Escape from the Masculine Mystique

The other day I came across a letter I wrote to our son in February of 2000, in which I related two incidents that served “to remind me that I’m getting on.” I had asked a cab driver in Jerusalem to let me off in front of our apartment house, which would have required him to take a circuitous route back to the main road on which he had been driving. He asked me if he could drop me off a bit before having to make that detour. “I really didn’t have time to pick you up,” he explained, “but I did you a favor because you’re elderly.” And only a few days later, after I had bought a ski cap, the proprietor called out to me as I was leaving his shop, “I don’t suppose you’re going to the Hermon [a ski resort].” While I thought of myself as "getting on," I didn’t think of myself as old. It was beginning to be clear, however, that strangers thought otherwise.

There had been an earlier indication of how I appeared to others. Seven years before, when my wife and I were touring New Zealand, a young waiter at our hotel asked us where we were going next. Queenstown, we told him, and then asked what there was to do there besides walking amidst the spectacular scenery. “Bungee jumping,” he said without hesitation. He then looked at me and said, “but I guess you’re beyond that now.” I was indeed beyond it. On the other hand, I had probably always been beyond it. I laughed and told myself that no doubt he considered anyone over 40 as old.

The signs of how we appear to others are usually abundant, but we often ignore or deny them, as I did with the waiter, the hat shop proprietor, and the taxi driver. Though it’s clear that for many years I’ve appeared to others as elderly, it’s only recently that I’ve finally acknowledged the fact that people look at me as an old man, and that I can no longer kid myself that I’m in “late middle age” or even in the stage known as “the young-old.”

I’m glad that people see me as old because I sometimes need their help. These days, because a broken bone in my foot has hobbled me, I wear a soft cast and get about with the aid of a walker, which helps me to keep pressure off the injured foot. This means I must travel by taxi to go any distance. I’ve been impressed by the alacrity with which most cabbies leap out of their cars to take my walker, fold it up, and put it into the car’s trunk, and then help me into the car. They offer the same assistance when we reach our destination. I’ve also been impressed, during the past two months of using a walker, by how many total strangers go out of their way to help me on the street. They steady me over snowdrifts and hold doors open for me. Had I broken my leg at twenty and been walking with crutches, I don’t believe I would have received as much consideration. My benefactors clearly view me not only as disabled but as an elderly person who needs a great deal of help. They’re right and I ‘m grateful for that view of me.

So I’ve escaped at last from the masculine mystique. People no longer expect me to be strong and self-reliant, and I no longer feel ashamed to ask for help. This is a liberation, an unexpected gift of old age.

Diorientation

A few days ago, six hearty men packed up the contents of our apartment, prior to its renovation, and delivered most of them to a storage facility but some of them to us here at our new quarters. We expect to live here for the next five or six months, and although it's fully and handsomely furnished, we needed yet more storage space. So we came with three bureaus and three small filing cabinets, along with numerous cartons containing the contents of our kitchen, dining room, and linen cupboard (we had asked the owners to remove their dinnerware, cutlery, cookware, and linens), plus all our clothes, a dozen or so books, our files, office supplies, and so forth. As far as material goods are concerned, we're now fully equipped for life in our new surroundings.

It would be pleasant to assume that my mental equipment is equally sufficient, but after the first few days here I have my doubts. I keep looking for things in the places that they occupied in our former home. At breakfast, I reach behind me for the sideboard drawer in which I keep my pills, only to remember that the sideboard is now in a warehouse and that the pills are now in a cupboard across the room. When preparing for bed I go to our bedroom to organize my clothes for the next day, before remembering that my clothes now occupy a dresser in the hall and a closet in the study. I spend the day looking for things in all the wrong places.

Perhaps that's understandable. Habits form quickly and die hard, after all. But what habit can account for my losing one of my hearing aids? Suddenly my right ear felt naked. Where was my earphone? I had been opening boxes, stooping and lifting and putting things away, hampered by my still having to use a walker to protect my broken foot. Perhaps my hearing aid fell out while I was engaged in these unaccustomed acrobatics. "It must be somewhere in the apartment," my wife said, as we stood amid the crumpled white wrapping paper covering the floor and that she had been periodically carrying out to the recycling bins. What if the device had fallen onto a pile of papers, only to be hidden by yet more papers as these were thrown onto the floor, then scooped up, and taken away?

