Reaching the Age of Enlightenment

These were grim days for Leah Komaiko. The children’s book author had already passed 40 and was still aging relentlessly.

“L.A. . . . was not the place to get old,” Komaiko writes in her new memoir, “Am I Old Yet?” (Golden Books). “If it was, someone would have done it already.”

Komaiko’s misgivings about aging may have been typical for an Angeleno, but her way of ministering to her angst was distinctly her own. Instead of going under the knife--or, at the very least, to the dermatologist--Komaiko went into the belly of the beast: a pink stucco retirement hotel in Van Nuys.

“A couple of people suggested that I do something to get out of my head,” says Komaiko, now 46, who lives nearby. “If I’m really afraid of being old, why not visit someone who’s really old and find out what it’s like for them?”

That someone turned out to be Adele, a blind 94-year-old widow who would eventually teach Komaiko the life lessons. But Adele, who doesn’t disclose her last name, would do more. She would star in Komaiko’s first book for grown-ups--”Am I Old Yet? The Story of Two Women, Generations Apart, Growing Up and Growing Young in a Timeless Friendship.”

“God was smiling at me when I met her,” Adele says. “And I mean it.”

Komaiko is reading the book aloud to Adele, but since it has just been published they haven’t made it much past the beginning. In the first chapter, “So Young to Be So Old,” Komaiko writes about the trials of being an aging boomer, someone whose sleeping ritual now requires “heating pads (steam or dry for back pain), a night neck collar, lavender aromatherapy, valerian root, calcium magnesium and vitamin D to ward off osteoporosis, and a fan or air-conditioner running 12 months a year to block out the noise from my neighbor’s barking dogs.”

“You said it sounded like one gigantic complaint,” Komaiko is telling Adele. “That was your first critique.”

Komaiko and Adele are chatting in the deserted beauty parlor of the retirement hotel that has been Adele’s home for six years. They’re perched on pink vinyl seats with attached hair-dryer bonnets tilted back in the off-duty position. After all, Adele wouldn’t think of getting her hair done there.

“I came here a couple of times, and they did my hair,” says Adele, now 96. “What turned me against the woman that comes here was that she didn’t know that I overheard her talking about what she did to my hair. It was finished, at least to her satisfaction because it was my head of hair. So she said, ‘Oh, it’s all right. It doesn’t matter. She can’t see it anyway.’ Because I was blind. So that was the last time.”

*

Not that Adele allowed the hairdresser’s boorishness to interfere with her toilette. No need. She has something her neighbors at the home don’t--a real friend on the outside. Komaiko drives Adele to a neighborhood salon when she needs a trim.

“And there they treat me like a person, which I am,” says Adele, clutching her pocketbook. “I’m no different from other people, and they’re no different from me.”

Komaiko ultimately came to the same conclusion, despite their half-century difference in age, give or take.

“She was so engaged in her life that she made me see how dead I was,” says Komaiko, a petite, friendly woman with a cloud of curly brown hair. “I didn’t realize how old I’d become until I started hanging out with someone who was 94.”

Says Adele: “The difference in our age--and there’s a big difference--makes no difference whatsoever.”

Komaiko’s account of their friendship so beguiled Jamie Lee Curtis that she optioned the film and TV rights. “Every once in a while a book drops out of the sky and lands on my ‘favorites of all time’ shelf. ‘Am I Old Yet?’ is one such book,” Curtis writes in a cover blurb. “It reminds us of the power that life, and all its wealth of experiences, has to offer.”

Komaiko, who has no children, was mired in the torpor of early middle age when she called the nonprofit Elder Corps a couple of years ago in search of a companion who was older and lonelier than she was.

Komaiko writes: “I’d like to volunteer to be matched up,” I said. “What are the requirements?”

“Are you breathing?” the voice on the other end asked. “We could use you.”

When Komaiko began visiting Adele in the hotel’s Chit Chat Room, she was surprised to find that life among the elderly seemed eerily familiar.

“A woman in a Beatles cap passed us slowly and stared at me as if perhaps I didn’t know Adele was blind,” Komaiko writes. “I had no idea this was how the blind were treated. I knew what it felt like to be ignored by others. . . . I had seen it happen countless times when I visited kids in their grammar schools. I just had no idea this stuff still went on in the 80th grade. Was I supposed to spend time here with Adele . . . only to learn that in the end nobody ever grows up?”

*

Komaiko initially visited Adele once a week as required by the Elder Corps. But after a few months, she would find excuses to drop by more often, until the women became the emotional epicenter of each other’s lives. Komaiko found herself in the odd position of being the only person who ever visited anyone regularly at the home. Indeed, she was spending more time with Adele than with friends her own age.

“I went to visit her under the pretense of visiting somebody who had nobody, but really I was volunteering to visit someone to save my own life,” Komaiko says. “My social life was hanging out with people in their 80s and 90s. They were having a great time. They’d be dancing and singing, and they have a party for everything.

“I’d go to dinner parties with people my age, and it would be conversation about studio deals. I’d be bored out of my mind.”

Sometimes Komaiko finds herself straddling both life stages and feeling at home in neither.

“Plenty of times [at the retirement home], I think I hate old people. Get me away because it reminds me too much of where I’m going, because I get bored, because it smells. When I’m there, I want to live my wild and crazy life, which is basically to come home and watch TV. But you become very aware of how free you are now.”

Still, Komaiko ultimately found a nest for herself in Adele’s milieu.

“By accepting people with crinkly old hands, it made me think there’s a tremendous arrogance in the assumption that I’m better because I’m younger,” Komaiko says. “I see that’s not true. I have more mobility, and I’m glad I’m not 94. But I’ve never heard anyone [at the retirement home] say this is a tough town to be old in.”

The women talk to each other about whatever crosses their minds. Adele gives Komaiko tips on finding a home for her 78-year-old father. The divorced Komaiko shares her fears about embarking on a new romance. Often, Adele retraces her memories, and through the filter of time, they sound like fairy tales. Today, she is talking about a would-be suitor.

“Different little experiences that through the years come back to you, they’re not important in themselves,” Adele says. She is wearing green pants, a flowered shirt and a mustard-colored vest with a frog-shaped pin that was a gift from her daughter, who lives an hour away and visits occasionally. Adele’s son, who lives in Reno, is ailing and doesn’t visit.

“There was this man who lived on a curving little street who had lost his wife, and he was alone, utterly alone. So he wanted me to marry him. I was alone at that time, but I said, ‘No, thank you. I’m busy.’ ”

Komaiko hoots. “That’s a good one. I’m sorry. I can’t marry you today. I have other plans.”

As Adele talks, Komaiko interjects an affectionate jab or a laugh. And so the women continue their conversational two-step, right in time with the other. Neither finds it odd that Komaiko is the only regular visitor to the home, even though she’s not a relative.

Says Adele: “You know, sometimes family isn’t the closest. They sometimes don’t care to put themselves out a little bit, but she never falls down.”

*

Irene Lacher can be reached by e-mail at socalliving@latimes.com.