Old People Eat Dinner in the Afternoon
And other anthropological mysteries unraveled
I shoulder a heavy tome of trivial answers to life’s vexing questions not out of courage or conviction but because, like Buffy and Rambo, I was chosen.
Part of being chosen means I must fight the twin demons of cultural ignorance and ageism with the only tool at my disposal: a cheap, plastic knife I got from Starbucks and stored in my glove compartment because I feel guilty about global warming.
Many of my readers and non-readers alike wonder:
Why, oh soothsaying wise crone, do the Olds eat dinner so early?
First, old people are not actual people, so their ways are strange, like a tribe of spear-chucking jungle dwellers who must be studied in their natural environment by trained professionals.
Second, our society is terrified of aging. The fear is that we, actual people, shall one day die. For this reason, the Olds shouldn’t go out in public and remind everyone of reality.
In Succession, the Olds were mocked in Living +, a ghoulish active lifestyle community promising the hope of immortality.
The message was clear: being old is a disease, like leprosy, and it needs to be cured, preferably while the victims are sequestered.
Last, when we get old, we’ll buy orthopedic shoes and take up strange hobbies like pickleball and quilting. These habits are not adequately explained by academic research because the Youngs shake their heads and say:
“That’s never going to happen to me.”
A syllogism:
Other people get old
I am not another person
Therefore, I’ll never buy orthopedic shoes.
But we go out, still eat food, and take up space.
We shuffle to the nearest Denny’s at 4 in the afternoon as if we don’t realize how crazy that is.
In broad daylight.
It’s all perfectly logical because we’ve been up since the middle of the night, hate noisy, hip eateries full of young punks, can’t think of what to cook for dinner for the umpteenth time and have to get ready for bed at 7:45.
The afternoon is later than you think.
When you awaken at 4 am, you’ve been awake for 12 hours by 4 pm. According to math and clocks, this translates into the following:
If you wake up at 7 am, 12 hours later, it will be 7 pm, also known as dinnertime.
The math is clear.
Eating at 7 pm is pretty normal for Youngs and Middles. Americans with kids and teens and nonstop responsibilities wake up at 6 am, then eat dinner at 6 or 7 pm.
Sometimes 8 pm, because time gets away from them.
Eating dinner usually follows when you eat lunch, and before that, breakfast.
In exotic places like Spain, they take an afternoon siesta, then eat dinner at 9 or 10 pm. Therefore, they cannot eat dinner in the afternoon. Also, they do not have Denny’s.
Turn down your hearing aids.
Here in the Village — not the same as Florida’s Villages, egads — we have a restaurant called the Home Plate.
It’s a cozy throwback decked out with baseball paraphernalia that serves standard diner food like meatloaf and mashed potatoes.
It starts to fill up around 4:30 pm, which isn’t because it’s that great. The food is mediocre. Then again, in central Arkansas, most of the food is mediocre. The best meal around here is from Debra’s food truck, and that meal is a patty melt with a side of corn nuggets and an ice-cold soda pop.
Back to the Home Plate, where the soundtrack is early 1970s easy listening, the decor is 1966, and most of the waitstaff are professionals — or they were before Covid.
The soundtrack might get a little wild with some of Neil Diamond’s more passionate ballads, but generally, we are talking Elton John duets and a loop of “I’d Really Love to See You Tonight.”
It’s not some citified cacophonous echo chamber of post-hip-hop, post-Metallica, post-dubstep confusion.
By the time you reach your mid-50s, unexpected noises get much more annoying.
Hamburger helpless
What shall I make for dinner? You ask in a fake cheerful voice.
By the time you reach 55, you’ve prepared 91,342 dinners and untold lunches. Not one stands out as epic or memorable.
You have made everything several dozen times.
You are out of clever ideas if you had any in the first place. It’s like those castaways who’ve eaten potatoes boiled, baked, fried, au gratin, hashed and browned, on the half-shell, and with a side of human flesh.
The recipes you used along with the cheerful banter of Julia Child.
Now they require pawing through endless ads and CEO word salad filler to get to the flipping recipe.
The kitchen isn’t what it used to be, and dinner is especially annoying. The temptation is to get it out of the way while there’s plenty of daylight, so you can start drinking earlier.
Fixed incomes
Early bird specials appeal to us because our money isn’t what it used to be. We get scammed a lot, plus we tend to think meals should cost no more than $6.
Most of us have figured out we’d rather save for a cruise or a visit with the grandkids than throw away good money on fancy dinners, so the Early bird special calls us like sirens to Odysseus.
The specials typically last from 4 to 6 pm.
We also take advantage of Taco Tuesdays, which cover 2 to 5 pm around here.
Society is encouraging us to eat earlier by marketing senior specials to us. This may also result from Youngs wanting us to be hidden away in Living + bubbles.
We don’t give a rat’s ass.
It doesn’t matter when we eat since we aren’t European and no one is watching us.
We can no longer be embarrassed, which should be obvious to anyone who has ever examined a pair of polyester stretch pants up close.
This horrifying piece of clothing, worn by 63% of women over 75, according to me, is exceedingly practical. What’s even more mysterious is why old ladies wear stretch pants when they could go for scrubs.
But that is for another article after I work up the gumption to interview old ladies who wear stretch pants.
It’s probably best to dial back on the fear of oldness and chow down when hungry and wherever and whenever the grub is cheapest.
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Jean Campbell is based in Hot Springs, Arkansas. She has been writing on Medium for years and recently published her first novel, Down and Out on the Road South, with Wings ePress.
