How Did I Get to be 80?

Yesterday was our guest’s last full day in New York before leaving for a conference in Tel Aviv, where he will spend a week before flying home to Germany.   A past president of his city’s psychoanalytic institute and instrumental in bringing psychoanalytic method to the former East Germany, he was a stimulating guest.

Although he had visited New York many times before, he had never seen the Brooklyn Bridge, so I took him to the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, which offers a spectacular view of it.   On our way to Borough Hall, which was next on our morning’s tour, I pointed out Monroe Place, a few blocks away from the Promenade, where I had lived more than 50 years ago.   Fifty years ago!  How is it possible when most of the time I don’t feel as if I’m more than 40?

Most of the time, yes, but there are frequent reality checks.  Among them are climbing the subway stairs, when I have to stop half way up to rest my aching thigh muscles even though I’d been half pulling myself up by means of the railing.  And then there are the many times young people offer me their seat on the subway without my asking them, without my even first meeting their gaze. 

Just the other day, as my wife, our German friend, and I were walking to Shabbat services (he’s not Jewish but was accompanying us out of curiosity), as we waited for the light to change at the Grand Army Plaza, a young fellow, perhaps 20, called out to me, “You look sharp!”  This pleased me, of course, for I had done my best to dress well, but on the other hand I reflected that he would never have complimented me had I been even twenty years younger. 

When I discussed the interchange with our psychoanalyst friend, he said, “Do you remember when you were twenty or thirty and encountered a man in his 80s? Then you’ll know how you appear to others.”  Of course he’s right, but that reality check was a particularly bitter one.

I offered my theory that just as I feel free to address a baby, an utter stranger, so the young man felt free to address me.  And what’s in common between the baby and me?  It’s powerlessness, exclusion from the  role-relationships of everyday life, as least as perceived by the public at large.

“Why,” I asked our friend, “am I so surprised to find that I’m 80?”  He said he knew what I meant because he feels the same way at 75.  “Because,” he continued, “our emotions haven’t grown old. They’re the same as they always were.”  That explains a lot more than my surprise at having grown old.  



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