A Senior Moment

At 45, I am bracing for the indignities of aging.

While I am today a magnificent beast, I know one day soon I won’t be able to dance in public without someone calling paramedics. There will come a time when my butt is only a case number at the Bureau of Missing Keisters.

Oh well. Considering the mileage, I’m philosophical. But must I read AARP magazine? Will I be spared nothing? Apparently not.

Formerly known as Modern Maturity, the lifestyle magazine of AARP is publishing’s gray-haired Godzilla, with a bimonthly circulation of nearly 23 million households. That makes AARP magazine the largest paid-circulation magazine in North America. Not Time. Not People. Not Cosmopolitan or Playboy or its pawing, panting manque, Maxim.

I should note that AARP magazine’s No. 1 status is a bit of a technicality. A subscription comes free with AARP membership, solicitations for which start arriving in mailboxes as soon as you turn 50 and don’t end until these solicitations come back marked “deceased.” Roughly half of Americans 50 and older--35 million--belong to AARP. Technicality or not, that’s an ocean of readers.

And yet, unless you have crossed the half-century mark, you might be unaware of this publication. I was. It has no newsstand distribution, and even this newspaper’s excellent library does not have a subscription. I didn’t actually hold a copy in my hand until I went to a podiatrist recently for a broken foot.

And so I espy a portent of my future, hours unto days languishing in pink waiting rooms, thumbing through magazines that assure me that my impotence/incontinence/incompetence problems can be addressed through medication. Take me now, Lord.

The current issue, with actress Candice Bergen on the cover, features the results of AARP’s survey of sexual behavior and attitudes in older Americans. The good news is that seniors have a new lease on sexuality thanks to potency-enhancing drugs such as Viagra and Cialis. This also is the bad news. Among the thanks-for-the-visual findings: 20% of women 70 and older admitted to masturbating; 11% of people ages 50 to 69 confess to having sex in a public place.

The sex survey story is accompanied by a list of the “50 Sexiest People Over 50,” including Pierce Brosnan, Susan Sarandon, David Bowie, Patrick Stewart and Condoleezza Rice, who I do hope has restrained herself in public.

Don’t misunderstand. It’s not that I think age or declining health should foreclose the pleasures of sex for anyone, and as I sit here now I cannot imagine a time when I won’t be a sexual being. And yet part of me wishes that it were so. Think of the gardening I could get done. When the Zen poet Basho had grown old and infirm, a visitor asked him if he was ever tempted by sexual thoughts. “At last,” Basho is reported to have said, “the beast is silent.”

You said it, brother.

One of the compensations of age ought to be a kind of transcendence. As eyesight gets shorter, vision ought to get longer and we should see the world in better proportion, valuing the eternal and discarding the ephemeral.

Not so, judging by AARP magazine. The petty squabbles persist. The advice column “Modern Love” fields a question from a wife who suspects her husband’s old girlfriend has designs on him. The beauty column weighs non-surgical options for wrinkles.

So this is what seniority is like: high school with liver spots.

The more disturbing realization was to come. I found myself interested. As a matter of fact, I do want to know how to live longer, and so I worked my way through the article on tips for extending longevity. Here’s a bulletin from the frontiers of gerontology: eat right, exercise, give up bad vices and, if necessary, pick up new ones (see above on sex in public).

After the Terri Schiavo fiasco, the article on drawing up a living will was a must-read. This hits close to home for me. My mother had a living will with do-not-resuscitate and no-heroic-measures provisions, which were summarily ignored by doctors when she was wheeled into the emergency room with an aortic aneurysm. Gray as oatmeal, she came to a couple of days later in intensive care and, boy, was she mad. “I can’t believe I’m still alive,” she said. “Where is the jackass responsible for this?”

I suppose there are methodological flaws to any analysis of American senior culture based on a single issue of AARP magazine, but I can’t imagine what they might be. Surely what these Americans read--what they pay to read--is some kind of index to what they think. It reflects a population obsessed with sex, enamored of celebrities, fretful over mortality and enraptured, above all, with self.

In other words, people just like the rest of us.