I don’t doubt it for one moment.
Numbers are numbers. But even the
value of currency changes vastly over time, as does the significance of the
numeral on that U.S. legal tender.
I’m fifty-six. I’ve never been that before, and my life’s experience, oddly,
never endowed me with a thorough understanding on just how to be
fifty-six.
In today’s anti-ageism world, gratefully, we generally all don’t judge or
discriminate by age the way we once did. Professionally as well as socially. It
undoubtedly has to do with the result of the vast population growth of the last
fifty years, coupled with the existing population of so many of the grownups
preceding that explosion. Unless the legislation of a “Logan’s Run” Bill were
to be passed, the answer is, we all just have to learn to live with
one-another. Peacefully.
Unfortunately, one unconditional side effect my age has provoked is this inexplicable
comfort I experience when I’m presented in any situation with someone within or
beyond my years. I’m always grateful for
the company I keep and those who nourish me. Those younger “old soul” people
also know my algorithm, and there are blessedly plenty of those. But somehow, advancing toward Senior Cat in a
world dominated by more and more chronological kittens is something to be reckoned
with.
The irony that characterizes my life is, I never could really be a kid.
From the time I began grammar school, Grade K, I was more in tune with adult
company. I was raised in a home of three
middle-aged grownups. My aunt and uncle
were the fifties family in the 1970s. Empty nest, with constant grandkid
visits. They were my cast playmates. To offset all that silly kid stuff,
thankfully there was my mom. Sometimes,
when things got too raucous with the little ones, she’d snatch me aside and whisper,
“hey, wanna go to the movies…?” She was just as bored as I was..! We’d get a
ride over to the UA Quartet or Glen Oaks, and regardless of what the chosen
feature promised, it was a respite. And
she took us to some great ones, like Day Of The Dolphin, Funny Lady, or the
uproarious re-release of Take The Money And Run. But what made those afternoons
important were the discussions. Lectures,
actually. My mom was known to venture on
in table talk about English literature, Socrates, Aristotle, the Mortimer Adler
or Leonard Bernstein interview she watched on Channel 13 last week, and all
things academic. None of them college-learned.
She never attended college. I was raised by a single woman in her mid-forties
who lived on administrative office jobs and a lifetime of reading everything in
any college bookshop. She would come to
insist in years to come that nothing I was being taught in my Core Curriculum
of History or Arts was being related nearly as comprehensively as her efforts
would offer. I had enough exposure to
her home-schooling to second that, actually.
Despite some of the numerous setbacks of being raised, ultimately
one-on-one at age nine, by a codependent elitist intellectual, one of the top
benefits, I never doubted, was some very good company.
Being with my mom and her closest companions at the time, her older ex-husband
and friends, in their trendy Village settings in the late 1970s was kind of
like hanging out on the set of Open Mind or The Stanley Siegel Show. Their sociocultural references were ones I’d research
and learn all about if I didn’t get them already. I became absorbed in knowing what all those
Bogie and Bacall cracks meant, if I didn’t already figure it out from all those
1940s Warner Bugs Bunny features I’d wake up with on Channel 5 each morning. When kids my age were wrapped up in Star Wars
and Saturday Night Fever, I was fixated on the Museum of Broadcasting, and
those precious mid-century kinescope films of The Dinah Shore Chevy Show, Texaco
Star Theater, The Ed Sullivan Show, and that Lincoln Diamant collection of TVs
earliest acclaimed commercials. When I was approached by one of those high-rise
living room talkers wanting to hear what this little kid had to say, this ten-year old was never spoken down to. I could rap about the history of TV comedy
for an hour. With Norman Lear. We would
have dug one another when I was ten.
I studied the men’s styles, their wardrobe, these men in their greater
fifties. Mom’s silver haired ex- was a
dapper Manhattan schoolteacher, and almost never showed up in anything less
than a nifty tweed jacket and knit tie. His notorious Costanza-like twin brother
was also a snazzy clothes horse. I didn’t
wear such fashions. A ten-year old doesn’t
stroll into the schoolyard wearing a jacket and tie. But I sure could dream.
My daydreams consisted of the tall, slender grownup me, decked out in the sport
jacket, the print tie, and that girl in the fifth grade I secretly crushed on,
arm in arm on our way out of the Metropolitan Museum. Every ten-year old has his dream.
I’d grow up, and keep all that frame of reference I’d cultivated within me.
The eighties didn’t really impress me when I lived in them. I held my high
school teachers with great respect, perhaps the kind not all my classmates
maintained. Our Assistant Principal was
a finely composed man, impeccably dressed each day, with a voice and delivery
like a commanding TV news anchor, a veritable Milton Lewis or Roger Grimsby. My English Honors-Program Lit teacher was lost
on his entire class, in their eyes an unmistakable Saturday Night Live
sketch. But to me, this silver-maned
semi-Anglican in tailored formals was the real stuff.
