I am once. . . twice. . . three times a. . . senior. Did you think I was going to say lady? The first go round of my seniorhood was of course in high school, in the fall of 1977. In my high school, as in every high school before and since, there was an elite class. These kids usually came from well-to-do families, had enough clothes and style advice to minimize their physical flaws, and were more or less duty-bound to look down on the rest of us. Some kids from outside this group were ignored, some were tolerated, some were treated like pets, and others were actively persecuted.

One member of the latter group was a young man who was probably a perfectly nice person, but whom somebody decided to nickname “Barnacle.” One of the many atrocities that I witnessed in high school but lacked the courage to challenge was this: John Q. Jock was standing in the hall, faking passes with a basketball at Barnacle’s face, and laughing each time he raised his hands in self-protective mode. Finally, the young man stopped reacting, and merely stared at his tormentor during the next fake pass. You guessed it already: the pass immediately following that one was a real one, right to the face, and the ensuing bloody nose was explained away earnestly to the assistant headmaster by the perp, and nobody, including the victim, argued with his version of events.

For many years I felt awful for not simply body-checking that basketball-wielding bully, and I have tried to make up for it in various ways. There was that time, for example, at the Denver Zoo in the mid-nineties, when I took on an entire extended family who were either directly teasing the gorilla or laughing at the poor creature’s reactions. I actually faced off with that old battle-ax of a matriarch and said, “If you don’t stop it I am going to tell on you.” They didn’t, and I did.

The second time I became a senior came in 1988, when I was in college, and it passed virtually unnoticed by me and everybody else. I was utterly uninterested in such distinctions at the time and concerned myself only with whether I had enough credits to graduate. While I did participate in my high school graduation, wearing a new dress and platform shoes that were at least two sizes too small, I skipped the college festivities altogether.

The third time I have officially become a senior is a few days ago, when I picked up my new senior citizen tax exempt card. If I go to a certain grocery store on Thursdays, I can get ten percent off my groceries, in addition to skipping the sales tax. This new privilege reminds me that throughout my various stages of seniorhood, and all the times between, I have been fortunate in so many ways. I keep trying to pay it forward. One of my easiest and therefore favorite methods of achieving this goal is to just not be hateful to those who can’t fight back.

For your further edification:

Commodores – Three Times A Lady [Live] – YouTube