To replace the device would cost more than two thousand dollars and in the meantime I'd be even deafer than I am now. I felt guilty and depressed. What a start to our new life here! But there was no point in indulging in self-flagellation. I would look for the missing hearing aid. I wasn't exactly searching for a needle in a haystack, but the device is very small, the apartment large, and the number of places it could have fallen seemed to me almost infinite. First I checked my clothes, to see if it had fallen somewhere in there. Then I looked around all the boxes on which I had been working. Finally, I gave up. "It will appear or it won't," I told myself, "so pull yourself together and continue to unpack." This I did, but with a heavy heart.

But in the end I did find it. It had not left its little box. I had neglected to put it into my ear in the first place. When I opened its box and saw it, I felt immense relief and not a little chagrin. I understand that the elderly are often disoriented by a move. I hope that it was disorientation and not mental decline that caused me, for the very first time, to put in one hearing aid but not the other. Time will tell. In the meantime, I will continue to unpack.

What Do You Do?

Terry Tempest Williams, a naturalist and writer, is the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah. In an interview with Krista Tippett, broadcast last week, she recalled that when she was recently asked at a dinner party “what do you do?” she responded, “about what?” She believes that it would have been so much better to have asked her “what do you see?” or “when was the last time you were afraid?” These questions probe the essence of a person, in contrast to the question “what do you do?” which she considers superficial.

The unfortunate person who asked Ms. Williams “what do you do?” expected of course a response such as “writer,” but that's only part of what she “does.” She’s not only a writer of books and op-ed pieces, but she’s also an educator and a campaigner for the preservation of the environment. Those are some of her public roles but she must have private ones too involving her family, friends, and neighbors.

Her remark might not have resonated with me were I not retired, no longer teaching, directing dissertations, writing academic articles and books, or addressing professional conferences. In the past, if someone asked me what I did, I would say I was a university lecturer and give my departmental affiliation. The question may have been superficial, but my answer, I felt at the time, defined me.

I retired young enough for people to continue asking ask me what I did, a question that persisted for another five or ten years. It seemed pretentious to say I was a writer, even though I devoted much of my time to writing, since my writing earned little money and I published little after I have retired. So I would respond by talking about the book I was currently trying to write. Now that I’m no longer writing books, I can't do that. It doesn’t matter, though, because nowadays no one asks me what I do. No one asks me the universal question that academics at research universities ask each other, “what are you working on?” I’m too old, I guess, for people to assume that I’m doing much of anything at all.

But in fact, I’m occupied all day long, carrying out various clerical and domestic tasks, writing letters, fulfilling familial obligations, maintaining friendships, keeping abreast of current events, reading novels, and so on. Of course, I also did those things while I was employed, even if I allotted less time to them. (They require more time now. A few years ago, a college classmate observed that he spends more and more time doing less and less.) As Terry Tempest Williams implies, I did much more than carry out my professional obligations. We are more than our careers.

If someone were to ask me how I occupy my time now, I'd say that I'm trying to squeeze as much experience as I can from each day. I'd also say that I'm trying to maintain and strengthen my friendships and family relationships. Pursuing these goals, which I once viewed as tangential to my "real work," are now a central occupation. Had I said so thirty years ago, people would have looked at me askance. And it would have been an odd response, for men defined themselves, still define themselves, by their careers. Perhaps it would still seem odd, but it would be the truth. My perspective has changed, now that I'm acutely conscious of how little time is left. That consciousness drives some former colleagues to write one more book, one more article. Not me. I no longer view those academic goals as crucially important. I no longer aim to accomplish anything beyond experiencing as much as possible and strengthening my most important relationships. Those would be accomplishments enough.

