I’m a cautious person. I drive at or under the speed limit, even when there’s not another vehicle in sight. Even if I’m the only one at the intersection, I come to a complete stop.

If this makes me sound like a goody-goody, I’m not. I simply don’t want to take unnecessary chances.

But the demon voice in my head whispers temptations. It’s a good thing it’s getting harder to hear or I’d scribble outside the lines a lot more than I already do.

So often, there’s a conflict between what I look like and what I feel. On the outside, I have wrinkles earned over the years, and I proudly tell anyone who’ll listen about my amazing grandchildren and how things were 20, 30 and even 40 years ago.

I wear prescriptive lenses, color my gray hair and, when shoe shopping, I look for comfort and practicality before fashion and style.

In many ways, I’m getting more like the people I used to call old geezers.

But that’s not how I feel on the inside. My mom, who’s an active 91, said when she looks in the mirror, she still sees a young girl.

I know exactly what she’s thinking.

What’s on the outside, especially as we get older, often differs from what goes on inside our heads.

There, it’s a different story. I’m bold and brave. I drive without a care in the world, pushing the speed limit. The windows are down and the air conditioner’s off.

The older, cautious me drives with the air conditioner on from April to October and the heater on full blast from January through March.

In November and December, the windows are down, and I feel 15 years old again with a brand-new driver’s license in my wallet.

However, I still obey the speed limit.

The young girl inside only goes to the express line in the grocery story because she’s the only one she’s shopping for.

Instead of low-fat yogurt, fruit and chicken in the cart, there’s chips and dip and bags of sugar. Filling out the cart is full-calorie Coca Cola and ice cream.

That could be the reason the older me is having so much trouble losing those extra inches on the hips.

There are some areas where the young person inside of me and the aging person on the outside intersect.

When I’m alone in the car, the music’s blaring. I could chalk that up to the above-mentioned hearing loss, but music is and always has been the background in my life.

Back in my teens, it was rock and roll. These days, there’s some rock and roll but Broadway tunes and hits from the 70s are at the top of the playlist.

The old me also can swear like a sailor. In all honesty, I’ve always used colorful language, starting when I was 18 years old.

I went away to college for a couple of years, and the girls across the hall in our dorm were hippies.

They smoked cigarettes, wore hip-hugger jeans and bandanas over their unwashed hair. I thought they were the coolest girls I’d ever met.

They also swore, and I don’t mean the little words.

They used the big ones.

The ones my mother would’ve washed my mouth out with soap if she’d heard me use them.

Of course, I immediately added them to my everyday vocabulary. That still hasn’t changed although I do refrain when I’m around children and relatives.

I question every single stupid bureaucratic rule put in front of me. “Why” and “who says” are part of my regular word list along with a shrug of the shoulders. Then I go right ahead and do what I want to do.

Even though there’s quite a few differences, there’s a lot that’s still the same. Geezers and the young can share mutual interests and benefits.

And if that means we’re occasionally ordering a Coke float from the drive in and drinking it on the way home with the windows down, then that shared space is heavenly.

 

  This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.