Gerontology

At my work, there are a lot of senior missionaries. Most of them are just what you'd expect them to be. Some of them seem like professionals even though they are just volunteers. And some of them are, well, quirky. I'm not saying anything about whether they are good or bad, smart or not, or anything. I know they are all wonderful people and probably quite intelligent.But they have their oddities.

There is one in the cubicle across from mine. I don't really talk with him, because he doesn't seem to be into conversation, and the few times I've talked with him, I've had a hard time understanding him. He kind of has a Jimmy Stewart manner of speaking, kind of mumbling and stammering.

When I started there, I thought, "It's cool that he still volunteers when he's so old." He appears to be in his 90s. I heard another missionary say, "He looks like he's 114." But then I heard this old missionary tell someone he was only in his early to mid 70s. I was shocked! He's a decade younger than my grandparents but looks a decade older. He has typical old features--wrinkles, baldness, gray hair, hearing aids--but they seem too advanced for someone his age. In addition to those, he has scoliosis, so he is hunched over badly, and he has that foggy look in his eyes you'd expect from blind people, but he's not blind. He's also, well, very flatulent. Every time he gets up or walks down the hall. I'm embarrassed for him.

Since we're just an open area with cubicles, we hear everything everyone else is saying. And he has a few set expressions he says over and over:

• "You dumb thing! Arr!" He mumbles this one the most, channeling his inner pirate when he gets frustrated with his computer, which is very often. I'm not sure what he gets so frustrated with. Maybe his computer is as slow as my work computer.
• "That's wonderful." Wonderful is apparently his favorite adjective.
• "My goodness! You're here!" Usually followed by "that's wonderful." He usually says this when someone stops by his desk, but once he said it to me when we met at the stairwell. I found it an odd response.
• "You came to see me!" He says this when he doesn't say "My goodness you're here." 
• "That's nice of you." He says this as often as most people say thank you.
• "Good morning." He says this when he answers his work phone (which has a very loud ringer), even if it's 5 p.m. I think he's usually talking to his wife, but I don't know if that's always the case. I was shocked the one time I heard him say "Good afternoon," because I didn't think it was part of his vocabulary.

His wife also volunteers there some days, and assuming she's close in age to him, they both must be drinking from the Fountain of Aging, because she is very wrinkly and a little hunched over. But she doesn't have gray hair, because she dyes it orange. One day she was wearing a SpongeBob Christmas t-shirt with a sweater and skirt--and it wasn't even Christmas!

Now, this week, there was a presentation at work about social media use in Africa. His wife came to his desk and said, "They're having a presentation on black people." I found that an exceedingly strange thing to say. I mean, there were some African kids on the announcements, but you think they would just have a presentation on black people? And then she said, "Do you want to go to the Negro thing?" If "Negro" is even what she said.

A minute later, he said to his wife, "You should have two necks." An unusual thing to say, but I figured he was going to say something about necklaces. I wasn't prepared for his follow-up:

"All the better for necking."

Either he forgot that we can hear everything, or he doesn't care.

Old people have been on my mind this week. Especially when they are awkward on the internet.