There it was once again—the pungent, thick, almost toxic cloud of cheap perfume. It penetrated my lungs, and for a split second, I thought I might faint. Surprisingly, the noxious odor was encountered in a spacious atrium of a basketball arena, which made me wonder if the cologne had been applied with a paintbrush.
Stupid old lady, I thought. Yes, throughout your life, you
consider your age to be the smartest age there is. People younger than you are
obviously stupider because they have yet to gain the knowledge you have. People
older than you are dumb because they do weird, irrational stuff that you would
never think of doing.
Yes, you think that older people are weird until you reach
that age and find yourself mysteriously adopting behaviors that you ridiculed
ten years earlier. These "aha" moments occur all throughout our lives.
Still, strangely, we don't learn from them and thus keep thinking that older
people are peculiar.
My best personal example is how much I resented my mother
seeking to interfere in my adult life. It didn't matter that I was a business
professional with a graduate degree; she thought she knew the best course for
me and would strongly voice her opinion on every decision I made.
After this happened, I would be enraged (but only internally).
On the way home, I would think: WHAT THE HECK IS WRONG WITH HER? I am an
adult, fully capable of making my own decisions and figuring out what to do.
Why would she think she has any right to interfere?
I responded to these impositions by withholding information
from her, only telling her what she really needed to know. Her intrusions only
stopped after she suffered a heart attack and knew her life was winding down.
However, I am embarrassed to say that my desire to
interfere in the lives of my two daughters actually exceeds that of my mother
dealing with me. Of course, my daughters respond to this behavior by telling me
virtually nothing when important stuff happens in their lives. I only find out
the details months after the fact, and then I think:
Oh, if I would have known that was happening, I would have
….. And then I understand why I was kept in the dark – wise women they are. Of
course, I blame my behavior on my mother – it's in my DNA, so I can’t help
myself, even though I know it’s wrong.
Now, Back to the Pungent Old Lady
The encounter with the perfume cloud was still fresh in my
mind, or still stuck in my nostrils, when I saw an Internet headline for what
turned out to be a deeply disturbing article. The piece was about why older
people stink. From here on, I will refer to this phenomenon as OPS (Old People
Stink).
I had always thought that OPS was caused by poor hygiene
habits combined with reduced olfactory sense. While this can be true, the
article explained that primary OPS results from something else. Our body
chemistry changes throughout our lifetime. When we are born, the chemistry is new
and fresh, giving us that ‘sweet baby smell’. But after that, our scent
deteriorates over our lifetime until we smell so bad that they bury us six feet
underground or burn our bodies. The good news is that the change in body
chemistry is only nasty once we reach our golden years, thus producing OPS.
But the bad news is horrible. As I read the article, I made
a mental note that I will eventually need to shower more to wash off this OPS.
But unfortunately, that won't help. Because the odor is not on your skin; it
emanates from the chemistry within your body. If this were a hygiene horror
movie, the heroine would scream, “IT’S COMING FROM INSIDE MY BODY. THE TERRIBLE
ODOR IS INSIDE THE BODY!
OPS is further enhanced because senior citizens tend to be
dormant and spend more time huddled up in their homes. The stench can be
overwhelming when a group of golden-agers is stuck in one place, such as a nursing
facility.
Therefore, our over-scented old woman is not stupid. She is
an intelligent person who still has enough of her olfactory capacity to know
she smells bad and is trying to mask it. You don’t have as many older men
over-cologning because they don’t know they stink and thus don’t try to hide
it.
However, dousing yourself in strong perfume is not a good
solution to the problem. A guy on a local message board complained that his
wife suffers from asthma attacks and migraines when exposed to women bathed in “old
whore” perfume. Many people then commented about being sickened by “White
Diamonds” and other fragrances over-applied by senior gals.
I can’t believe that our country just accepts OPS, and no
one sees this as a real problem. Only one Japanese company is working on a
solution that uses green tea to try to mask the emissions. There is a mountain
of money to be made if some pharmaceutical comes up with a cure:
“I used to stink so badly that no one, not even
my family, would visit me. But now I take Noreeka, and everybody wants to get
close to grandma! And now the guys at the senior center all want hugs – hubba, hubba! Ask your doctor if Noreeka is
right for you.’
Somebody needs to do something soon because as the baby
boomers enter into the high-stink years and live longer, we have not seen the
peak of OTS. At some point there could be a giant OPS cloud terrorizing people
across the country. I would hate for our body odor to destroy our nation:
“Today is day eight of the Old Person Stink
alert. OPS levels are in the Red Zone – No one should leave their homes …..”
