Age, Part 3

The final section of this little essay on aging. I will say that aging is one of those things in life we cannot speak knowingly about when we're young. Duh, you say, but many young people think they know what aging is about. But here's something from an "older" person, a friend of mine--who is 78, doesn't look it, and is still working in the federal attorney's office. She says this of aging, "It's a dirty trick."
Obviously, at age 44, when I wrote the essay I've posted here, I thought I was old, and I thought I knew something. Now I know I was young and was only guessing. But that's life. Lots of guessing. Right?

Part 3  

When do we know we're old?  If we're young inside, and he was, must we admit to being old because others see us that way?  because our bodies insist we are?  Age brings its benefits; we really do know more old than we did young.  But mostly what it does is bring us up short when we catch those unplanned-for glimpses of ourselves in the mirror.  "Oh!  Is that what I look like?"  I know I'm not 19 or even 39 anymore.  I can even put the number on it--44.  And I don't mind being it as much as verbally owning up to it.  But inside me there is no age, and there is always the feeling--is it fantasy?--that I am young.  At the same time, I know the urgency one feels at this age, the need to rush, to catch something before it is gone.

            The feelings I'm experiencing have earned a label.  Our culture calls them the mid-life crisis.  I am tagged.  I wear the label as prominently as Hester wore her A; it is in the color of my hair, in the lines under my eyes.  It goes with me into the college classroom where I am one of the "mature" students.  For my dad, society's tag was old age.  Imagine an 89-year old man wanting to buy an artichoke farm.  In either case, with or without the label, the aging process does not relent.

            In the autobiographical story, Coming Out of the Ice, Victor Herman, who has spent 10 years in Soviet prisons, is now free.  He sits in front of the mirror in a barber shop and watches the haircut and shave he has waited 10 years for.  When it is done, his face, clean and bare of its beard, wears now a look of sadness, of disappointment.  We are confused.  Shouldn't he feel a luxurious, joyful sense of relief, a renewal of life?  The young woman who has done the barbering sees his disappointment, and she asks our "why?".  He answers simply, "I thought I was younger."

            We feel the poignancy of his reply, and we suffer with it.  Yes, we have suffered with him through his torture and beatings and isolation.  But at that moment, I think we hurt for ourselves as well as for Victor.   We have not been 10 years in a Soviet prison.  But we have known those quiet, private moments when we see that life is passing more quickly than we can keep track of, and we sense having lost somewhere a chunk of time, a piece of our own life.  We have had those brief shocking glimpses when we must face our own aging.

            I don't always know how old I look.  Older than I want.  But it doesn't matter; I'm younger than that.  My dad was old, and his years, his eyes, his body marked him old, as he spoke his dream of Watsonville and artichokes.  But my dad was younger than that.

Age, Part 2

So, I've been thinking. Perhaps when people say "Oh, you're so cute," they're actually opening the lid of the box they have put me in because of my age. Something I've said or done surprised them coming from an old person. I mean, I think we do not expect much from our senior people. They're done. They're relegated. This is actually a complaint I have had for a long time, and it is as much with getting old as with how people regard the old.

Part 2

In the last year of his life, his 90th year, Daddy wanted Mama's '67 Dodge back from my teen-age son.  He was going to move to Watsonville, California, and buy an artichoke farm.  He would live the rest of his life there.                   

            Watsonville.  One of the many places Daddy fell in love with in his earlier travels up and down California as a soft-sell life insurance salesman.  Wherever Daddy would go, he'd get the paper and check the Want Ads for real estate buys.  That's why he had property here and there--not vast holdings, but a house or 5-acre farm.  "Income property," he called it.  He had a place in Santa Cruz, near the Begonia Gardens; a small farm in Oceanside, southeast of the Rosecrutian retreat; and a cluster of rental houses in Lancaster, on the Mojave desert.  Daddy didn't own property in Watsonville, though I often heard him and Mama speak of the place fondly.  And he loved artichokes.

            But my dad had no driver's license in the 90th year of his life.  Cataract surgery on both eyes had left them only partly seeing.  (Those terrible thick glasses he wore made his eyes look bigger than eyes ought to look but did not make them see.)  He couldn't sit, rise, or walk unaided.  He didn't dress himself.  We all knew he couldn't move to Watsonville or drive or raise artichokes or do anything but stay right where he was and let us take care of him.  And when we told him, he knew it too, likely had known it all along.  He said, "I know.  But I want to."

            Maybe these were his attempts to keep living.  Death was near, he surely knew.  These were ways to turn his back on it, ignore it.  Maybe then it would go away.  Maybe then he would be young again.

           

Age: Perspective from An Artichoke Farm

Age is a definer, not that I want it to be. I say this because of how other people insist on regarding me. "Oh, you're so cute," in response to some funny thing I may have said or done. I've been saying funny things all my life. Now such behavior makes me so cute. People call me "Sweetie" or "Hon" or, yes, "Cutiepie" instead of my name. They might as well just call me old woman. That is what those titles mean. I insist I have never done this kind of thing to anyone.
And I insist that inside me, like in my soul, age matters little. Only when my joints hurt or I get more tired than I like do I feel my age. That is, those are the times I feel old.
Here is something I wrote many years ago. It's about age and my dad and about me, hence the title of this blog post.

Part 1

I walked around the corner of the house and saw my dad perched at the top of that tall ladder with his can of paint and brush.  Painting the house again.  It was a tall ladder, though never quite tall enough.  That and Daddy's five feet, six inches meant that the eaves of our 2-story Victorian never felt the slap of the paint brush, never wore the fresh cream color.  But Daddy painted often.  Perhaps he thought sometime he would reach the eaves.

            I wonder now if the neighbors chuckled when they saw him painting again--his stout, round body not quite filling out the white overalls, his white hanky knotted at the corners, covering his bald head for protection from sun and splattered paint.  I knew how he looked, but I never laughed.  Always when I saw him on that ladder I was frightened he would fall.  I can still feel the fear I felt for him then, though he is now gone and long before he died had given up climbing tall ladders.

            Daddy was about 60 years old then and I was eleven.  But I didn't know his age, not then.  He was just my dad.  When we would walk the six blocks from our house straight to the beach and the big slide there, it wasn't Daddy's age I thought about.  It was trying to keep up.  I had to run because my dad's walk was a stride, full of purpose and direction, a real executive walk.

            In the 89th year of his life, Daddy proposed marriage to a middle-aged spinster with history of emotional instability.  That was charity in him.  Yes, he was lonely without Mama, but to him, this was a charitable, loving act and the woman's family would be flattered.  Through the mail he proposed because he lived in Utah and she in California.  Her parents responded by mail, not flattered.  We--all of his children--suspected they would refuse. After all, Daddy was 88 years old.

Sorrow

Our hearts are broken. We mourn with the families in Connecticut.

We, as they, are still stricken with sorrow and still find it all unthinkable, unimaginable.

Words have little power to comfort, but I here promise my prayers and pledge my hopes that comfort will come and life will again hold some joy for them.