Old ladies love being flirted with. And they don't blush. They're much too modest for that. And it's fun to be blatantly obvious and tongue-in-cheek, to tell them they look not a year over 50 or to throw them a slightly ironic wink and a compliment about the rose pattern on her shoes, or how beautiful her name is, Rose. And they eat it up and send it right back. What a charmer! What a face! I bet the girls eat you up. Oh, old lady, you're making me blush.

Old people love talking about sex. Or at least overtly talking about sex. I imagine when they do they think back to 50's era diners and greaser hair-dos and that one boy who always had a toothpick in his mouth and a cigarette behind his ear who probably was the one who invented the word cool or that girl Cindy-Loo who could make all the eager boys swoon. People have always had sex, people have always thought about sex, I'm pretty sure that doesn't change as you get older, it only becomes a nostalgic feeling. Not meaning that older people don't have sex, only they don't have young sex, so why not romanticize a bit?

When old ladies ask me if I have a girlfriend I know they are imagining themselves rosy-cheeked and wrinkleless, and in that minute their smile becomes something like an eighteen year old's and for all I know it is. So I act bashful and wave them away playfully. Stop it! But really don't because when I'm old I want that good kind of nostalgia and I want to think about how I tease the girls and make them blush in a lot of places.

Do you think that somewhere in our heads we are always young? I think so, I hope so. How do memories exist? As photograph stillframes laying in a dusty box in the attic? Or as moving and living entities? Am I at once all these different histories of me? Am I already an old man?

As far as the "we're all really the same" part of the post: We like to remember to remember romantics.