“Upon the hoary head is placed the crown of wisdom”—Book of Proverbs
I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled. Ol’ rocking chair’s got me! Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits.
There’s a fairy tale where the Good Lord handed out a span of life to each species. (It’s in the Grimm Brothers collection, but I think it goes back to the Middle East!) He was going to give everyone thirty years, but none of them were satisfied. The Horse, the Dog and the Monkey had hard lives and wanted fewer years, while Man was just getting started and wanted more, so God took some years from the others and gave them to the human race. So Man lives his own life for the first thirty years, where he’s young and carefree; then for eighteen years he lives like the Horse, working hard and receiving little gratitude; then for twelve years he lives like the Dog, barking and annoying everyone; and for his last ten years he lives like the Monkey, a plaything who receives no respect and gets ridiculed and put on the shelf.
I’ll say this much for growing old: it’s a problem that I know I can’t do anything about, and I prefer that to problems where I have a sense that I should do something, but I’m not sure what…. (It’s the same with the weather.)
What are the good things about getting older? One is that it’s easier to ignore things. Bill Cosby said, “You know you’re getting old when your glasses are fogged up, and you don’t care!” And it gets easier to say, “I just don’t know.” When you’re younger it feels wrong to be passive and bemused; you’re supposed to be proactive and figure things out! When I look at something like the Ukraine War, I wouldn’t claim to know what to do about it. I guess I accept sending weapons to Ukraine to defeat an aggressor like Putin, but I’m not ready to actively support that policy. I just don’t know enough about it. Anyway the policy doesn’t require popular support, just acceptance.
I turned sixty last year. Yes, I’ve always looked younger than my age. I’ve been thinking about the people who were that age when I was young—by now the great majority of them have passed on. I remember seeing Ray Bolger on Front Page Challenge, talking about The Wizard of Oz and mentioning “Judy Garland, who is no longer with us.” Now that’s a classy euphemism for someone being dead! Some of those old movie stars were so classy—like Dorothy Malone, who won an Oscar for Written on the Wind and kept it in storage! (If you ask me, she should have won the Oscar for The Tarnished Angels instead, but I digress…)
It’s odd how age can affect your taste. Ever see Charlie Chaplin’s speech at the end of The Great Dictator where he appeals to the people of the world to work together to create a world where dictators aren’t thriving on division? As I get older, that speech gets to me more and more. Just the other day I was listening to it again and it brought me to tears! It has “from the heart” sincerity and a certain desperation: the movie was released in 1940, when World War II was already underway, effecting even greater horrors than people feared, and a messy aftermath that we’re still living with today. It’s like a message for future audiences. Someone on YouTube took a TV ad from Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and combined its visuals with that speech—they went together surprisingly well.
So how do I feel about old age? I think I’m actually getting better at life! I’m still hoping for a girlfriend someday. But what would please me the most is finding something to work at, where I could really contribute to society and give some return for all the benefits I’ve received. It’s a paradox that I want to start working at a time when so many are anticipating retirement.
In The Once and Future King, Merlin tells the boy who’ll become King Arthur, “Whenever you feel down about life, learn something new. That always helps!” That’s a good approach to old age too. You aren’t too old if you’re still learning…
