I’ll Carpe Diem After I Take a Nap
I turned 65 last year. It sucks. People insist that it’s better than the alternative. I assume those people don’t watch the news.
Don’t give me any of that “65 is the new 45” crap. When you’re under the weather at 45, you figure you just need a good night’s sleep. When you’re under the weather at 65, you update your will. Except for receiving my Medicare card, I have found nothing good about this age, unless you enjoy weaker eyes, fading hearing, receding hairlines, lack of stamina, forgetting what you just said, forgetting what you just said, aches where you’re sure no muscle exists, struggling with driving at night, challenging the Guinness record for getting up during the night to pee… wait, excuse me a second.
[Flush]
Senior discounts? Overrated. Several months ago, I went into Dunkin’ Donuts and ordered a bagel. When the smiling young lady behind the counter entered a 15% discount I hadn’t asked for, I was pissed. Sure, saving thirty cents was nice, but it reminded me that when young ladies smile at me now, they’re not flirting, they’re thinking about how I remind them of Grandpa.
The things that once gave me pleasure now mock me. My favorite T-shirt may advertise my love of Guinness, but I no longer have the tolerance for more than one beer. Spicy food upsets my increasingly delicate digestive system; buffalo wings are yummy going in, not so yummy coming out. Loud music gives me a headache. My libido is now a phantom limb.
Now that my fingers are less agile, everything is smaller. When I compose a message on my smartphone’s tiny keypad, I make more typos than the proverbial thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters. When I pull out my phone, I find I’ve taken pictures of the lint in my pocket. Text is often so small that, even with bifocals, I must remove my glasses to read it. The other day — true story — I struggled with a crossword puzzle until, on the sixth pass, I realized that the key word in a clue was not “model,” but “mohel.” Hope nobody ever made that mistake in the Yellow Pages. (And yes, I just showed my age by making a Yellow Pages joke.)
The world changes faster than my ability to change with it. I slow down, but the world speeds up, with devices bleeping and pinging every five seconds, demanding attention and inhibiting contemplation. I quiet down, but the world becomes more cacophonous, with loud noise and contentious voices seeming omnipresent. Even as I spend much of my day on devices that keep me connected with the world 24/7, I feel more like a tourist than a resident of this new technological world.
Aging knocks the self-importance out of you. You learn that the world will go on just fine without you. A few years ago, I complained in a comments section that my wife was struggling with unemployment at age 60. Someone replied, “Good. Get out of the job market and let younger people in.” I knew he was just a troll, and should be ignored, but: he wasn’t wrong. Life is like a table in a busy restaurant; management doesn’t want you lingering over another cup of coffee, it wants to hustle you out the door so it can serve the next paying customer.
The things that were important to me have little value now. That is fine; I’m not a big fan of nostalgia. Recently I saw an article listing the greatest summer songs of all time. I learned that “all time” apparently began in 1990. Instead of being irked at the absence of music from my youth, I pictured the author seeing a similar list published twenty years in the future and sputtering, “What, no DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince?”
I am acutely aware that I have far more yesterdays than tomorrows, and that the score grows more lopsided every day. I have no idea when I will arrive at the finish line, whether it be twenty years or twenty months; hell, I might drop dead before I finish this sentence. (Whew, made it. Uh-oh, here come more sentences.) All I ask is that when I finally collapse in a heap, someone please turn off my laptop so that the EMTs won’t know that the last thing I read was the latest on the Katy Perry-Taylor Swift feud. I have a reputation to uphold.
I have always considered aging to be the narrowing of options. When you are born, the possibilities are limitless — “Kid, if you work hard, you can be anything you want to be, including President of the United States. Don’t worry, they’ve lowered the bar.” With each passing year, however, decisions — whether yours or nature’s — eliminate many of those possibilities. It didn’t take me long to figure out that I would never hit a home run in the World Series, or fill the empty spot on my mantel with a Pulitzer Prize, or open for the Rolling Stones.
Those, however, are rarely realistic fantasies. More likely, you choose a safe career path and then, twenty years later, wonder if you made the right choice and realize it’s too risky to reverse the decision because you have a mortgage to pay and kids to put through college. Maybe you put aside money for empty-nest traveling, but financial setbacks and health problems make that unrealistic, and you wish you had packed your bags sooner. Then you start obsessing over all the other things you’ve never done and never will do and your sense of futility paralyzes you. When someone my age says he wouldn’t change anything, I think: you’re either a liar or a lucky bastard.
*
There are, of course, people with healthier approaches. For example: In 1951, the year I was born, Tony Bennett recorded “Because of You” and “Cold, Cold Heart,” his first two #1 hits. Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks were writing for Your Show of Shows, the first great TV comedy sketch show, and Norman Lear was writing for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Betty White was hosting a daily live talk show in Los Angeles. These performers all had vibrant careers when I was soiling my diapers and they all still have vibrant careers now when I am worrying about needing adult diapers.
They are also featured in the HBO documentary If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast (the title comes from a Reiner joke). Narrated by Reiner, who is 95 but could easily pass for twenty years younger, the film portrays several nonagenarians who are still active, and it ponders whether there are common denominators.
