On Growing Old

Crystal and I are talking in my office about her paper on rap music.  I tell her I listen to rap, that I like the embattled self-consciousness in Kayne West’s “All Falls Down,” the resolute hope in Common’s “I Have a Dream,” the history lesson in Rage Against the Machine’s “People of the Sun,” and the exquisite pathos of South Park Mexican’s promise to his mother “not to do no more shit no more” in “Drunk Man Talkin’.”  Crystal’s eyes round.  “I guess I thought you’d never listen to rap,” she says.  “Because I’m an English professor?” I ask.  “No,” she says; “I mean, you know, you’re old.”

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The Roman poet Virgil says, “The best days are the first to flee.”  Tom Stoppard says, “Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.”  Edgar, in King Lear, says, “A man must endure his going hence even as his coming hither.  Ripeness is all.”  Brigitte Bardot may have had Edgar in mind when she said, “It’s sad to grow old, but nice to ripen.”  Yeats described himself as “a tattered coat upon a stick.” Kerouac may have had Yeats in mind when he described “the forlorn rags of growing old.” William Faulkner defines time as “the mausoleum of all hope and desire.”  Martin Amis may have had Faulkner in mind when he describes time going “about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.”  The Beatles, worried about sustenance, physical and emotional, wondered “will you still need me, will you still feed me” when they turned sixty-four. Emerson asserts, “The years teach much which the days never knew.”  Thoreau declares, “None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.”  Longfellow believes that “Age is opportunity, no less/ Than youth, though in another dress.”  So does Oliver Wendell Holmes: “To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than being forty years old.”  But a party-pooping Philip Roth character maintains that “Old age isn’t a battle; it’s a massacre.”

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Autumn of our years, evening of our lives, the remains of the day, the Geritol generation, the empty-nesters, senior citizens, the leisure years, the twilight years, the sunset years, the golden years—what metaphor for being old that isn’t words hollowed out, grinning gourds, encandled to dispel the rueful nearness of kingdom come they only imperfectly conceal?

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My dad said, “It’s OK to be old; it’s not OK to be an anachronism.  You can’t stop getting old, but that doesn’t mean you should stop learning.”  Dad had little patience for metaphors. 

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The life cycle of a rose begins with a compacted and sheathed green bud stage, followed by the partially-open bud phase, which tantalizingly reveals the petals’ color.  In the full-bud stage, the color is completely visible, though the petals are not yet fully exposed.  The petals fully unfurl in the open rose stage.  The rose has bloomed.  When the petals fall off, the rose enters the rose hip phase.  A nutrient-strong bud remains, which is harvested to cultivate other roses and to regenerate a new rose from the old. 

Which of the five phases is the essence of the rose?  Each, in its own moment; all, in their progressive unfolding.  A becoming and a consummation.  The life cycle of a rose, of any plant, of any being, is a plotted narrative, coherent and continuous, whose theme is the what it is.

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 From the perspective of the long duration, we are all, no matter how many times we have witnessed this whirling planet’s yearly pilgrimage around the sun, incomparably old, stretching back though veiled eons to the point of our emergence.  We are time’s chronicler. It records itself in us, on us.  We are fossils. We are still emerging.

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I sometimes wonder if going gentle into that good night is preferable to raging against the dying of the light.  Seems like it could be a waste of good rage. 

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I did not attend my 45^th high school class reunion.  I haven’t attended a reunion since the twentieth in 1986, where I found, two decades out, that too many of my classmates had never really graduated from high school. 

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Getting old is reaching the point where one’s sense of self, one’s interiority, one measure of worth, no longer seeks validation in others, is no longer performative, no longer ritualized and staged to solicit social recognition.  The who we are, the what we are, is objectively established through long experience.  We have learned what to pay attention to and what to winnow from attention; what needs to be chosen, rejected, overcome, changed.  We have witnessed connections, disconnections, transformations.  We do not need a self granted and affirmed by others.  We are selved, and still selving.

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My Dad told me a story when I was a kid about a young boy, the son of a farmer, whose father gave him the present of a newly born calf to raise.  Every day the boy lifted the calf in his arms.  By the time he was a teenager, Dad said, he was lifting a full-grown cow.

 

When I turned forty-five, I decided that each year, on my birthday, I would add an eight of a mile to my daily runs.  At fifty-five, the dull throb of aching ankles, knees, and hips—a persistent and discomforting body language, a grammar of pain—forced me to cut back.  At sixty, I stopped running and bought a treadmill.  As they say in the technology business, the power scaling stopped.  Still, I walk, briskly.

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I sometimes miss my young body, its agility and strength, its loping looseness, its seemingly inexhaustible energy.  Decline is hard.  Our bodies betray us, or seem to.  They age chronologically but our minds do not.  In our minds, the carnival of youth still clamors.  Our minds loiter in the past, in the what-I-could-do, and, with resistless seduction, whisper the should-still-be-able-to. That whisper is a high-proof intoxicant and offers a spiky buzz, but its hangover is disappointment.  The body, however, knows this and will not be seduced.  It is one acquainted with the night.  It knows things and does not speak in a whisper.

In Paul Simon’s song “The Boxer,” we are told the fighter “carries the reminders/of ev’ry glove that laid him down/or cut him till he cried out/In his anger and his shame/”I am leaving, I am leaving”/but the fighter still remains.”  We carry the reminders of hurts and guilts and cruelties, the anger and the shame, but we also carry the joys and pleasures, the curiosities and achievements, the loves and the friendships.  Beautiful things are still beautiful.  We are limited beings, and that is humbling, but it is also ennobling because it dignifies our striving.  So we remain, the almost-turned page, until we leave.   I’d like to think I’ll be grateful.  I’d like to hope I was unpercentiled and did not give myself away, piece by piece, until I was a silhouette of the man I was.  I’d like to hope that I honored the past but was not eclipsed by a longing for it.  I’d like to hope that I’ll have the grace to let go of what I held so closely.  Then, I’d be gone.