Get Old Already

My mother, a great beauty in her day, was famous for being willing to reveal her age. This was a big deal mid-century because your age was commonly regarded as something you didn’t want anyone to know. Age was a secret. My own Aunt Ella, one of three girls, lived her entire life as the middle daughter when in fact she was the youngest. Her sister Shirley just could not abide being older than anyone and Shirley was formidable.

My mother, bless her, staked out her own territory and I have taken a stab at joining her there. I have tried to be transparent about teetering on the brink of 80.

Photo by Eilis Garvey on Unsplash

Last weekend, we went to a live-music venue in Berkeley where my nephew was playing lead guitar in a cover band. The room was long and narrow. It was jammed with people. As guests of the band, we were entitled to one of the few tables, right up front. This may sound like a good thing, but the volume promised to be extreme. I considered the enormous speaker right next to where we were sitting and the pulsating crowd and thought to myself, “who am I kidding?” This is not the Fillmore East and the year is not 1969. But then as if transformed, I got into it. Overwhelmingly, the band members and the people dancing were in their fifties. I knew they were in a different universe with more energy, more sexuality, but it wasn’t as if it were a room full of college kids. I can do this, I said to myself, and proceeded to dance as if I’d never dance again. You just don’t know. At the end of the second set, shortly after I caught an elbow to the head, a woman with long blonde hair who I’d been “connecting” with in space - in the way that complete strangers sometimes connect non-verbally when doing their best dance moves in public - came up to me, this woman did, and said, “I was really glad to watch you having such a good time out there on the dance floor. You remind me so much of my parents. They’re in their eighties.” We were not amused.

Some people in Gen X, squeezed as they are between aging parents and teenage or young adult children, seem to be especially vulnerable to admiring “cute” older people around them. The lives of fiftysomethings are difficult, their responsibilities many, and sometimes it may ease the burden for them to think of their parents’ generation as hapless hippies who are trying as best they can to stay relevant. We are not doddering as expected. It’s possible that our lingering youthful displays sometimes embarrass them even as our very real signs of aging worry them as well. It’s a mixed bag. We are a walking category error. When will we just move on and get old already?

I must add here that some of my best relatives are in their fifties. This would include our two sons, princes among men, their partners, and our splendid nieces and nephews. These beautiful people are looking at the early signs of their own aging. They like to sleep. They like to watch low-grade television. They look in the mirror and don’t entirely recognize themselves. Like the rest of us, they’re en route to somewhere else that, by definition, they don’t know much about. This is true at every stage of life. The toddler has no apprehension of the first day of school. Newly married people have scant idea of what struggles they’re facing. I am ignorant about being very old or truly facing the end of my life around the corner even though I worked with the dying at Hospice. You just don’t know. This is central to what life is. No matter how much we contemplate our experience, no matter how mindful we are, we enter every day - every moment - innocent of what will happen next and that’s what makes being alive both so dark and so radiant at the same time.

It’s even more of a stretch to look back on an earlier incarnation. I watch my great-granddaughter painting a many-legged monster on colored construction paper and I try to enter into her freedom, her joy, but my child-person has morphed into an adolescent and then an adult and then an old woman. The monster has taken up residence in another part of my consciousness. Nothing is fixed. Not for me and not for the people around me. We are in an ongoing negotiation with one another, with aging, with transformation. Always in transit, never arriving.

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