Going of Age in Columbus

©2018 John P. Hewitt

When I turned 70 I began to wonder when I would begin to feel old. I sported several of the stigmata of aging — some age spots on my skin, a few wrinkles, gray hair (ok, snow white hair), joints that occasionally assert themselves, permanent atrial fibrillation. But I didn’t feel particularly old, which is to say, I didn’t think of myself, much less refer to myself, as an “old man.” Now, going on 77, I am by any objective standard “elderly.” I first began to feel that time was catching up with me when my father died. He was almost 96 and I was nearly 64. The thought that my genes might give me another thirty years or so was reassuring, but the reality is that the death of an elderly parent is mother nature's way of saying, "Next, please." With both of my parents gone (and my wife's as well), I had now begun a chapter they had themselves begun decades before.

As you grow older you accumulate deaths — not just parents, but aunts and uncles, cousins, your own and your partner's, friends, neighbors, colleagues. Probably all of my grade school and high school teachers died years ago, along with my undergraduate and graduate school professors. And it takes more than my arthritic fingers and toes to count the professional colleagues who have at last been hired into a named professorship in the perfect department. With tenure. One of them, within a couple months of being exactly my age, died recently, and another very close colleague had died a few months earlier. About a quarter of my age cohort have already died, and the daily newspaper provides plentiful evidence that people begin to die in larger numbers around this time of life. I know this because I read obituaries as assiduously as some people read the sports pages. I know the score.

You don’t have to be a sociologist to know that the lived experience of aging has more to do with your own and others’ expectations than with biology, at least until mind and body fail to the degree that you can’t keep things going on your own. One learns to adapt to bodily changes and take the good news wherever one can find it. My hips hurt a bit when I first begin to pedal my bike, but that goes away (or I stop noticing it) soon enough. Until a recent encounter with my urologist’s miniature Roto-Rooter, I peed in a liquid Morse code, to borrow Billy Crystal’s charming description, but that which aging clogs, “minimally invasive” surgery can unclog. At the unisex shop where I get my hair cut my stylist tells me that people are deeply envious of my hair color. My wife and my dog both still seem to like to hang out with me. Physical decline may be destiny, but so far it has been manageable, and my ailments are irritating but not life-threatening.

The central sociological fact of aging is that “old” is a place in the social world, a role that goes with it, and a corresponding sense of self. To become "old" is to be handed a script whose broad outlines have been inscribed for you and are enforced by a cadre of stage managers, directors, costume designers, lighting technicians, and stage hands. There is room for improvisation, but not much, and everybody knows how the play ends. This is what fascinates, amuses, and often annoys me most about aging: the variety of ways one is induced, encouraged, seduced, urged, and sometimes even forced to perform a role whose requirements are simultaneously rigid and flexible, voluntary and enforced. Since an example is generally worth a thousand sociology words, I’ll share an experience.

A few years ago, my wife and I spent a week in Paris, where we had rented a tiny studio apartment in the Marais. The owner met us on the first day, arranged for tickets to an art show, and on the morning of our last day met us again and walked us to the Châtelet-Les Halles Metro station for our trip to the airport. On our return I emailed him to say thanks for a great time and all his help. In reply he said it was his pleasure, that he hoped we would return one day, and that we were an “adorable couple.” Adorable! I was a bit nonplussed by that. Infants are adorable. Kittens are adorable. I can walk, I don’t wear diapers and onesies, and I don’t purr. Can I haz a different adjective, pleeze? Then I thought about how we might seem from his vantage point: elderly, but still spry, pulling our own suitcases along Rue de Montmorency, holding hands, polite, well-groomed, charmingly connected to the world with our iPads and iPhones in spite of being, you know, old. We epitomized the socially desirable appearance and behavior of old folks: no long faces, no visible drool, not physically repulsive, making no unreasonable demands, willing gracefully to accept a helping hand but not expect it. How adorable! Almost sickeningly so. And the truth is that it is not at all unpleasant to be thought of that way.

