| For a long time, I thought I might avoid growing old altogether, but as they say, it’s better than the alternative. I mean, I had outfoxed opening ordinary packaging and could comprehend an excel sheet. But I still don’t understand why they have to keep inventing new ways to turn a shower on and off. I am at the time of losses, what Jung called, “the afternoon of one’s life”; a marked and steady erosion of ambition, a kind of cliff edge. I have to accept I am not going to change the world after all, and will easily be forgotten. This knowledge is sobering, but also a sort of relief. It’s certainly changed my approach to filing taxes. All that I have built up is now diminishing, disintegrating, disappearing; more doors closing than opening. Running out of time and not being able to leap out of taxis like a deer is something that never occurs to you when you are in your twenties or thirties, even in your forties. Now it looms ever closer. In other words, I still may have time for a second act, but I’d better get moving. Breaker Morant said that we have the responsibility of living every day like it might be our last, because one of these days we’re guaranteed to be right. I’m glad I’m still drinking, for this should help immensely. So, what have I learned about getting older? Not a lot. But I thought I’d better write it down before I forget. |
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One of aging’s unnerving surprises hard to reconcile, is that everything is declining: health, firm thighs, a gimlet social life, and the certainty that you have something to impart, if only you could remember what that is. Once past the physical peek, of say, 26, it is an incremental dive downhill from there; the most prolonged of all disagreeable experiences. Nothing can keep you young – except maybe great sex. Hey, maybe even mediocre sex can add a few years. But wait, hasn’t there been some mistake? I was 19 a minute ago, but when I look over the paperwork, I see that I really was born quite a few years ago. Although I’m gratefully on the other side of something, I actually feel 35. Okay, 45. It’s the age I identify with, feeling like a young woman with something really wrong with me. it’s a weird hybrid of the me I once knew, my personal brand of delusion. There is, of course, a chance that I may be happier at eighty than I was at twenty or forty, but I’m probably also going to feel far less pleasant than I would like to. Essentially, it’s a messy business. Dylan Thomas’ “Do not go gentle into that good night.”, encouraged us to fight off aging, but he died when he was only 39, so he never knew how inflexible your knees could be in your 50’s. You can call it experience, but I am under no such illusion. It’s really a matter of adjustment; to embrace the perceptible sense of deflation, my skin draping like a grubby old net curtain, the pair of wrinkles carving arches over my eyebrows resembling an anthropomorphized cat. And my chin, which can only be described as a kind of smudge. The only good grace about this, is my inability to be able to actually see it. And hair – it’s showing up in the strangest places. |
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The adage, “beauty comes from within”? I can’t stand people who say things like this. What can they be thinking? Don’t they have necks? And by the way, wrapping a scarf around it is not advised, as the imagination usually conjures up something worse than the reality. I often hear people complain about how they look, people I’ve known for 25 years. To them I say, “What are you complaining about? You never looked that good to begin with.” Our society has been youth obsessed for as long as I can remember, transcending the centuries. Example. In 1513, explorer Juan Ponce de León discovered Florida while searching for the fountain of youth and eternal life. I also read that people have tried staring deeply into their fireplace until a younger version of themselves appeared in the flames, but I can’t confirm the results. And no, you can’t ward off death or prolong beauty by only eating raw meat, roasted cauliflower and the stem of a rare tree. Although now a mere technicality, a loophole, it might have been helpful if I hadn’t followed the skin care rules of the ‘60’s – baby oil and tinfoil, having no idea, among other things, that moisturizers were a part of wellness. Like Mickey Mantle (or maybe Mae West or George Burns) quipped, “If I’d known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.” By the way, men have a distinct advantage when it comes to aging, because their skin is 20 to 30 percent thicker than women’s. This just gets more and more agonizing. I had a shock a couple of months ago when I was shopping for watercolours. I soon became aware of a stooped lady following me around the mall. Then I realized there were mirrors everywhere, even in the elevator. Let me tell you, you don’t bounce back from that overnight. |
