Lionheart Street
There’s always a handful of scraggly leaves floating in my grandma’s pool. When I visit her in Florida, I go every chance I get. It’s a small pool, no longer than ten feet, and I always imagine it’s in the shape of a perfect circle, but it’s actually more like an hourglass — thick on both ends and squished in the middle. It’s a few blocks away from my grandma’s house (a trailer) in her elderly community (a trailer park).
I had never seen trailer parks that existed without rebel flags, pit bulls, and cinder blocks littered around the yard. But they do. And my grandma has a petite 2-bedroom on a pretty, palm treed street called Lionheart. If we just met and you asked about my favorite places, I’d tell you that number one is the desert. Broad and unspecific, but true, and a good conversation starter. But my grandma’s pool is the place I’d tell you about if we were in love when you asked.
There’s no reason it should feel like paradise, but it does. It’s small and outdated, but sleepy and cool. If you position your lounge chair just right, when you lie down on your back the only thing in view is a big, old oak dressed with Spanish moss. You have to squint a little to block out the telephone wires on both sides, and there’s nothing you can do about the sound of boulevard traffic right behind the fence, or the Latin music blasting at the gas station next door, but it’s just shy of heaven.
I like it there because I feel young. Not little, not younger than I am. Just young. The neighborhood is strictly old people, most of them over 70, and none of them visit the pool. Nobody even works in the next-door pool office to check if I have a pool pass. Sometimes a few old people cruise by on golf carts and wave hello to me. Everyone there is polite, and they all seem to take pleasure in their age. Young people never seem to take stock of youth. I don’t mean appreciating that they’re not old, the way you feel when you speed walk past an old man using a rickety cane to get from one airplane gate to another. I mean independently, without comparisons to other people, feeling young and recognizing your youth. I know my friends feel this when they’re at parties, when they’re working out, or when they see photos of themselves online. But for me, I feel my youngest at my grandma’s trailer park pool.
People talk about youth and old age as if they are opposites, and they are, in denotation. But I find, more and more often, that youth and age are not merely opposite terms — they are in active opposition. In the small things and in the details, it’s war.
There’s something about old age, or just older-than-us age, that is inherently intimidating. Older people seem to enjoy knowing things we don’t know. That can be healthy. They have the context and the memories to see what probably lies ahead for us, and because they’ve seen it before, it’s a comfortable place for them. They’ve earned the right to watch from the sidelines, and in the best cases, to cheer us on. But sometimes they seem to enjoy making us feel stupid, and the fact that “young” and “stupid” can be interchanged so easily is the problem. When you are young, you’re always one half-step away from being an idiot, if you’re lucky.
It’s so easy to feel inferior as a younger person when doing business with an older person. In my limited experience as a working grownup, I cannot say that most older people I encounter are truly rooting for me. More often, they make it grossly obvious they aren’t. It happens on conference calls, in meetings. It happens in classrooms with trusted professors. It happens just in passing. Recently I was involved in a soundcheck at a theater for an old woman’s film screening. My superior introduced us, which revealed that I was an intern and would be helping out today. By the end of the soundcheck, without ever asking what I do as an intern, what my background is, or even my name, the old woman made sure I knew how talented my superior was for using words like “decibels” and “aspect ratio” when speaking to the theater projectionist. She urged me to really pay attention and learn something. My superior, who knows me better, but barely, wedged in a comment: “Well, Christy is a filmmaker, so she’s well-versed in all of this. She knows exactly what’s going on.” If I were the old woman in this scenario, I’d feel a little embarrassed. I’d probably apologize for being a bit condescending, for assuming the intern was just an average dumdum. But none of this happened. Instead, the old woman received this statement as a challenge, and used the next 10 minutes to try and corner me on technical details I may not know, camera specs I may not have encountered, film festival operations I may not understand. Sadly, I knew everything, and sadly, I enjoyed making her feel stupid.
Old people get very uptight when young people challenge their ideas. Or at least when I do. The puzzle is that I’m starting to like it. I’m beginning to spot it from a mile away and gravitate toward the fight. I’m slowly morphing into a cranky young person, and therein lies the irony. Ghoulish old people that feel so deeply challenged by youth are sending me into early onset grouchiness — the same grouchiness they trademarked so many sad years ago.
Ill wishes or superiority complexes from people my own age are more tolerable. With older people, it feels so intensely personal. If we disagree on taste, and I don’t back down about how I feel, I am made to feel disrespectful. I am not granted the elbow room to voice my own opinion if it directly contradicts what’s already been hammered into our discussion. On the worst days, I am made to feel whiny, but that’s usually due to a male counterpart, and that’s an essay for another time.
But some old people — neighbors, parents, store clerks — use their inherent power of age and wield it in the kindest way possible. And this is what I really want to spend my time studying. I think about my favorite professor in college (a man) who pushed me to call out injustice if I saw it in faculty members. He taught me how to rewire a lightbulb plug, demanded that I never think of myself as a “female” filmmaker, and asked me if my new boyfriend understood that he could never get in the way of my career. I think about my neighbor, Phil, who let me call him Philly Cheesesteak long after it was cute, who always asked me what I was reading, and urged me in his thick Boston accent to “keep smiling” every time we passed each other on walks to the beach, even weeks after his wife passed away. I think about my mom, who speaks to small schoolchildren as if they’re high-functioning adults instead of little nuisances, cleans the restaurant table before we leave so the waiter won’t waste his time on it, beats you down on your lousy interior design tastes so you won’t end up with something tacky or temporary, prints out photos of random animals because she loves them, and sends mail to me in Christmas envelopes regardless of the time of year. I think about my dad, who visits his longtime shop customers in the hospital because he knows they’re alone in life, constantly struggles to make ends meet but could never fathom charging a friend full-price, speaks to other men using “sir” even when they’re his age or younger, gets a kick out of it when I’m able to speak Spanish with someone, loves TV programs about outer space, and finding huge bags of candy on sale.
Aging gracefully has nothing to do with skin creams and wrinkles. It has nothing to do with surrendering your weekly rock band practice, your dating life, or your travels. Enjoying age even when surrounded by youth appears to be difficult, which means the stakes are sky high for us as young people. If almost no one can do it well, it needs to be prioritized. We need to be thinking about it now, in our youth, so that we can be excellent old people when the time arrives. When I get there, I hope I electrify the young people around me. I hope they trust me to fan their flames, to offer specific insight when I have it, and to let them breathe. I hope I can help them savor their youth instead of feeling ensnared by it. I hope I can be their trailer park pool.