Being called adorable is a form of deference that contradicts the notion that old people nowadays get no respect. There are other ways deference is shown, most of them fairly subtle. People go out of their way to hold open doors for you at the public library. At the deli counter without a take-a-number system younger people invite you to go first if there’s a question of precedence. I’ve even been offered a seat on a crowded bus. The boy who offered needed only the slightest of prompting from his mother, and, granted, it was Disney World, but still, he offered and graciously I accepted. He even called me “sir,” although he was from the South, where young boys are evidently taught to call their male elders “sir.” It is especially helpful in situations like this one to be respectable looking — and white. In any case, deference assigns you a place in a social transaction, one you are obliged to acknowledge. “Thank you,” I said, and sat down.

Social forces of a different kind came into play when my wife and I relocated from our adobe home in the desert outside Tucson, Arizona to a house on a residential street a few short blocks from our daughter’s home in Columbus, Ohio. “To be closer to our grandchildren as they grow up,” we told people who questioned the sanity of a move from the sunny retirement haven of Tucson to the miserable continental climate of central Ohio. We knew, of course, that the grandsons wouldn’t stay boys forever, but we were also aware that it would be easier on us and on both our son and our daughter if we experienced the onset of decrepitude in Ohio rather than Arizona. Sooner or later we would need their adult supervision.

Our relocation meant that the roles of “parent of adult children” and “grandparent” had to be enacted more frequently and in a greater variety of contexts. All the world’s a stage and we are merely players, but when I lived in Tucson and my daughter’s family were performing their roles in Ohio, and my son’s in Maryland, my entrances and lines in their drama were limited to visits and phone calls. I was not wandering around aimlessly offstage in Arizona but acting in my own play. After moving to Columbus, I realized I was either on stage as “Papa” or available for that role more or less constantly. A helpful ride to school for one of the boys every so often, attendance at school functions, dutifully watching Saturday morning soccer matches in the rain — these activities confirm an identity as a grandparent far more powerfully than visits for birthdays and piano recitals. Now, of course, as the boys are nearing the end of high school and college, there are fewer rides and no soccer games.

One is, of course, other things besides grandparent: husband, brother, neighbor, library patron, tourist, driver, customer, patient, concerned citizen, angry opponent of power lines and highways, rider of a bicycle, airline passenger, and so on. Few of these roles are either attained or denied one on the basis of age. You have to meet age qualifications to vote, buy alcohol, or attain a driver’s license (and in many states demonstrate your competence to keep it past a certain age). But a great many social roles are, in principle at least, not age-specific. Boarding an airplane doesn’t particularly require you to “act your age,” although being over 75 does get you past the TSA agent without removing your shoes. I know how to use the self-checkout lane at the supermarket, thank you very much, I have opinions about road construction that I will gladly and perhaps too emphatically share at a public meeting, and I stare at my IPhone as much as any millennial. White hair and liver spots are irrelevant.

If you were a highly trained sociologist like me you would at this point register an objection to any notion that one can ignore age, even when voting or taking out a book from the library, and you would be right. The enactment of a role is always shaped by the actions and expectations of other people. The old lady on the corner may be perfectly capable of crossing the street on her own if she wants to, but there is a boy scout nearby with his sworn oath to help little old ladies. The attendant at the supermarket self-checkout line who has to certify that I am old enough to purchase beer takes a look at me and enters a dummy birthdate into the cash register without asking me to show my driver’s license. I may think of myself as just doing my thing, but there is always somebody else present who has ideas about how I should, must, may, or can do my thing.

