Back to blog

Growing old is so many things that sometimes it feels like it is everything and nothing, like air, like time. I have aches in all my joints, some of which I don’t think have a legitimate purpose in a human body. My memory for nouns is honestly, shameful. I was a French major in college and I was watching Jeopardy the other night and couldn’t remember the name Charles De Gaulle. I could easily picture him, big nose, cute hat, lil’ moustache. He was tall, imposing. It would be like an American forgetting FDR’s name.
I don’t have the physical resilience and energy I had when I was younger. Stuff happens. Most of my friends are around my age and their bodies are deteriorating at the same rate as mine, some drastically so.
Also, while it is very, very upsetting to me to see the rights and liberties I marched for completely overturned. White supremacism, homophobia, transphobia, oh, I’m too exhausted to cover all the ‘isms and ‘phobia’. I know now, which I did not fully know when I was young, that things change. Change is the constant in the universe. If you want to believe in something you can count on, believe in change. Things will get better around here after a while. Unfortunately, although change is constant, it’s not always timely. I may not live to see the glory, the real greatness of the America I was heir to and witnessed, restored, but, like they say in the movies, “I believe in us”. We’ll be back.
I guess that kind of faith, which I only got as I’ve aged, is kind of a gift. I know that patience is. Ageing is the great ‘shit happens’ drug for me. If someone grabs my parking spot or speaks rudely to me in the market or is driving like a complete asshole it honestly does not bother me. I wish them good luck with their current life strategies. I smile. No one can see me anyway.
That’s another good thing that happens. Indifference. Let’s say that the critical, imagined regard of self-, especially physical self is at an all-time high during adolescence when the vaguely pink nascent disaster of a pimple on the side of your nose can make you shrink in shame during all 6 periods of an interminable school day, is at 100; that same conglomeration of anxiety and narcissism is down to single digits by the time you’re 70. I like to look good, I always put on earrings, wash myself, floss but honestly, the words ‘after five’ on an invite as dresswear suggestions just makes me wonder whether that means the black jeans or the regular ones.
I spend several hours each week with my baby grandson in the backyard. We both love it out there. At first, I found it a bit boring even though he is truly wonderful in every way. After a while, though, I slowed myself down to his level. I watched him watching the birds on the tree, following their trajectory back to the yard next door. I watched him exploring the grass, learning to roll over on it, trying to eat it, trying to pull it, rubbing a leaf and watching it for a very long time and then laughing.
Here’s what I found out: We are living in a kind of paradise where every generation gets to discover this beautiful, complex world at their own pace until the world takes us with it to the busy, busy place where travel arrangements and dinner plans are made, jobs are good or bad or stressful or enlightening, relationships go well then poorly then even better, families change, apartments must be vacated, all that stuff, the stuff of adulting that robs us all of our ability to really encounter a leaf. Thanks to ageing, time and a preternaturally adorable 7 month old boy, I got it back. I am grateful.