Even if I did hang with a bunch of high-school co-seniors who prided
themselves on some kind of worldly sophistication because they watched
Masterpiece Theater Sunday night as part of their Honor Society project, but
were more focused on the latest Wham video on MTV, I still saw myself not quite so applicable. Ultimately, I’d figure out how to recognize my own
individuality, and appreciate it.
Part of it always meant tossing out references of a world of the past. Why was a kid of seventeen in the eighties comparing
a TV sketch to Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca.? The one response I’d never stop
hearing from elders around me was “You’re too young to know about that..!!” How
rude.
I never knew why that was an offense.
I still don’t. If someone today introduced me to their sixteen-year-old and the kid began discussing the early days
of Studio One and Playhouse 90, we’d have one fine conversation..!
And amidst a majority of my life spent in the wings of the radio business,
where it’s all about the thrill of just “getting the show on the stage”, a constant,
collective Olympic effort, surrounded by like souls just as dedicated and
clever, there’s been little call for academic conversation or formal attire on
any regularized basis. Just absorption in
and gratitude for one’s occupation, while ignoring the changing cultures, if one so choosed. That’s how I woke up one day in 2005 with no
computer or cell phone.
I would learn soon that my elitist disdain would need to change, along with
my other virtues. And in this odyssey I
would come to discover not a generation gap, but an existence on a planet in a
generation galaxy.
Those grownups, the stencil by whom I designed my self of today, were my
age back then. They were much less
healthy by comparison, they had accrued more experience and establishment professionally
and financially than I’ve yet to conquer. And to this day, I continue to admire
the long lost presence of those vintage towers, indulging when I can at last in
some of the era literature and available media on which they once dined. I can
actually, virtually pretend I’m them back then..
And suddenly, I’m me now.
Last time I looked in the mirror I was twenty-four years old dreaming of
the respect I’d receive as a shirt-and-tie, cardigan-clad grownup. Respect of
course, begins inside the self. I can’t
honestly say I’m frightened or dismayed by the sight of a full beard of gray
fur. Trouble is, I’m not so at home with
being surrounded by what the AI-driven society believes is my proper
wheelhouse.
It’s understood that soon I’ll be a member of that distinguished senior
cult. And with that comes the necessary debriefing and indoctrination, on Medicare,
health care supplementation, benefit capabilities, matters of “retirement” such
as that might be. It’s been commonly believed that the challenges for a man in
retirement consist of dealing with the nature of the relationship with his wife
after forty years, while sanding the wooden patio deck of his American Gothic
backyard, of his palatial two- story pre-century house of six bedrooms, as seen
on those financial ads during NFL Sunday. Perhaps the dreaded word of
retirement brings to some of us the dreaded fear of just how we expect to exist
in some livable way without our codependent source of income or professional
identity. If the holographic Doctor on
Star Trek Voyager lost his license, which I think may have happened on one
episode, he’d be a mess..!
Most in today’s world, those reaching in age but still vital to our professional
teams, are not necessarily ready, or are they persuaded, to step down. Some, like home-bound pets gazing out windows
longingly, cannot. And therein lies the
new dichotomy of the American culture, dividing rich from poor. The ballad of the Boomers is only the
beginning. Soon we’ll have something
called the Split of the “X”. And it won’t
be a kind one.
With life costs and health care costs going nowhere but up, the Medical Industrial
Complex surging prices inhumanely, it returns to what some mad, raging House
Speaker once yelled in a session years ago, citing the message of the modern
health care system: “Get rich or die quickly”.
Taking proactive care of ourselves begins of course with apples per day and
less doctor appointments. But even Jack
LaLanne saw his physician. And for those
of us blessedly long un-beset by such immediate need for so long, certain birthdays
mean finally dealing directly with that annoying thing you just lived with forever
and didn’t think about. Usually because it won’t go away and you don’t know
what it’s gonna turn into. It also means looking at how you’re gonna afford to
live, maybe where you might be forced to leave and migrate to. That’s if nothing else changes the plot.
The fifty-sixers I once knew likely did not have to contend with these
kinds of untold dreads. They had pensions, safe long-term investments, and
policies. And yet, this looming tidal
wave ahead on the radar, I do not perceive myself in any way as “grown up” as
those sometimes ailing, ached-and-pained elder statespeople. I’m blessed, after odysseys of my own to be
mostly fitness-minded and dodging the pack in the men’s locker room at the gym,
the thirtysomething Schwarzeneggers, talking sympathetically of all the moves
they can’t do anymore because of what the prescription meds and steroids did to
them. It’s kind of like winning a game of checkers on the Titanic.
But I’m reminded that on this Titanic I’m just a passenger. Age or
not. And if I care to pretend I’m on the
Preferred Deck while confined to the rafters, I just might do that. Ultimately,
we’re all going to the same place.
Noah F.
No comments:
Post a Comment