Electronic Devices

A month or so ago, as my wife and I traveled up to Boston on an express train, we noticed the extent to which the young people sitting near us were immersed in their electronic devices – i-phones, laptops, e-readers, i-pods, and i-pads – typing, texting, reading, listening. Sometimes, it seemed, they were doing several of these at once. Deftly, swiftly, and with complete nonchalance, they operated these devices as if they had emerged with them from the womb.

Not so with me. The older I get the more resistant I’ve become to adding yet another electronic device to my repertoire. It’s not just a matter of age. Some of my elderly friends are as tech savvy as the youngsters, and they operate their devices with the same élan. But as for me, I’ve found that each new device complicates my life and exposes me to one more set of technical problems, many of which I’m unable to solve by myself.

But technical problems are not the exclusive domain of new-fangled electronic devices. They’re found in even plain vanilla instruments such as the telephone. My wife and I spent many hours over a three-day period last week talking to representatives from Verizon, the company that provides our telephone service. The trouble began before that, although we didn't know it at the time, when we placed an order with Verizon. We asked them to change the date at which they would transfer our telephone service from our present address to a new, temporary one. Verizon assured us, when we inquired at the time we placed the order, that the original date had been canceled and replaced by the new one. It turns out that Verizon did change the date for connecting the phone to the new address but it did not change the date for disconnecting it from the old one. So last week, while still at our old address, we were unable to receive incoming calls.

To reinstate our service, we engaged in at least 10 time-consuming conversations with Verizon agents. A few times we were cut off in the middle of our interaction and had to begin again. Once I was put on hold for more than one hour (thank goodness for speaker phones, which allow you to continue working while waiting for someone to come on line). Finally, we found a representative who fully understood the problem and provided a solution. From what she told us, it was clear that none of the previous agents had fully grasped the company’s automated system.

As frustrating as was our recent experience with Verizon, it gave me a perverse sense of satisfaction. It’s not just an old person like me who is confounded by technology. The Verizon technicians were confounded too. The automated system which they had to operate had become so complicated that they had not mastered all of its parts. So those young people we saw on the train, with their fancy devices, are just as apt to run into technological walls as I am.

If it’s true, as a wise person once observed, that there’s never been a labor-saving device that saved anybody any time, the same is also true of electronic communications devices, whether telephone, cellphone, i-phone, fax, or computer. One can accomplish more with their help, true, but they also consume inordinate amounts of time, even when they're trouble-free. But few of them are trouble-free. Rare is the electronic device that has not made its owner want to throw it out a window at least once during its life. I hope Verizon's agents finally learn the company's system before it becomes even more complex. In the meantime, I derive comfort from the knowledge that I'm not alone.

Words: beautiful, kind, and unkind

When he was about my age, my father used to say that the most beautiful words in the English language are “come back in three months,” at least when he heard them from a doctor. When you reach our stage of development, you no longer take it for granted that you’ll still be around.

But those aren’t the only beautiful words. “I love you” is perhaps the most beautiful, and “come back in three months” the next most beautiful, at least for people of my age. But a close runner-up to these is “you’re right.” As Laura Belgray writes in a recent blog post (www.talkingshrimp.com), it may be painful to admit you’re wrong, but it costs nothing to say “you’re right,” and it makes the person you’re talking to feel good.

Almost as good as “you’re right” is “perhaps you’re right.” My mother taught me the usefulness of that expression. Not only does it end a fruitless argument, it pleases the other person, because you’ve shown that you’ve listened. Besides, maybe the other person is right or partly right. There’s usually something positive to be said for the other’s point of view, even if you don’t agree with it.

If “I love you,” “you’re right,” and “perhaps you’re right” are pleasant to hear, “you’re wrong” strikes the American ear as unnecessarily harsh. But that’s in America. In Israel, as the linguist Eddie Levenston pointed out, saying in Hebrew the equivalent of “you’re wrong” is not thought to be overly abrupt at all. Israelis are dugri, a term they've borrowed from Arabic, which is to say that they're uncompromisingly frank and direct. So Israelis view the American practice of saying something like “are you sure?” in place of “you’re wrong,” as wishy-washy.