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| I guess by growing older, this also means you should have the social acuity to “act your age,” like wearing age-appropriate clothes (apparently leggings and a matching leopard-print top have an expiration date), drinking age-appropriate drinks, and doing age-appropriate activities, but maybe doing one or two surprisingly young-like things (rollerblading, maybe, or being expelled- for “illicit drinking”) so that doesn’t seem like you’re trying too hard to let people know you’re still in the game. Most of this, though, just simply makes me tired. I mean, what’s the point? But honestly, I never particularly had a desire to keep up, or even frankly, to sit up, having an inherently joint purpose with my bed. First, I have been around for so long that I’m re-reading the classics. Secondly, however arduous to admit, I am losing my grip strength and now have to remember to only go to places with low lighting. Having long resigned myself to being essentially ignored, inconsequential, and unnoticed in fast food and bank queues by people not of the same age, I also have been accused of being a surly curmudgeon: vaguely cynical, furtive, temperamentally chilly, disapproving, and dismissive – but these are just signs that I’m a bit hard of hearing. Although, sometimes it would be nice. Like a few weeks ago. I was driving down the street, minding my own business, when a cyclist shouted something at me. It was either “In the end the king and pawn go in the same box” or “Your brake lights are out.” My windows were up, so it was hard to hear. But really, I hear when I want to. And multi-tasking. It used to be that I could do twenty-seven things at once. Now it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do two things at once – especially to remember what both of them are. Things that happened in the mid-1980’s and Tuesday of last week, sit side by side in my memory. Like when I say “the other day”, it could be anywhere from yesterday to fifteen years ago. But this usually isn’t much a problem as long as I restrict my conversations to people older than me, although they are increasingly harder and harder to find these days. |
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I also have to contend with the enormous volume of everything I’ve done and wish to forget: user manuals, bad sex, pop culture, questionnaires, dental visits, and at least ten bank account passwords. But my vocabulary has increased. Ossified, oximeter, cataracts, liver spots, glucosamine sulphate, acid reflux…all extremely interesting words once you get to understand them. I find as I wobble around the city, I’m like Fran Lebowitz, garrulously pointing out here and there memories and missing things: a gym where I once did 100 sit-ups – not in a row, the staircase where I suffered the tragedy of lusty, but unrequited love with an aristocrat from San Salvador, the apartment I lived in that always smelled like a combination of something that had been filtered through a sweat sock and a long-ago-sprayed bug treatment; continually haunted by what happened and what didn’t. I recently read that older people can see a third less than young people in the dark. Something to do with the amount of light that they can let in. They also suffer from floaters, making walking about a bit like groping through a forest full of falling black leaves on a dark night. Not much good when someone young points out a humming bird on a tree branch, but extremely useful when faced with a check-yourself-in machine at the airport. “I’m so sorry, I simply can’t possibly do it myself. I can’t see a thing!” |
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The Jungian psychologist James Hillman asks a shocking question: could ageing itself be conceived of as an art form? Can we become larger, contain multitudes? I don’t know about you, but I can finally hold a two-minute plank, just got off the brutal “W” trek in Chile almost unscathed, and can almost understand most of Wallace Stegner’s novels. Maybe it’s time to age disgracefully. Jung in his wisdom, says that the goal in the second half of life, is to make it as interesting as possible. Personally, I think it’s a conspiracy of cluelessness. Yet there is something cleansing about the loss of one’s looks and teeth, as there is about letting go of things once hoarded. It’s not so much a feeling of relief, but more of a challenge, a rite of passage. With luck, it can open the door to something that would be best described as character, if that didn’t sound so hopelessly old-fashioned. Ageing is a process of editing. It means loving new things and discarding old things. It means living as you want to live, not as you should. You know those people you don’t like much? Well, don’t bother with them. If someone has said “we must do lunch” for the last 20 years and you haven’t, you certainly are not going to go now, just as you aren’t going to put on that little hot pink number you wore to that nightclub in Nassau. We are now old enough to know what does not spark joy. Do you really want to go to a restaurant where they have substituted hamburger buns for doughnuts drizzled with mustard? No. Do you want to sit in bars where the music is so loud that you can’t order another mimosa from the waiter? No again. And believe me, nothing makes you feel older than drinking cheap white wine and making small talk with people who ask you about wills and white walls. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to getting my card from the King, or whoever’s at the helm at that moment. |
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