5. If you've ever been trapped in close quarters with a not-altogether-there senior, some place like the back of a Prius, an elevator or a changing room (who are we to judge?), then you may have noticed that olfactory treat resembling a hint of urine and mothballs with maybe some Old Spice and perogies thrown in for good measure.
While it's possible your grandfather has misread the recipe for meth and is trying to set up a lab, it's also possible he's fallen victim to the fearsome one-two punch of scent markers that prey on our elderly like ravenous stink hounds falling on weak members of the pack.
Accounting for the urine smell isn't entirely difficult. Reports say upwards of 53 percent of elderly people suffer some incontinence as a result of losing bladder elasticity with age, which in turn means you simply can't hold as much as you used to. As the detrusor muscle--the muscle that lets you write your name so neatly in all those snow banks--also begins to fail, so to does your ability to hold in your musky morning dew. The result is, sadly, the occasional splatter across the inside of your old guy slacks.
The other ingredient to our crusty old fella bouquet is much more exotic and potentially comes as a result of the psychology of being ancient. For whatever reason, the older you get the more you never want to throw shit out. Hoarding is actually a serious issue for a number of elderly people. They have a difficult time understanding that those stacks of newspapers from 1963 really aren't going to become anymore useful and are taking up valuable space that could be used to store Hummel figurines or pictures of people who are dead.
The issue with hoarding crap or just storing everything you've ever bought since the 70s is that shit gets musty and gross. The natural weapon against this, if you think like someone in their 80s, is to scatter mothballs about like fairy dust. Behold the solution to one problem and the cause of another. Suddenly everything grandma owns smells like it's been hidden in trunk since the Depression, only opened so that grandpa can add a tiny sparkle of whiz for zest.
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