The prospect of being old for 40 years is a daunting one.
There's always suicide, which I last thought about consistently through my twenties. Nothing was bad enough to warrant it, and indeed the onset of life-threatening problems showed it for the Suzy Creamcheese amenity it is and banished all thought of it as the resilience genes clicked in.
A black parent once summed up what he didn't want in terms of education for his little girl -- that she shouldn't be made, in white majority schools, to feel dumb and ugly.
Add handicapped -- sight and hearing an effort, getting up and walking a pain -- and you've got 40 years of old age.
I was just watching Martha Stewart who had a feature on how fabulous it is to be a woman of 50, and it's true. You know who you are, the resilience gene has kicked in (if it hasn't, you're not going to be on television talking about how great it is to be 50), your children have disappeared (ooops!), and you are left with the prospect of another 50 years of creativity.
The creativity is the key. A life of the mind is the pre-requisite -- that is to say, you can live without the validation of being good-looking. Because there is a point where you become invisible and also mute. Men, including gay ones, simply do not hear what you have to say -- one reason I've had so many problems with the mice infestation. The exterminator, like all men of his class, stopped listening to me when I was about 44 years old. You have to hire a man to speak to these guys. That Hillary should claim them as her constituency is preposterous.
Creativity doesn't mean painting high art easel pictures. Although it can. It entails concatenation, contemplation, experimentation, and, I suspect, having your own nest arranged exactly as you see fit. I've never trusted a girl who didn't have her own functional nest, and the rubric of don't sleep with a man who doesn't own his own furniture eliminates about 50 per cent of the Mars and Venus problems from human communication. (If only I had followed this rule.)
Creativity entails a spiritual life. We all know people who wallow in the special effects of Epcot church ritual and emotional transaction without ever actually, you know, undertaking amendment and reform of their vicious lives. A belief in change and gratitude for everything, for that which does change, for that which does not change, are the only tools for enduring pleasure and resilience that I know of, and it has not been my experience that human will power can sustain either against the catastrophic blows, or the little ones that hurt you every time you stand up and walk across the room. There really isn't any defense against any of the atrocities. Except the kind of delusion you see people in their forties and fifties electing to embrace, the one summed up for me by the vision in the movie, Death in Venice, of the mini-me-sized playboy, dressed exactly like our hero, flirting with the boys on the boat, his cheeks just a touch too heavily rouged. The Spanish have a nicely medieval turn of phrase for such an one -- a viejo verde.
Change entails willingness, which is hard to calibrate when you're also mustering ignorance of pain and debility. That's not true, actually, willingness, as opposed to will, is what makes the pain go away.
Isolation is the inescapable companion of 40 years of old age. I watch the people who live together in the old peoples' gulag and see each other every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Half of them, if not all of them, are demented <i>because</i> of isolation. My mother stopped seeing her last faithful friend 30 years ago. I finally asked her why. She said her husband made a pass. And I have seen the difficulty of keeping up with friendships outgrown -- people do get bent out of shape by parenthood, bad marriages, the vicissitudes of their profession -- and the difficulty of making new friends dumb and ugly.
Coupling seems to be the most delusionary action to take in old age. My observation is that it's only available to women who are willing very seriously to strangle any signs of life or wisdom they've accrued -- the viejas verdes. I'm recovering my eight-year-old's sense of how very strange, what an enormity, sex is. I've just been reading about what John McCain did to his first wife, who had survived an awful accident while he was in POW camp, shrank four inches as surgeons removed bone, gained weight, and, not incidentally, turned 40. Toast. And this is the quotidian, just the way it is, not the monstrous.
Isolation as dealt with by the nursing homes, I don't know. You can't believe the number of losers who come there peddling their dreadful wares to a captive audience, from the creepy ministers to the folk singers and infantilizing potters. Oh jeez.
That's the big one. It's not a hundred years of solitude. Only 50. That's big.
Erving Goffman years ago studied the management of spoiled identity and stilll has a lot to teach. I'm going to think about him. And about the very ancient ladies I saw sitting on the benches in the median at about 103rd and Broadway, all dressed up and made up.
Cities, public space, the amenities of the agora, of pedestrians, all of which are under sustained attack by neo-liberals, are made for old people. Is being surrounded by the love of strangers the real solution? I think it is. The Hindu nomad was advised, as he set off on the third, hermitage ashram of Hindu life, Let India take care of you.
Mattie Breedlove, with her swept yard and rare heirloom rose, Heirloom Rose catalog, ca. 1991.
http://www.amazon.com/No-Space-Hidden-African-American/dp/1572333561/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213199895&sr=1-4
http://www.amazon.com/Keep-Your-Head-Sky-Interpreting/dp/0813918243/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213199965&sr=1-2
-- Jeannette Smyth
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