Dark Ruminations on the Light of Aging

My hands look like my mother’s. Veins so near the surface, I can almost see them pulsing. When I pinch the skin on the back of my hands, it stays in place as if I’d pinched wet clay on a potter’s wheel. Ready for the kiln. And skeletal, my hands are skeletal, bones fanning out to knuckles made thick by clenching and unclenching my fists for seventy seven years. Babies afraid of witches would be frightened by my hands.

            I always knew I would get old but it still surprises me. My great grandmother lived to be ninety-nine. The town newspaper captured her birthday in a photo, a huge white cake ablaze with candles set on the tray of her nursing home bed. She was sitting up and smiling. She wore a pink corsage. I struggle to remember her first name. Surely, she had one. I knew her as Grandma Yule. Before the nursing home, she lived in the upstairs back bedroom of my grandmother’s house until she became ‘too much’ what with all the meals on trays and the bedpan filling and emptying. The hand carved rocking chair from that back bedroom is just feet away from me in the office where I write this. I am thinking I should polish the chair, not let it gather so much dust. I need to take better care of the things that are old.

            I am a Boomer. This means that I was born between 1946 and 1964. People born in 1964 are infants to me. In 1964, I was driving my dad’s white station wagon on surreptitious trips to the shopping center to visit my best friend who worked at Winkelman’s, the fancy clothing store, and always had beautifully matching skirt and sweater sets because of the amazing employee discount. I wore off-brand sweaters bought on special at my dad’s Ben Franklin Store. Drastically marked-downed knock-off clothing was his way of beating his competitors, that and cutting the price on Aqua Net hair spray which all the cool kids plus me used all day every day after we did the morning ratting of our hair. So, if a person was born in 1964, if they were babies that year? Well, they’re not Boomers. They’re something else.

I wear the end of World War II on my face. It’s not a noble thing or a suffering thing. It’s just the air filled with memories of radio broadcasts and ration cards and letters from Burma and a grandfather dying and then lying in his casket in the downstairs bedroom and uncles coming home from overseas and all the women in aprons over dresses, the runs in their stockings like maps of foreign countries. There was no war when I was born but people still breathed its air.

            I went away to college when I was eighteen, after having worked in my dad’s store since I was twelve. At first, he paid me a dollar an hour and then bumped me up to $2.50. It was money I ended up spending at the store on paperback novels, knickknacks for my bedroom, and white sneakers that wore out in three weeks. I knew how to have a job, though, and how to not complain. My dad insisted that I learn to type so I would always have a job so I did what he said and typed my way through my first summer home from college as a white-gloved Kelly girl filling in for secretaries on vacation at the State Capitol and getting hit on by a notoriously flamboyant legislator from Detroit who told me I was a ‘stone fox’ while the two of us stood in a stalled elevator. There is more to the story than that comment. He drove a Pontiac Firebird.

            In my office there is a very large photograph of me when I was twenty-one. I have long red hair and not a single blemish, not a laugh line or crow’s foot. I was a stone fox if only for that moment but at least I had that moment even though, at the time, I was woven with self-doubt and regret about things that had happened already in my short past as an adult. But this essay isn’t meant to be a recounting of all the deeds and misdeeds. It’s to be a reflection on the light of aging. The only light of aging cannot be reflecting on my good looks as a young woman. What are you doing now that believes itself to be light? What is light?

            On Saturday, my husband and I went to a film about a woman with Alzheimer’s Disease. This was the second Alzheimer’s event we had attended in as many weeks and the moment we walked in, we were tired and feeling victimized. I had an obligation to be there otherwise I would have preferred the slasher film across the hall. After the film, which was endless at only thirty-eight minutes and featured sustained close-ups of the ‘victim’ with her eyes closed and her mouth open, alternately moaning and yelling, the local Alzheimer’s Disease experts stood up with microphones to tell us what’s what.

            You can forestall or avoid Alzheimer’s by tending to your brain health they tell us. The speakers are in their forties. Good sleep, Mediterranean diet, social engagement, oh, there was a long list. I listen to this and think they are saying these things because everyone is loath to believe that fate can be cruel and can pounce on the perfect specimen and strangle the life out of them for no reason. Instead, we tell old people it is their own damn fault if they get Alzheimer’s Disease. It is their misspent youth – the cheap wine and the cigarettes and the countless cheeseburgers and the weekends not wanting or able to get out of bed because you know Alzheimer’s doesn’t start when you think it does. Oh no, they tell us, Alzheimer’s starts decades before. In other words, many of us have been ignorant of our doom for ages. Maybe that’s the light. The ignorance.

            I have taken to drinking bourbon and ginger ale. I was a rum and Coke drinker for a long time but the shots of rum kept getting bigger until I was using the Coke just to camouflage how much rum I was drinking. I am more circumspect about the bourbon although it is as beautiful a color and have replaced the tendency to pour more alcohol by adding two maraschino cherries to my drink. They are the dessert for the bourbon. The Alzheimer’s Disease experts would approve of neither the alcohol nor the cherries. They’d rather I drank tap water with the thinnest slice of lime. They think that at my age, I am ripe for deprivation. But I differ. Another spot of light.

            This afternoon I wore a long denim skirt, a heavy white sweater, a hand-knit red scarf, and my knee high LL Bean boots, which I’d just rejuvenated with bear grease last night, to the new writing group I’ve started at a local senior center. I wanted to stride down the hall, skirt and scarf flowing behind me, looking like a writer, eccentric and confident. And that is what I did. I smiled at the old men working a jigsaw puzzle who looked up when I passed. I was going places, oh yes, I was going to the end of the hall to the room with the big wooden table and rolling cushioned chairs, the room where the early afternoon light shone through the blinds, painting stripes on the carpet. The light would shine that way for another hour until we were done and packing up to go.

            “You bring so much energy to this,” one woman said in parting. And I decided that she’d really meant light, that I’d brought light to the group after all the years of fists clenching and unclenching, the unblemished becoming the gnarled, the incessant warnings of impending doom, the bourbon and ginger and maraschino cherries. All of it light in some way, if only in my acknowledgement and acceptance and if only for that hour.