Getting Old (or being aware of my age)
You're only as old as you feel (and who you hang around with).
The first time I thought I was getting old I was five years old. I can remember feeling very proud as I walked towards my house on Caribou Road in Corner Brook, Newfoundland: I am old now, I am five!
On one of my parents’ visits to Toronto a few years after Dave and I were married we met them at Union Station. We were wearing new, very stylish, (relatively very expensive) leather coats and probably had our noses in the air. Dave had started his work as a lawyer with some success and we were beginning to spend, something we hadn’t ever been able to do. We really thought we had arrived and were entirely mature (old). My Mom said to us how good we looked and how happy she was that we could feel like this even though we were so young. Young!
When my son, Davey, was about ten years old and I was 36 we were looking at one of those pictorial diagrams of women at different ages. It wasn’t this one but something similar. I asked him where he would place me on this chart, I thought I was the woman in the sky blue dress. He thought I was the woman with the white top and navy skirt. Oh dear.
(Now I am the woman in the navy skirt and pink top but still without the cane.)
In my early sixties I sometimes went shopping at Toronto’s upscale Holt Renfrew on my lunch breaks. Fifteen minutes to walk there, half an hour looking around, and fifteen minutes walking back. I remember on one of those lunches happily browsing the jewelry and cosmetic counters noticing the sales ladies, all dressed up and made up -- looking so good. I thought I fit right in. And then I tried on some foundation makeup and looked in the mirror. What a shock. Oh no! I don’t look like those sales ladies; I look like their grandmother.
When I was working at the Legislative Research Service I was considered an innovator. I got to work on most of the new projects – both to conceive (when I suggested them myself) and to plan and carry them out. I loved it. My motto was “Run it up the flagpole and see what hits it.” In my last couple of years of work things changed. I was still working on some of those projects. But the younger staff were coming up with the new ideas and running the implementation teams. It just wasn’t my time anymore. I was ageing out of the great innovator reputation.
For the past couple of years when someone asks me how I am I grin and say “Not bad for an old lady.” I don’t know how I came up with that, it just happened. I have a touch of irony in me. And, of course, I am just fishing for the reply: “Oh, you’re not an old lady.” I really don’t think of myself as an old lady. I still think of myself as a vigorous, curious, lover of the good life. Ageing indicators are becoming more apparent: resting in the afternoon, an aching body, forgetting common words, waking up three times in the night, friends becoming sick and even dying. But I don’t personally feel old. Some of my best friends in their eighties are living active and wonderful lives. Compared to them I am young.
For a couple of his last years my widowed Dad, then in his late seventies, lived with us in our Pinehurst house. He loved to sit in the back yard for hours watching the birds and the squirrels. At the time I couldn’t believe anyone could be so content to be so inert physically. But now I understand. Sitting and contemplating, watching whatever activity, thinking whatever thoughts, feeling the warmth of the sun. What a glorious reward! It is one of the best gifts of being old.
Maybe soon I’ll be there too but right now I have to run off to a meeting and then answer some emails and then make dinner and then watch MSNBC or CNN to see if the world has imploded yet.