“The kindest words I’ll ever know are waiting to be said,” wrote Richard Rogers for the musical No Strings (1967). What are the kindest words? When your wife has fallen in love with her new dress and asks you if you like it, what do you say if you don't? My grandfather, when faced with that question, would say “I’m no judge,” but that’s the same as saying “no.” I suppose you could say, “now that’s a dress!” (This technique works well when proud parents show off their ugly infant. You can say, with perfect truth, “now that’s a baby!”). The kindest response to your wife’s question, since after all she’s already bought the dress, is to say that you like it.

Kindness calls for tact. At the conclusion of a freighter voyage across the Pacific, where I was the only passenger, I told the Head Engineer that I’d like to treat the officers to wine before our last dinner. That tactful soul didn’t make me feel bad by saying that this was not such a good idea. Instead, he said, “even better would be to pick up the tab for their drinks before dinner.” He was right, since in this way everyone could have what he wanted, but he implied that my original idea was good.

The kindest words, of course, depend on the context. But the unkindest words of all are clear. Unfortunately they're as hard to repress as it is cruel when you don’t, but you must repress them at all costs. Those awful words? “I told you so.” Sometimes it's kindest to say nothing at all.

Turkeys and Change

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his best-selling The Black Swan, provides an instructive analogy. A turkey is fed and watered for 364 days, so the turkey would be justified in assuming (if it could assume anything at all) that the 365^th day would be like all the others. Conditions may continue for a very long time but, as demonstrated by Thanksgiving Day, to say nothing of the current revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East, they don’t last forever.

In a recent broadcast of Krista Tippett’s interview with the physician Jon Kabat-Zinn, he spoke of our “somnambulism.” The founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, he said that we go through life without realizing that change is the basic condition of life, that stability is illusory. For years our homes and our retirement portfolios increased in value and we assumed they would continue to do so. We extrapolated those trends into the indefinite future, so the Great Recession shocked us. We were unprepared for the change.

Aging is, of course, a universal product of change. So why are we surprised to find these changes operating in ourselves? Sometimes we rail against them, sometimes we even deny them. We’ve seen our grandparents and our parents age but somehow don’t expect that our own old age will be accompanied by some of the same physical, emotional, and mental changes.

The 365^th day will arrive for all of us, but in the meantime, our last years will not be like the last days of the turkey, which are more or less all the same except for a continual increase in its weight. Year by year, our medications and visits to doctors increase just as our strength and energy decline. Yet at the same time, we have greater opportunity for reflection, greater opportunity to reach out to others, greater opportunity to consider our actions and to be mindful of our surroundings, and best of all, greater opportunity to appreciate the wonder and glory of being alive. If change is a necessary condition of life, it’s worth it.

Geezer

In my last post I wrote about the Geezer Bandit. The story of his exploits aroused my curiosity about the origin of the word geezer. According to worddetective.com, geezer derives from an English dialectal term guiser, which referred to a person of any age who dresses up in costume. In costume a person assumes a new guise, acting in a way that is out of the ordinary. The word gradually changed its meaning from a person wearing a costume or disguise to one who is simply odd. The meaning kept on changing, from an odd person to an old person to simply an old man.

The original meaning of geezer, it seems to me, remains at its core. The old are odd, different from the rest of the population. In general, we don’t work for a living, our memories weaken along with our physical strength, our health has declined, our life expectancy has drastically contracted, and in reaction we’re often crotchety. If the referent of geezer has changed from all old people to old men only, perhaps the reason is that old men are even odder than old women. After women retire from employment, they continue in the domestic tasks that they have always performed, and they often find satisfaction in helping to care for their grandchildren. This may give old women a greater sense of continuity and purpose. In any case, retirement seems not as disorienting for them as it is for men, whose identity is often bound up in their work.

The closest equivalents to geezer that I can find for old woman are crone and hag, but these terms are highly pejorative, yet another instance of sexism. Geezer is not so much pejorative as condescending. The picture it arouses is that of an unkempt, somewhat wayward old man. If crone demonstrates sexism and geezer condescension, both reflect agism.

So, old people of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our derogatory and condescending terms. Demand to be called what we are: not geezers, not crones, but old people. There’s no shame in that.