To the Editor:

I am writing to you to say thank you for your wonderful piece on aging [“From the editor: Our March of Progress through life should not end in mere oblivion” The Altamont Enterprise, Oct. 11, 2024].

My routine with regard to reading The Enterprise is to place it on my kitchen table and each morning, after breakfast, with a fresh cup of coffee, I sit there and read it. By the end of the week, I'm pretty well through all of it.

This morning, I read your “From the editor” column about the aging process and how we are, and are not, dealing with it. You put a standalone pull quote in the middle of your column which read like this, "Ageism is one of the last socially accepted prejudices."

I found so many sentences and facts throughout your article that I underlined that I could have underlined the whole article. One of those underlined sentences reads like this, “So, yes, a first step is awareness. Each of us can make an effort not to discriminate against others or, if we are old, (and this is what really got my attention) against ourselves.”

As I got up from the kitchen table to take my dishes to the sink I noticed the nice deep, bright blue paint design around the edge of the middle-sized plate, and then I noticed the faded blue painted design around the smaller coffee dish.

I said to myself, ahhhh just like me, getting old, just fading away, and I chuckled to myself. Then, as I started to walk away, I stopped short, looked back at the plates and "I just did it to myself!"

If someone else had said that to me, I definitely would not think it was funny. It was a perfect example of “one of the last socially accepted prejudices.”

I am involved with the Old Men of the Mountain, around 25 to 30 of us have breakfast once a week. I enjoy it very much, I come away from each breakfast in a good, happy mood.

I think now that part of the upbeat feeling is a direct result of not hearing these sometimes patronizing, not-so-subtle prejudices directed at us because we are older, or we walk slower, maybe use hearing aids.

So thank you again for your important and timely article regarding aging and all that comes with it.

Doug Marshall

East Berne

Editor’s note: Doug Marshall writes the Old Men of the Mountain column for The Enterprise.