Old Old Age

Once in awhile I just have to write something about old age. To be honest, I don't think a lot about being old-- anymore than I thought about any other age. The thinking happens when a combination of events come together to tweak my interest or remind me-- hmmm I am old, aren't I. One of those things was this article from Susan Jacoby on

Old Old Age

Definitely it seems our culture is screwed up regarding our thinking about old age-- beginning, middle or end.

I don't know about you but I find the television advertisement about the guy in his mid 70s with a weight lifter's body to be repulsive. Is it appealing to think some old dude spends all his time working out-- and please don't tell me that body happens without steroids or constant working out. What it tells me about him is that a muscular body is his primary interest.

Or the other one in the same ad who, thanks to this program, wants sex ALL the time? Is wanting to go back to one's youth, feeling and acting like a teen-ager again, and being just as shallow, that's supposed to be our goal for our life, where we get to when we finally reach old age? Seriously???

Is this really about trying to deny aging, the cycles of life? They went through all those years, those experiences and it ended up all they care about is a muscular body and a libido like being a teen? I didn't find that appealing in a man when I was young and at this age it seems pathetic. That's all there is to life?

I don't think there was so much debate about what old age meant when I was a girl. None of this-- 60 is the new 40 talk. Old age just was what it was and you knew it when you saw it. Grandmas were old-- aunts not so much. Old didn't mean the same thing though as my grandmothers were very different for how old age was for them.

One always wore dresses, her hair in a braid coronet around her head, old lady shoes (if you don't know what that means, you are still young), and sat a lot while activity swirled around her. She was the queen bee. My memories of her are from after she lost my grandfather. From photos I have seen of her when younger, she changed after that. I never really knew her as a woman but only as my grandmother. She was an example of one sort of being old, living with her daughter and her son-in-law but with fierce dignity and a sense of self worth that never left her. She was who she was and had no interest in being someone else. Emotional game playing around her? Forget it!

The other grandmother was still probably regarded as hot when she was old. She wore wigs, sandals, slacks if she wanted, laughed a lot, and had men wanting to be boyfriends after she had lost my grandfather. She sold her cabin at the coast and bought a small home in north Portland where she lived alone, got involved in a Soroptomist Club, painted, and stayed busy. She had grown up in that general neighborhood, remembered racing horses down one of the main streets when she was a girl; so she had come back to her home base. Her I knew better as a woman because we had long phone calls where she shared of herself and was interested in my life.

I look nothing like either of these women and tend to look more like my father and father's father, but I have taken values from them both. I don't know that they taught me how to age though. I am not sure they either one thought about it. They likely knew they were old, but did they think about that as something negative? It was just a fact.

Today there are a lot of elders who deny they are old as though the word is somehow insulting. They say they feel as young as they ever did and inside they are still girls or boys. I am not sure from what this stems except maybe the fact that inside we are the same person who has learned as we went along but the inner us is still us from the time we were children to the time we reach the end of our days-- assuming our minds travel along with us-- and if we cannot access the memories, inside, they are still there, just with a short circuit to them.

Over a month ago I was at a funeral in the local rural church. It was for a much beloved old lady who had touched many many lives during her 95 years. I first saw her when she was 62 which means younger than I am now. THAT is simply not possible, except it is although I never knew how old she was until much later. I guess she did seem old. Or maybe not since she was taking care of her mother who was really old. Still I was 34, and back then anything over 50 probably seemed old. It's all relative.

When I was at the funeral, I saw a lot of friends I hadn't seen in years. One of them asked how I was. I said fine (this was before ear ache and tooth breaking). She said no aches and pains? I said, 'By 67 everyone has aches and pains. It goes with the territory.' She and her daughter were in shock at my age. That cannot be. Well it can and is and aches and pains do go with being my age, but it's one of those other things I don't think about unless something gets out of hand.

When I got the ear infection, maybe helped along by being out in extremely cold air without a knit scarf, I thought was that a less effective immune system that ends up making old age a lot like being a child for how more things go wrong? I don't actually have an answer, but I do once in awhile remind myself that I can't eat what I once did without it upsetting my stomach or intestinal system and the muscles don't recover as fast from being pulled. There are differences

There is no doubt that when I see people I haven't seen in a long while, I do think how much they have aged or haven't. It's of interest to me how people get into real old because that's coming and I want to see how it's been for them. We live in a culture that hasn't much valued old age. It doesn't have to be that way.

To worry about looking young doesn't make sense to me. I do what I can to make myself look good for where I am. I haven't let it go for the styles of clothing I wear, my hair, or my skin (don't ask about weight); but I don't feel the need to take extreme measures.

Actually I like how old looks. We watched RED recently and I liked seeing Helen Mirren as a woman of her age and yet still vital. She may have had some plastic surgery. I don't know. But she looks in her 60s to me and it was fine. She has changed from what she looked like years ago but in a good way. She still is her and sh looks like a real person.

The thing is plastic surgery doesn't actually work for making people not change. I read something the other day about how the bones in our faces shift as we get old. Tightening your skin then will produce a different person than that 20 year old you once were.

Those people who have had surgery are trying to defeat aging but it doesn't work. If they aren't careful, it takes away their identity and turns them plastic. They might look smooth of skin, but they don't have character. No thanks. And Botox would be worse as, injecting poison into our skin, where will that end up someday? Maybe people can have a tweak now and then and it's not so noticeable but why do it? To hold onto youth? We can't anyway.

I think the biggest thing with aging is how it amazes me the various ages I have been. I was that girl? Really, I was her? It doesn't seem like me and yet I know it was. I guess someday I'll look back on these years and think the same thing.

When I was leaving a beauty salon a couple of years ago, after a permanent, an older lady than me and I got to talking and she said these would be the good old days to me someday. So far they all have been. :)

The photo was from 1967. My grandmothers are next to me with my mother beyond, Farm Boss's grandmother was visiting from Iowa, and his mother was holding our daughter. The abstract painting on the wall was a gift to Farm Boss and me from and by Diane Widler Wenzel (Parapluie here).