Wearing Those Sweatshirts

I've just been looking at Google Image to find some examples of those odious sweatshirts usually adorning women my age.  You've seen them on your secret trips to WalMart when you were praying no one you knew would see you shopping there, ruining your vociferous arguments that "Small is beautiful," and that we should all boycott that place.

Anyway, I saw one sweatshirt that said, "Autism Rocks", another that said "I'm retired and my part time job is Grandma."  And the inevitable, "I Love Grandma." Grrrr...I hate this stuff.  Suddenly because I'm a grandma, I'm vapid. 

I went to WalMart yesterday to get my small load of toilet paper, cheese popcorn, nuts, pomegranite blueberry juice, and Brillo pads.  Since I eat my meals at school, there's no sense in buying real food because it would just sit in the fridge.  Anyway, horror of horrors, I took off my coat on entrance and one of those oh-so-nice greeters nodded approvingly at my chest.  I was wearing a  sweatshirt with a picture of three 1930s lady golfers.  I got that for a dollar at the battered women's shelter used clothing shop in Worcester.  I don't wear it to prove anything--I'm not a golfer, and it didn't relate to grandmothers, so I don't know what that woman was approving.  But it hurt.  It hurt as much as my reading student telling me one day that I'm a sweet old lady.  What the f-@#$??????  I'm not sweet and I'm not old, sonny boy.

When I was a young reporter, I remember I did a feature story about going on the once-a-week shopping trip on the bus with everybody from the senior housing in Northboro, MA.  My grandmother was going, and I suppose I wanted to sneak her picture into the Worcester Telegram and Gazette. Anyway, I was all of 22 and stupid in that way of the young, and I madly wrote down all the cute things the old were saying, and I quoted their bickering fights.  No doubt I even called them oldsters.  I thought  it was oh-so-terrific until I got these outraged letters from elderly folks across Worcester County who claimed I was rendering their peers as idiots.  I was shocked and I couldn't believe that anyone would take offense.   This was the late 60s when both the Black and Grey Panthers came to Worcester.  Maggie Kunin headed the Grey Panthers, and she was hardly sweet.

How naive I was back then.  I think that in those times, except for people my own age, everybody else was a cartoon character.  I didn't see anyone except for myself and my generation.