Please consider these assorteds on old age as a batch of letters that someone sent you long ago. They are no longer lost somewhere in the postal system. They have been delivered after travelling the world’s continents and seas. Let’s examine their numerous postmarks, forwarding stamps, addressee unknown return to sender marks before finally opening and reading their contents.
Once we slice open these historic envelopes, a door will open to gaze upon long ago keepsakes, letters and cards from birthdays, condolences, births and achievements, delightful photo albums and killer 8MM home movies. We must resist succumbing to the urge to binge on these sea salt caramel sweets. I still want to see, remember and enjoy treasured past family pets, vital grandparents, stunning at seventeen girlfriends, a black tobacco Gauloise cigarettes I smoked in Paris along the Seine during the students riots of the 60s, my toe headed daughters and auburn haired mother laughing and ducking in and out of the camera frame again and again, waving their hands in front of their faces.
Many people my age and younger seem able to recall entire tableaus from their childhoods and those of their own children’s lives as well to include conversations, exact meals, birthday parties, illnesses, picnics, vacations, the time when . . . . I can’t do this. I am forced to rely on prompts like these assorteds. Join me if you want as I recall, re-assemble, gather and group these items as they take me backwards and forwards.
I will likely leave out a lot. The insistent dailiness of today will get in the way and interrupt my focus and work. I will do my best.
Sorting these unsorteds got harder as time went on. It required an initial ruthless in-out decisiveness to which I was unaccustomed. Yes, so an endless dithering led me to postpone their assembly to the point that I find myself at now, where all I can do is call the mob forth and worry about culling the herd later. Perhaps a future bonfire will be required as a final editing tool.
I have a deep respect for ageing, especially when it is bottled and comes from either Bordeaux or Scotland. Oh yeah, I almost forgot to also mention ageing cheese – the aromatic ones that are either crumbly dry or spreadably runny.
I think that individual human longevity is due in small part to keeping the mind busy and living life as if it were unending. I hope to die while I am constructing a new house during my late 90s.
As I get older, rhymes do not come as easily as they did during my youth. Metaphor and assonance are infrequent and often forced when they appear. I am left with prose, which allows me to more slowly and with more words express what it is I felt, I observe or might think in some near or distant time.
Sometime during my late 50s, I realized there were no answers, just stories. That is why I believe that one of the most critical things we do as parents is teaching our children how to be storytellers. They should know how to tell stories that are insistently, beautifully and believably true.
Why?
Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, and conceive the inconceivable. Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth.
When I turned sixty, I started reading fairy tales again. Sadly, they were on the front and editorial pages of our daily newspapers and weekly magazines.
I am treating my late sixties like the adolescence of my old age. Consequently, occasional stupidities are allowed and encouraged, not just tolerated.
As I age, minor infirmities and physical diminishment are ever present inconveniences. Old age is a place where many of us don’t want to be, but none of us want to leave for good. Sometimes the bravest thing some of us do is getting up and facing the new day. With just a wobbly left footed walk and cataracts, I do not require that type of courage.
The antidote to the pains of old age – a springtime week in Paris.
Old age, whether we believe in God or not, is a place where some of us dwellers come to feel that we are prophets who must share the fruits of our divination. Unless this harvest is stylistically entertaining, philosophically deep or mildly humorous, our crystal balling may cast us into the corral of fools and crazies in the eyes of our listeners.
We old men write about our lives in part to retrace our steps. Perhaps to see if there was some alternate life course. But many of us are secretly afraid that should we be separated from our stories, life would have no meaning. We would then only be shapes of an indeterminate size and bereft of color. Should our life’s meaning become lost to us, we would no longer have even a name by which to be remembered. We suspect, or at least hope, that our story, once written, can never be lost from its place in the world. And that is what awaits our search of discovery. Our tale.
What is my story? old men end up whispering at the beginning of this odyssey.
WARNING: The writer in me and perhaps my readers want this tale to have shape and structure, development, a theme, insights and resolution. Be advised once again that it is an assortment of slides, many of them at times defying chronology and refusing structure.
When I was a child, Mom pushed me around in a stroller. When she and Dad were old, I pushed them around in wheelchairs. In between, the world tried pushing them around. They pushed back – only much harder. I have tried with a few noted successes to be like them as an adult.
An unexpected bonus observation on ageing came to me late one winter night after a long bout of alcohol temple visits along Duval Street in Key West. It was raining lightly and the drops spun prettily in the yellow-white light that illuminated the waffle house parking lot in New Town. It was empty inside, except for two chilled homeless gents at the counter, escaping the wetness outside over quickly chilling, formerly hot cups of joe.
Once we sat down, I noticed by the kitchen order window a pretty, brown haired waitress in her late teens, dressed in a yellow and brown uniform with her hair tied up on her freckled neck – much like my oldest granddaughter did when she worked at Subway. Our server seemed tired, but she was polite and smiled at me when she took my order. While the others in my party openly flirted with her, I felt a sense of guilt, almost shame not for them but for me, at my susceptibility and thankfulness for this young woman’s smile. It was then that I recognized that in my early sixties a man is easily flattered by a young woman’s seeming attention to him. I had forgotten that when I was young in the company of aging women that a warm smile was simply a respectful deference to old age.
