Bob Seidenstein MacGyver’d himself a very snazzy mask out of a Crown Royal bag he just happened to have lying around in April 2020. (Enterprise photo — Peter Crowley)

There was a time in This Great Land of Ours when older people were figures of respect. But no more.

When you hit the Big Seven-O you’d like to think that because you’ve paid your dues and learned some things, you’ve earned some props. However, the exact opposite is true. Today, if you’ve creaked into your Golden Years, you’re at best a figure of ridicule, and at worst a blight on the landscape. And Americans’ two favorite ways of handling blights are to either incinerate or ignore ’em. This in turn has caused my fellow ancients to devise two main coping mechanisms, each as maladaptive as the other.

One is to accept their status as fifth-class citizens and societal eyesores, and instead of fighting back, they just cave in. If they’d been Neville Chamberlain, they wouldn’t have handed over only Czechoslovakia to Hitler, but Old Blighty as well. They are sniveling apologists for their decline who surrendered to the Grim Reaper long before his scythe hit the horizon.

The signs are obvious. Shaking and shivering at crosswalks. Being housebound slaves to TV news so long they think the only things outside their door are homicidal maniacs and natural disasters. Endless whining about things they can’t change (like how all doctors look like they’re 14), and refusing to change the things they can (like finding a doctor who looks 21).

Even worse, a bunch of them define themselves by their weaknesses, showing off their latest infirmity like it was The Medal of Honor. Their blood pressure is too high, their blood sugar is too low, and you don’t even wanna know their white count.

Some others convert their Slide into the Void into a reverse snobbism, bragging that their cardiologist is smarter than yours, or how they just scored a BOGO on Metamucil and got a helluva deal on a top-of-the-line truss.

Their list of miseries is endless and they never grasp the one basic truth about it: No one cares. If your bad knee swells and aches when the barometer drops, only your rheumatologist gives a tiddly-doo, and that’s because he gets paid handsomely for it. The more you parade your decline in front of everyone, the more they just wish you’d just Billy Joe Mcallister your sad dupa outta here.

–

Delusions and illusions

–

The second main group are fighting the good fight against the ravages of time — but only in the arena of their own delusions. I’m sad to report my friend Jack Drury is a perfect example.

He will announce — on Facebook for all the world to see, no less – that he biked for over two hours that morning. However, what he fails to say is he did it on his electric bicycle. An electric bike, exercise? Hells bells, I burn as many calories speed-reading on my Lay-Z-Boy as Lance “Battery Assist” Drury does zooming up and down the hills and dales of My Home Town.

Then there are the cover-up artists -the true believers of dye jobs, nose jobs, boob jobs, face lifts, tummy tucks, and surgical and chemical enhancement of all sorts.

Before I go any further, let me clarify something. I’m not against anything that makes people feel better about themselves. Beyond that, I admit I know nothing about the plastic surgeon’s or esthetician’s trade, except they deal in artifice. And as a magician, I know the most important thing about artifice is it needs to be hidden.

Everyone knows the first rule of magic — never reveal a secret. But they don’t know the reason for it, which has nothing to do with hush-hush for its own sake. We don’t reveal secrets because if a layperson knows the secret, the trick no longer entertains. All the fun and delight vanish — in short, the magic is gone. The perfect example is “The Wizard of Oz,” once Toto pulled back the curtain.

And thus it is with cosmetic camouflage: If you know it’s there, it’s failed.

Black hair with white roots is as much a failure as blonde hair with black roots. A wig that looks like a wig is a lose-lose. And few things are worse than old men so desperate to pass as young men they end up with a shade of red hair seen only in scrap yards and on triage floors.

As for face lifts? Ditto … in spades.

Sure, there are great examples — Dolly Parton, Sophia Loren and Hef being three of the best. On the other hand, there are the Great Facial Floparoos. My fave three are Kenny Rogers, Wayne Newton, and Mickey Rourke, all of whom look like they got their work done at Sears while waiting for their tires to be rotated.

–

Losing it

–

Lest you think I’m fearless about getting my tuchis kicked by Father Time, I’ll tell you right now I’m not. I do my best to stay physically fit, and — fingers crossed — so far so good. Since I never had good looks from the get-go, I never worried about losing them. But my mental acuity is a whole different deal. One that dogs me to no end because, ultimately, I don’t have a good baseline: I’ve been completely disorganized my whole life.

Without going into the causes and cures (something I think is futile anyway), when it comes to keeping track of things, I’m a hot mess. As a result, I have continuously misplaced or lost damn near everything – my appendix scar the most noticeable exception.

I make attempts to fight it, but with limited success. For example, I always try to put my glasses in their case and my car keys on the kitchen counter, so I’ll always know where they are. But the key word there is “try.” Because while I do those things most of the time, there are times I don’t. When that happens I’m reduced to such frenzied freakitude that if I don’t find them after fifteen minutes, I end up looking in the freezer compartment and the oven.

As disturbing as those times are, they happen, and I accept them. But last week I had a lapse in cognizance was the stuff of nightmares.

I’d finished a long writing session and as a reward I decided to call my pal Kookie for a telephonic shmooze. Just after I picked up the phone, I wondered how much suet was left in my bird feeders, so I went out to check. Luckily, the little feathered gluttons still had a way to go with their repast, and I went back in the house to make my call. But when I did, I saw the phone wasn’t in the base.

I immediately let out a string of curses so filthy and foul, it embarrassed me!

Once that storm had passed, I started to look for the handset. Knowing it had to somewhere near, I went about it as sensibly as could be … for about five minutes. Then, when nothing turned up, I felt the pulse in my temple start to throb — a sure sign I was losing my cool and was about to launch into another Curse-a-Palooza. But then I realized I’d no reason to get upset. All I had to do was hit the “Find Handset” button on the phone base, which I did.

Suddenly the phone rang so loudly, I about whizzed my drawers. And there was a good reason why the ring was so loud — I was holding the handset in my left hand.

It could’ve been a lot worse; I could’ve had witnesses, who would not only have a laugh at my expense, but would’ve shared it with the world at large.

Then again, so what?

The more I thought about it, the more I thought laughter is the best way to deal with our inevitable slippage.

In fact, only one thing is more fun than laughing at our own foibles and follies, which is laughing at someone else’s.