YOU ARE NEVER TOO OLD.

Wouldn’t you like to be all you can be? Better and more competent at your job, avocation or just as a human being? Imagine if you could be all you can be as a golfer, parent, employer or employee, juggler or hit man? The answer should be a resounding, “Yes”. I’d give anything to be the best yodeler around.

The U.S. military as co-opted that catchy phrase in their recruitment campaigns. What learning how to use a flame thrower has to do with being all you can be – unless you hope to be a professional torch is beyond moi? I can understand the military’s need for enlisted people especially after the unnecessary wars that messers Bush, Chaney and Rumsfeld have gotten us into. Before you think I’m one of those bleeding-heart, unpatriotic liberals that Bill O’Reilly rants against allow me to explain. The Old Geezer is as patriotic as any one including John Wayne – who, by the way, never served a day in the armed forces. I guess it was easy for old Duke to be brave at Republic studios.

I come from a long line of warriors. My still dead uncle Yitzhak was a famous soldier in Pinsk who caught a strange disease while fighting the Hun which caused him to blow up like a swollen sheep. After 9-11 I made it my duty to grab my wooden rifle, put on my little tin helmet, my puttees and patrolled my neighborhood every night looking for evildoers. Guess they must have heard about me because I never found any terrorists but did find a dime on the sidewalk and a half full can of Red Bull.

But the truth is that after Iraq our military has gone into over-drive trying to get enlistments up. They are offering inducements including nights with Hooter girls and pairs of new shoelaces to get people to sign up. A woman in Saugus, California was flattered by the nice recruiting letter asking her to consider becoming one of “the few and the proud.” Sonia Goldstein was very tempted but thinks she might be a tad too old to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps. She’s 78-years old. “I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “My grandchildren were sitting there and we were in hysterics, we laughed so hard.”

The recruiting letter told her that the corps could use her unique language skills – obviously the Marines need leathernecks fluent in Yiddish, who play mahjong – but also warned that life as a Marine would test her physical and mental abilities “beyond anything you’ve ever known.” She would have been really challenged since she needs a walker to maneuver from here to there. When informed by Sonia the Marines reluctantly admitted that maybe the letter must have been a mistake. Don Rumsfeld’s only comment was, “no comment.”

The 78-year old grandmother admits that had the Marines offered her some new shoelaces she might have changed her mind and enlisted.