WARNING: Old age is not a consistently satisfying bookend to the arc of life. We old people are just as vulnerable to disorder, not to mention happenstance, caprice, and bad luck, as anybody else.
Now that I am passing through the cusp of old age, I am going enjoy it as I am able and plan to be awesome at ageing. I do not regard old age as a downhill grade full of missed opportunities as our jalopy bodies hurtle toward a crashing dissolution. Rather, I intend to keep roaring, pedal to the medal, up this steep mountain and through its switchbacks with, I hope, surprising horsepower and nimbleness. The past half century of acquired cunning and guile should help me. Screw the dashboard GPS for a recommended follow on destination when I reach the peak. I do not plan to go down the mountain’s other side, but I shall essay to keep rising, perhaps reaching a velocity and vector to aviate with the zephyrs.
The passions and appetites of my old age are like a reduction sauce in cooking. This concoction is marked by its ingredients — great herbs, spices, red wine, butter, and sugars from my life; by instruction it has simmered over low heat for a long time; and in the end it has been slowly reduced to a flavor intensity not found in its individual elements. The last requirement for me is to remember upon awakening each day to pour this sauce over that day’s entrees.
I grew up in the Pleistocene era of consumer electronics, using rotary phones, playing 78 and 45 RPM records, watching only three channels of black and white shows on postcard sized TV screens, goring to bed when the day ended at 1130 PM as the national anthem played on all TV stations before they signed off, developing a roll of black and white film to see photos of yourself a year or two old, and listening to scratchy AM radio. Jesus.
Do all the lessons we learned on the laps of our silvery voiced grandparents allow us to claim more years of age? I’d like to think so. If so, I might be much older than my 60 something calendar long years, perhaps I am a century or two more aged in width. While I have a literal and longitudinal age, I sense a surrounding radius of years about me. If so, I am pleased by this gift of another century or more of additional life to have lived.
It does old men well to remember how a pair of female high-heeled shoes sitting alone on the floor at the edge of a bed that we were in or about to enter could fire our bones.
Aging benefit: We finally figure out which worse luck situations our bad luck saved us from.
Memory:
I am in equal measures bemused and saddened by forgetting what I wanted and tried hard to preserve as memory and by recalling with precise physical, emotional and spiritual atmospherics that which I wanted to forget. This tells me that scars, both physical and psychic, are powerful reminders that our pasts were real.
The act of recalling a memory does some violence to the original memory. What we alter in the recalling and writing down is yet another reality.
My life’s memorable guideposts include three card monte games and hat trick games I saw in summer carnival sideshows, fevered sweaty dreams and schemes from my adolescence, ghostly chimeras from childhood stories, and political/religious tent show baptisms, confirmations and elections of adulthood.
On happiness:
By the time we’ve grown to adulthood, we are as happy as we are going to be. We will have good times and bad times afterwards, but in the end we will be about as happy as we were at that point. Or as unhappy. So the time to get this right is during our youth and get a firm grip on and the hang of it. It’s too bad many of us either learned this unadvised the hard way during our youth or never got it at all.
The role of chance in our lives:
If we’re lucky, we figure out that our universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is unconstrained. Human existence, however, has its own order in which the odds of happiness and success at the individual level are deeply marked by the pure chance of the circumstances of where and when we are born.
The truth about the world is that anything is possible. But not always probable.
Just remember things can always get worse.
Rolling Stones Axiom on Luck: with effort you get what you need instead of what you want. That’s just about the best kind of luck we can have.
The notion of chance is the preoccupation of rational men engaged in rash undertakings. These include waging war of madmen’s making in a distant foreign land. (More on this later)
Quit bitching:
Complaining about the bad things which happened to us along life’s way were undeserved is unwarranted BS. Why? We seldom if ever mention the good things that fell our way as if we had done something to deserve them.
Mysteries of Life #1, #2, #3:
Was I in life’s experimental or control group?
Was I given the test product/drug or the placebo?
The way of life in this world is to bloom and then begin to die at the stroke of noon during our lives. The only thing left unknown is how long we have after this sunny onset of the night.
Another thing I observed during my life inside the American Dream theme park was that many people who were successful during the period of life that I call The Great In-Between were losers in high school. As we entered adulthood, values changed and the deck was reshuffled. We got another chance, a last laugh if you will. It turned out that it wasn’t life’s last laugh. The deck will be shuffled once more when we enter old age. How long we live, how fast we age, whether we win or lose the dementia sweepstakes, stroke bingo or the cancer lotto has little to do with the factors that determined our success or failure in the previous rounds. Some may see justice in this (and there is from some vantage points), but I’d chalk it up to the role of chance and not to worthiness, virtue or any other self-controlled variable in our lives. So, as I tried to say earlier here and in another piece last month, but did so poorly and in too many words, we should choose to live life in the most excellent and loving manner possible.
Copyright © 2016 From My Isle Seat