Process of Growing Old Has Its Curious Rewards

No matter one’s age, society undermines the egos of people who grow one year older every year. That’s all of us. Impersonally and relentlessly, the marketplace actually has enlisted our cooperation in robbing us of the pleasure we should have in not only our ripe years, but our process of ripening.

I was never so aware of this than a few years ago when, in my mid-60s, I returned from the Canadian sub-Arctic healthy, glowing and full of wilderness tales. The mid-60s is not an advanced age for camping out, not even in the Canadian bush. Old people in relatively good health are often more enduring than the young, because they have learned the skill of pacing their lesser energies, a skill that balances against the greater strengths of the young.

But when I returned to civilization, I found that many of my friends considered the adventure an unusual experience for one so “old,” which is curious because I have a lot more energy now than I did as a middle-aged mother rearing four children. Listening to the people who told me of all the things that could have happened to me, I realized that they had been badly brainwashed. Though we sat face to face, talking, they had projected upon me the holograph of some rheumatic stranger.

It is not unusual for a person who has been doing something well all of his life--like jogging, or making wall-hangings out of old leaves, or creating beautiful quilts--to suddenly become the subject of patronizing news stories on the theme of “senior citizen does these amazing things!” The implication is that if you still are active and doing a little something in your late 60s, 70s, or 80s, you are news. The unfortunate thing about these news stories is that they steer the mind of the public away from the real wealth of the elderly, which is their intimate memory of events that shaped the present.

Though aging for a woman always has been something to be dreaded, there was, when I was in my 20s, no medium visually hawking an impossible standard of beauty. There were movies, but they were not so ubiquitous and constant as TV. Cinema was beginning to set standards of youthful appearance, but only tentatively. A woman still sought uniqueness of personality, good character, a feminine freshness of appearance and good grooming.

The demand upon women, in these times of “enlightenment,” is that she be attractive physically, and that she conform to the standards of the times. Only a few voices are calling for her to be herself, to show her unique personality apart from any role she may play in life.

In my mid-20s when I was teaching in a junior college near Boston, I had a student named Muriel whom I shall never forget. At 18, she wanted to look 30. In her eyes 30 was glamour, mystery, allure, black lace and sultry makeup. Muriel was the first person I had ever known to admire an age so far beyond her own, an age even beyond mine, which I had been taught to dread. It occurred to me that she had invented an excellent thing. A woman could and should anticipate the ages to come, study each in advance, pick out the best that any particular age had to offer, and hopefully progress to maturity in a lovely way rather than to be a person always pathetically trying to look or act young.

Quality of Life

Inspired by Muriel, I began studying people two or three decades beyond mine, separating the attractive from the unattractive. Looking back, I can see that, although not too far from the cultural pattern of my peers, I was extremely immature. I considered my conscious decision to respect old age as a form of old-age security, which would pay dividends of self-respect in future years. Though this was valid, it never occurred to me that what I really sought was a quality of life. Like my peers, I found old age inherently unattractive, but it was a mountain to be climbed that might hide alpine meadows of beauty in its heights, so I was going to find beauty even if I died of old age in the attempt.

When I began my serious search in my late 20s, I was looking at women who were 50 and older. At first it was a discouraging project. It appeared that the most I could hope for in old age was to be neat and piously well-groomed. But then came along an old woman whom I shall never forget. I saw her on a playground where I was watching my children play. The old lady was with a much younger woman, perhaps her granddaughter, and she was obviously freshly arrived from Europe. Going from swing to swing with enjoyment, she regarded everything about her with a child-like astonishment.

Very tall, the lady was dressed in a shapeless cotton dress that hung down to mid-calf. Over the short-sleeved dress, she wore a hand-knit sweater of heavy yarn. Her gray hair was pulled back in a bun; her face was seamed; her nose was very large, almost witch-like. Her laced-up boots were odd, probably men’s shoes, heavy and thick-soled. Yet this lady shone. Oblivious to the attention she attracted, she laughed as she swung back and forth in happy celebration of life. She talked excitedly in Polish and there was an innocent sweetness that bubbled out of her chatter. Though clearly from the peasant or working class of Europe, she had a gracious air that a duchess could have envied. Tall and bony as she was, she moved with a graceful clumsiness that, rather than giving the appearance of an aging person slowing down, gave her the charm of a young colt.