Frankly, I had no intention of watching. I’m allergic to anything that can be described as “inspiring.” Wake-up-with-a-smile memes make me roll my eyes, and I would never buy a self-help book unless I ran out of kindling for the fireplace. I also suspected that the film would downplay the role that luck and genetics play in long-term health and conclude by urging the viewer, “Get off your fat ass, you lazy sod.”
But I did watch, and I was wrong. The documentary did not downplay luck and genetics at all, and eschewed any lecturing. Instead, it served as a celebration of those who keep on creating, and you would have to be even more cynical than I to be unimpressed by 91-year-old Dick Van Dyke’s song-and-dance with his 40-years-younger wife. Reiner himself is an exemplar of one thing they have in common: continuing to do what they love. He writes every day, and has published five books since turning ninety. Let me repeat that with emphasis — he has published five books since turning ninety.
I can dismiss the examples of Reiner, Bennett, White, et al. Of course they’re happy: they’ve had multiple commas in their net worth for decades. However, the film also portrayed several non-show-biz nonagenarians, and they were harder to dismiss. Like Tao Porchon-Lynch, a 98-year-old yoga instructor — let me emphasize that too: a 98-year-old yoga instructor — and Peewee Martin, a 93-year-old D-Day survivor who still parachutes.
The person who humbled me was 101-year-old Ida Keeling. When Ida was 67, or one year older than I am now, she was depressed about the drug-related murders of her two sons, both crimes still unsolved. Her daughter, to shake her mom out of her torpor, challenged her to train for a 5K race. Ida began running — and hasn’t stopped since. The film shows Ida running a 100-meter race at the Penn Relays, setting a record for 100-year-olds. Oh, I smirked to myself, I can easily run 100 meters, ignoring the fact that I was 35 years younger than her, and that I would still need copious amounts of liquid refreshment afterward, not to mention a three-hour nap and maybe an oxygen mask. But as I watched footage of her doing push-ups, riding the exercise bike, and lifting weights, I looked at the bag of potato chips in my hand, and felt something resembling shame.
I realized that my pessimism ignores the possibility that I have genetics and luck on my side. There is a history of longevity from the maternal half of my family tree. My grandmother lived to 100, outliving her second husband by 56 years, and she attended my wedding at age 99. When my mom died two years ago at age 90, she only slightly outlasted her four sisters, who all lived well into their 80s even though two of them were heavy smokers. Her 95-year-old brother is still alive. (Hi, Harry!)
Despite all my kvetching in the opening paragraphs, I have never had a major illness and have never spent a night in the hospital. I am more careful about my health than my jokes indicate: I have never smoked and haven’t gotten stoned or drunk since I got married 32 years ago. When I tell a nurse that I don’t take any meds, she gives me the you-have-to-be-lying stink-eye. And for good reason. I have watched many people, younger and more health-conscious than I, battle all sorts of health problems. Since I have a somewhat sedentary lifestyle, my health is not due to doing anything right, but rather to luck and genetics, and there is no guarantee that my luck will hold up. I decided to stop taking it all for granted.
Like Reiner, I have returned to writing every day, a habit I’d followed for several years but recently abandoned. Since I have always had stamina for long walks, I began to take daily walks from my house to the Hudson River — it’s a 20-minute stroll each way — which not only give me exercise and fresh air, as well as beauty on a sunny day, but stimulate my mind. I’m also exercising more control of my sweet tooth. It turns out that the documentary did deliver the message, “Get off your fat ass, you lazy sod,” and the voice saying it was my own.
But first: all this writing has tired me out. Time to take a nap.
******
POSTSCRIPT: I finished writing this a few weeks ago. I figured I would give it one last edit the next couple of days, and then post it. Meanwhile, I went to a doctor for a minor problem. I figured I’d be in and out of the office in a few minutes. Instead, after they took my vitals, I ended up in an emergency room hooked up to an IV and an EKG while the medical staff waited for my alarmingly high blood pressure to drop.
Trust me, this scared the crap out of me. In addition, within a period of a few days, one acquaintance died suddenly of a heart attack, another survived a heart attack, and a third had open-heart surgery. I can be gloomy at the best of times, but this sent my dread to DEFCON levels. Every time I felt the slightest palpitation, I felt like putting my hand on my heart like Fred Sanford and yelling. “This is the big one!” (Again, showing my age with a Sanford and Son joke.)
So now I have a cardiologist on speed-dial, and if I tell a nurse I don’t take any meds, I am lying, bigly. The days of feeling “lucky” about my health are behind me. Fortunately, the tests showed only a couple of very minor problems — “You clearly have genetics on your side,” the cardiologist told me — and I have stopped living in a state of panic.
A few months ago, out of nowhere, my wife asked me not to lock the door when I go to the bathroom. “If something happens to you,” she said, “I won’t be able to help you.” I laughed at her alarmism then. I’m not laughing now; maybe she sensed something that I didn’t. The scare has dispelled my sense of futility, and focused my mind on being productive with my remaining years. I mean, if Carl Reiner can publish five books after age 90, I can publish one after age 65, right? That spot on my mantel is still empty.