That I am a creature of others’ imaginations as much as of my own is a hard sociological fact that periodically smacks me in the face. My white but still reasonably abundant hair announces my age wherever I go, including in my car. I imagine that if I were driving a Lamborghini it would announce “attractive older rich guy,” but in my Subaru Outback it just shouts, “here’s another old.” (I’ve noticed, come to think about it, that many Outback drivers here in Clintonville seem to be “senior citizens.”) For many drivers, especially young men, white hair is a red flag: “here’s an old guy driving too slowly, must pass, must pass.” I don’t drive especially slowly, but my white hair is sufficient evidence that I am impeding traffic and need to be passed. As he surfs past me on a wave of testosterone, the youthful driver presses on the accelerator and scowls. Not only must I be passed but the fact that I am an old guy being passed by a young guy must be communicated.

There are other, less irritating instances where age shapes others’ attitudes. Occasionally, for example, I will merit a smile from a young woman as we pass on the sidewalk or in the aisle of the supermarket. Alas, I know that the smile means that I am safe to be around, unlikely to offer to show her my etchings. Especially when they see me and my wife together, young women smile because they think we are, well, an “adorable” couple. Although men are perhaps less socially outgoing, men who are probably themselves “old” almost invariably exchange greetings with us when we walk our dog, a mutual recognition that we are in the same leaky boat.

And then there is the matter of social invisibility. Wrinkled skin tells the liquor store clerk you don’t need to be carded and white hair stimulates the post-adolescent driver to zoom past you, but under other circumstances these external signs of age render you invisible. You are, for example, unseen by the herd of teen-agers busily checking their smart phones as they mill about in the mall. If you were a parent of one of them, you would at least have the satisfaction of knowing your presence is an embarrassment. As an old person you exist only if you are a blood relative, an employer, a school principal, or someone else who can do things to or for them.

Not only people, but inanimate objects act in ways that make one conscious of age. My Wii Fit, which every year or two I retrieve from the place where I have hidden it, informs me that “it looks like balance isn’t your strong suit” and that if I want to get a better score on the dance routines I should “try stepping on and off [the Wii balance board] a little faster.” It also calculates my “Wii Fit Age,” and its announcement that my “Wii Fit Age” is close to my chronological age is not what I want to hear. I can’t “head” the soccer balls the Wii throws at me as well as I could a few years ago, a fact the device throws in my face at the end of each game when it shows me my score in relation to my best scores of the past. I would throw the Wii out the window, but it would hit my neighbor’s car and cause him to think of me as just another cranky old man rather than as the nice guy next door who is surprisingly much older than he looks or acts.

The most constant inducement to feeling old, however, comes from the medications I take. Like many people my age I distribute my pills into the seven daily compartments of a weekly pill minder. Doing so is a convenient way of checking to see that I have taken my pills for the day (or finding out what day of the week it is, provided I can remember if I took my pills). There is, however, a darker side to this very efficient way of complying with your (multiple) doctors’ orders. After I take each day’s medication there is an empty compartment in the pill minder, day after day after day until it is empty, and I have to refill it. I do this week after week after week. Now and then I imagine the rest of my life as a series of compartments in a very long but not infinite pill minder. Optimistically, twenty more years of life means there are 7300 more compartments full of pills waiting to be taken. And not refilled, because when they are empty, they are empty. Like Prufrock, I have measured out my life in coffee spoons but going forward it will be measured out in pills.

So, am I old? Yes? Do I feel like I imagine an old man feels? Not very often. When I look in the mirror I see an older me, but I notice the features that remind me of a younger self and ignore the skull that lurks beneath the skin. When I look at my wife I see the girl I married over fifty years ago. I go to bed each night expecting to wake up the next morning. I still would like to have a fast sports car. You get the picture. I remember one of my Princeton professors telling me after I had successfully defended my dissertation, the graduate school Bar Mitzvah, “Now you are a man among men.” (In his defense, the year was 1966 and men had yet to learn that women counted as people.) These days I feel much as I did that day, that I am a grownup among grownups. Not young, not old, just a grownup. I’m still me.

The clock ticks, however, and the pages of the calendar flip relentlessly and too fast. Although I may feel like it’s July or August, it is really more like the middle of October. The leaves have fallen. Halloween is around the corner. And winter is coming.