Sunday, August 5, 2012

You're always older--and younger--than someone.

Age 49: Day 7

I've been 49 for a week now. And I've written in this blog every day, probably the first time outside of college or high school that I've written something original every day for a week. 358 days to go! If only I could approach my diet with such consistency. But I'm not going there today.

Where I'm going is toward the passage or time, or, more specifically, getting older as a woman. Or even a person. One of the nice things about spending my summer weekends in Connecticut is getting to know some neighbors on my new street--most of whom are much older, and very different, than the people I spend time with in Manhattan. Last night, my husband and I went to a small dinner party where the hosts were in their 60s, and one of the guests was, I'd say, in her 70s--she'd had a hard week because her husband--a former ironman competitor--recently went into a nursing home and is not thriving. As I looked around the table, I realized that I was the youngster in this group--nursing homes, brushes with cancer, the death of a parent, grandkids--all of these were things that my dinner companions were dealing with and that (for the moment) feel very far from my life. I was thinking of this group when, a few weeks ago, one of my younger friends (47), was bemoaning her gray hair. ("I can't pull it out strand by strand any more--there's too much of it!") she said. As I looked at her--tall, rangy, graceful, swimming in the lake, eyes sparkling, I thought about how young she'd think she was when, in 10 years, she looked at photos of herself from this weekend. "We're still BABES!" I said to her. My dinner party host, who, at 62 and a  cancer survivor, is still a babe herself, with an infectious laugh, beautiful skin, boundless curiosity and an enviably toned body. Sometimes, she, too, bemoans her age ("I'm too old to wear a bathing suit!") yet I have a feeling that in ten years, if she saw a photo of herself from last night, in her linen sun dress and shining bangs, she'd think she was young, too. And so it goes. I've been trying to adopt the philosophy, whenever I'm feeling old: "Think of how you'll feel in 10 years? You'll WISH you were the age you are now." Ain't it the truth?

6 comments:

  1. I've told this to friends for years, when they bemoan their age. And I sort of believe it, myself. Sort of.

    But yeah, it probably is a turning point when you go from pulling out the odd strand of gray hair, and it makes you look younger, to having so much of it that if you pulled it all out, you WOULD look like a cancer survivor.

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  2. i'm going through major thoughts about age at the moment because i'm home helping my parents pack to go into assisted living and i just read through reams and reams of old letters my friends and i wrote to each other when we were in high school/college/young adults. thought-provoking, makes me feel so wistful. reading gore vidal's obit the other day it was reported that vidal's companion, on his own deathbed said, "didn't it all go by awfully fast?" looking at those old letters really brings that home. in some ways, i feel no different a person than i was then (although in other ways i do). and yet i know that to anyone who's a kid, i ipso facto seem old. hard to figure out how to balance that some things about you never change and yet based on surface appearance, the world is going to label you "old" or "older."

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  3. But don't you think that the nice thing about being older is that you can be yourself...without all the agony?

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  4. ha! not sure "all the agony" will ever be gone from just being myself. agony r us. but sure, there are absolutely advantages to being older. though just finished looking at a whole bunch of photos of my younger self and it was hard not to mourn a noticeable decline in my looks... you're catching me on a bad day to be pondering the joys of aging!

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  5. btw, truth is that my life has been in an upward trajectory since the year i was 43 and my intention is to have the trajectory continue. so don't take my musings on a day when i'm helping my parents to pack up/throw out, as my constant state. feeling wistful right now.

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  6. I won't. I'm remember what you told me re what Gloria said.

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