Even thinking about her now, I would like to hear again her happy, deep-throated laughter. She grew warm and removed her sweater, and as she lifted her thin arms to hold on to the swing ropes. I saw the unmistakable tattooed numbers on her forearm. The reality exploded in my mind. How had her laughter and joy survived the concentration camp! What an incredible person she must be!

More than a decade later I sat on the beach in Southern California when there appeared on the sands before me another memorable old lady. She was a gray-haired Asian woman running down the beach with a little boy. Her clothes were what older women from the Orient always seem to wear, something straight, severe, and somber in color with a patterned scarf at her throat, a straw hat tied under her chin. She carried her shoes and socks in one hand with the other held tightly to the hand of the barefoot child beside her.

Pure Harmony

There was such a freedom and harmony in their movements; it lent them weightlessness and joy. Gentle pleasure spread like a wake behind them as they winged along the water’s edge like two exotic birds. The faces of both were relaxed and serene; they had no need to chatter. Their lovely flight expressed pure harmony with each other, with the sun and water, with the pleasures of a day at the beach.

Another kind of extraordinary fascinating old woman used to be a fairly common sight in the Western states, the Indian matriarch on the reservations. Nowadays, these ladies dress a hundred different ways, and whether in modern dress or velvet blouses and long, full skirts, they are heavily adorned with silver jewelry.

At first a typical Indian woman appears to be haughty. Then one begins to notice the manner in which she speaks to the grandchildren who ebb and flow around her. There is strength and love in the low, rough voice speaking the language so alien to ears tuned to European tongues.

Rarely--but sometimes--accident brings the traveler within this woman’s private space. Suddenly the face is wreathed with a shy smile that bursts like the warmth of the sunrise. The smile gone quickly, the warmth remains and in it lies an intimate honesty and the inner peace of a life so hard I can hardly imagine it. Like the desert, she stands, full of beauty of being fully what she is. Her roots lie in the hogan and the casual traveler will never know them.

For a long time it bothered me that I could find no woman in my own American urban culture to add to my thin list of lovely elderly women. Then I suddenly noticed two ladies so close to me that I had never noticed before that they were elderly, though one is 82 and the other is in her mid-70s. The former is my cousin, who has been quietly and effortlessly charming all of her life, and the other is a long-time friend of hers, a woman who was a professional actress in the late 1920s and the ‘30s.

Here are two career women who never tried to squeeze their happiness out of husbands or anybody else. Nor did they stoop to piecing their personalities together out of the social artifacts of their times. If they have experienced heartbreak, it has never shown in their faces or disturbed their spicy, courteous grace. They are so comfortable with themselves that anyone in their company feels comfortable, too.

Both women can flatly contradict you, and instead of feeling socially battered, you feel that you have been handed one of the treasured jewels from their treasury of experience. There is something much deeper than mere character in both of these women. There is a beauty so real that it no longer needs the props of youth. It shines out of their eyes with a power it probably never had when they were young.

When I returned from the Canadian camping trip, rather than fight the misconceptions my friends projected, my pragmatic nature pointed out to me that this media image of the “senior citizen” could be a blessing in disguise; because behind this blurry screen the older person could operate with a tremendous amount of freedom. Society expects nothing of you anymore, though at the same time it gives a great deal of attention to its own idea of who it thinks you are. This leaves your real self quite unshackled by courtesy of invisibility. You are free! You have been put out to pasture, and, if you choose, you can find yourself curiously rewarded.

It was many years before I grew wise enough to know that to seek attractiveness was to turn and pursue the herring that society has dragged across the true trail, which is quality. Self-respect, self-confidence and contentment, daily deposited and slowly accumulated over the years, this would be my bank account. Nowadays, when there are so many pressures upon my personality to be not myself, but only some variant manifestation of today’s culture, that is the bank account that will sustain me.