. I’m sure some of them did, but the fact that I noticed and felt the difference is an example of internalized ageism.
What reason could there be to give older people a different colored wristband? I couldn’t come up with one except plain old habit. They’ve done it that way for years, so they just keep doing it that way. Maybe there used to be a reason, but nobody remembers it now and it’s just the way we do things.
On and off, I kept feeling different, and I was appreciating yet another example of how ageism can crop up anywhere, even at 7 a.m. on a Friday morning in the cornfields of Iowa.
By Saturday morning, however, I was thinking about my pink wristband differently. I started to think of it as a badge of honor.
I was one of the few, the proud, the older.