Pop 89: Old
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
Betty works Wednesdays at the library. That’s the day I usually pick up my holds. After Betty prints out my list, my tab, as I like to call it, I look at the bottom to see how much I’ve saved by using the library instead of paying for new books: $5, 467.00 so far this year. I should get a badge for this, I always say. And then we have tea.
I rant a lot about agism these days, more than likely a result of my own deeply repressed agism, no doubt steadily accruing all my life. Why wouldn’t it? I live in a world that exhorts us to shudder at the thought of jowls, double chins, cellulite and wrinkles. Even the most accomplished of women, moms who are also writers and actors and civil servants, will find themselves saying things like “I feel bad about my neck.” They raised their children, put them through college, maybe even put them through rehab, but they feel bad about their waddle.
My agism has never been against older people directly, just against me specifically. I resisted the fact of me getting old. Which, let’s face it, is a form of agism. I suffer from the sort that says: I’ll never get old, I’ll never “let myself go,” I’ll never loose my zing or eyesight or hearing or reflexes. I will not suffer the “plight of the elderly.”
And yet, I was born 40. My sister, who reminds me of this fact, claims she has always wanted to be 60. But if we simply sprung into life at 40 or 60 what lens would we use to perceive the world? Without all the embarrassments, mistakes, breakups, jobs, apartments, windfalls and near misses. Without the weight gains and losses, shoes and hats, hugs and kisses, fights and make-ups, without the the shock of loneliness, the haunt of memories, what would we have to offer anyone? At 60 we also carry in us 11, 22, 36 and 45. How interesting would we be without those parts inside us? And most of all, how would we face death having never really lived?
These are the things Betty and I ponder as we creak and groan getting up and sorting books in the tiny room. Somehow she has enlisted my help - something else age teaches us: tricks to get children to eat their vegetables, games to calm a worried mind, diversions to ease pain. The difference between elder and elderly may lie in the balance between the ability to distract oneself from needless temporary worry and the ability to return to the real task at hand - the task of living life as a fully engaged and present-and-accounted-for human being.
But this afternoon, Betty was performing the magical act of making a chore seem like a privilege. Here, Madonna, I’ll let you paint this fence for awhile, it’s only fair you should have some fun too. Then the kettle boils and we seat ourselves at the tiny table meant for toddler storytime and continue our individual retrospectives. I continue telling Betty something I heard recently and am planning to share with my brother on his 60th birthday: “Your first thirty years you worry about what people think about you. Your second thirty years you don’t care what people think about you. And your third thirty years…”
“Nobody’s thinking about you!” Says Jacquie, standing at the spinner rack, looking for another book. Jacquie, like my dad, turns 90 this year. She knows.
“That’s right!” We all laugh.
As they say: Old age is not for sissies. But there are some old things we like old: wine, cheese, art. And music. I spent some time among musicians in Nashville where I drove to research my radio documentary on defining Americana. One venerable old musician told me: “It’s gotta be old, worn, weathered, bruised, scarred and bloodied.”
He was describing music but he was also describing the ancestry of this place and most ranchers who live around here. And the grain elevators. And the abandoned barns and homes that folks from the cities come looking for. The places mistakenly called “ghost towns”, as if no one still owns them or the memories and histories attached to them. Just because others can’t see or perceive the stories buried and hidden in the foundations and on the land doesn’t make old communities dead zones.
One of the voices addressing agism is writer Sharon Butala, now in her early 80s and showing no sign of slowing down. Her book of essays “This Strange, Invisible Air” examines the ways we, as a culture, judge the old. She warns us not to judge ourselves and each other “in terms of the values, abilities, and desires of the young.” Because “by such standards we old can only fail.”
Whether we are navigating our 50s, 70s, or 90s…whether we call this time in our lives our “Third Third” or “Fourth Quarter” or our “Golden Years”, we have an opportunity to resist the urge to succumb to the self-deprecations and polite disappearing act expected of us. I personally prefer to call this time my “Season of Fury & Wonder”, after the title of yet another new Butala book, a collection of short stories.
The preface to the book begins: “These stories are about old women. I wanted to make them about old women’s lives now, as they live them.” But the past is part of the stories because “the past is very much an internal part of the now for all old people. If old age is a time of re-ordering the past…of trying to draw a clear narrative line through it, of finding, at last, recurring or steady themes, and summing up …then reflection, musing, meditating on the past is inevitable, and very much to be desired. The now only makes sense in terms of the past.”
So don’t be afraid to say OLD. Even if the young are. It’s not a four-letter word.