You Know What I Mean, I Know You Do

At a party a man, who has lost all his hair, shuffles at a precarious angle across the room to refill his wine glass, looks at me, not at any of the other people in the room, and says: at our age. He points at me to make sure I know he’s talking to me. What does he mean at our age? I haven’t lost my hair, my face hasn’t fallen onto my chest, and I don’t shuffle. How dare he include me in his memory loss club? His physical deterioration makes me think he’s far older than I am and yet he’s seen something in me that emboldened him to gather me to his aging frame.

I used to pride myself on my youthfulness. Maybe I still do. A vanity, I suppose. No supposing about it; it’s a vanity. And now a vulnerability. In the last years with people my own age, I don’t feel I belong. I’m holding off aging, whereas they are galloping towards it, folding old age into their open arms as if it were a precious cargo. In my neighbors’ company I regularly note the difficulty they have bending, how slowly they move, how they can’t remember the names of anything, and how they dye their hair garish colors. And then I congratulate myself for not being like that.

Getting together with friends, the conversation inevitably turns to retirement. Some of my friends think more about where they want to retire than about anything happening in the present moment. When you start taking the fifty-plus vitamin, do you start checking out Florida real estate? Do you start not wanting to go out at night because it scares you to drive in the dark? Do you do anything to avoid the slightest chill—parking as close as you can to entrances, driving to your mailbox rather than walking the short distance from your house to the mailbox. Does the world have to shrink? Sometimes I can’t help but think people are embracing old age as if it is the destination they wanted to reach all along.

I used to fear when I was younger that I’d hate how my students would stay young as I got older. I worried that the gap would widen between who I had become and who my students were and getting old in front of them would be agonizing. That isn’t what’s happened. My young students are keeping me alive. Because here’s the thing, sometimes age is just a number. For example, I taught in a graduate low-residency program in San Miguel, Mexico. I had nine students, ranging from twenty-four to fifty-five. I was not the oldest. Some had children; some did not. Some were straight; some were gay. None of it mattered. We all entered into what each other wrote, we could be moved, we could be troubled, we could help. We could touch one another across the differences.

My work is alive and changing and to some extent is what I make of it. I’m not ready to give it up. There are still things I want to do, to accomplish. Reinvention; it’s key. And this reinventing myself, this sense of my needing to create the job rather than have the job mold me, puts me at odds with the majority of people I know at my age.

Someone said or should have said that hanging out with other aging people is one of the main reasons aging is depressing.

I worry that a day will come when I look in the mirror and instead of seeing the girl I was, I will see an old woman, that the girl will have vanished forever and a dull withered woman will greet me. I’ll see myself perhaps as others see me. I know there is slippage under my eyes, wrinkles from fifty years of laughing, frowning, looking perplexed, angers, grief, joy. I’m sure I could use a chin lift. Will I go...