When Old Was Younger

When Old Was Younger

The calendar insists that I have reached a certain age.  In fact, the calendar and I are now in one of those long, bitter relationships in which one party keeps bringing up unpleasant facts, while the other keeps pretending not to hear them.  Officially, I am rather old.  Not “eligible for a museum display” old, perhaps, but old enough to remember President Eisenhower, which is no small thing in a country that now treats the 1980s as archaeology.

I still own an IBM Selectric typewriter…Not a keyboard designed to imitate one, mind you, but an actual Selectric—a machine built in that vanished era when office equipment was expected to survive direct artillery fire.  I also still own both a DVD player and a VCR, because I am apparently running a branch office for obsolete media.  I have clocks that need to be wound, which means that, from time to time, I must perform the same duties as a Victorian butler.  My car’s glove compartment still contains maps that are folded the way maps always are (which is to say incorrectly).  I keep them because I do not entirely trust a calm British woman inside a dashboard to tell me where I am.

I also still have a landline and it is listed in the phone book.  That sentence alone should qualify me for federal historic preservation.  Go ahead, look it up and call me!  It won’t bother me since, during the great presidential-election hysteria of 2008, I removed the bell from the phone.  You can still call it and, on your end, you will hear it ringing away like a respectable citizen’s telephone, but my end there is only blessed silence.  Ever since then, life has been so peaceful that I have begun to look upon the mailbox with similar suspicion.  A silent telephone was the gateway drug.  Neåxt comes a mailbox with no slot, then perhaps a front gate, a moat, and a tasteful sign reading, “NO SOLICITORS, CAMPAIGNERS, OR PEOPLE WITH IMPORTANT NEWS”.

Lately, I have attended a great many funerals and hardly any weddings.  That, too, is one of the unmistakable mile markers of age.  At a certain point, your social calendar becomes less “save the date” and more “in lieu of flowers.” The musicians who provided the soundtrack of my life are mostly gone, as are many of my favorite authors, actors, commentators, comedians, and larger-than-life public figures.  I still remember the names of the seven Mercury astronauts, which used to make me sound informed and patriotic, but now, mostly makes me sound like a museum docent.

All of that is standard old-age equipment—the usual set of rattles and creaks—but lately I have noticed something new, and it is profoundly unsettling.  I am increasingly shocked to discover that I have lived longer than a number of famous people who, in my memory, looked absolutely ancient.  Their appearance was not just older than I am now in spirit or in bearing, but old in the fully upholstered sense.  They bore the face, the posture, the jowls, and the exhausted gaze of people who seemed to have been born old, lived old, and died old.  And yet, examining one after another, I discovered that many of them checked out well before reaching the age I now occupy with such mixed emotions.

Perhaps the best example is Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  I have read biographies of Roosevelt… and shelves of books on the war years, memoirs, histories, political studies, and enough wartime commentary to qualify as pedantic at parties.  I know the photographs.  I know the voice.  I know the cigarette holder, and the grin, and the cloak of cheerful confidence draped over catastrophe.  But somehow, it had never really struck me—in any personal way—that Roosevelt had died before he was even old enough to collect Social Security benefits under the program he helped create.  Look at the man in those final photographs: he seems carved out of fatigue, worry, and world history.  He looks like the burden of the entire twentieth century has been carried home on his shoulders.  Yet he died at only 63!

That realization is becoming one of the rude little surprises of age.  The mirror says one thing.  History says another.  Memory, meanwhile, lies shamelessly.

Most of our presidents look ancient by the time they leave office.  The presidency is not a job so much as a public embalming process.  It sands a man down in full view of the nation.  By modern standards, though, many of those presidents were still surprisingly young.  Take a dollar bill out of your pocket and look at George Washington.  The Gilbert Stuart portrait that appears there was painted only three years before Washington died and he was just 67.  Sixty-seven!  In that portrait he looks like a man who was a passenger with Columbus.  He does not look 67. 

Then there is Lyndon Johnson.  In November 1963, when he became president, I thought he was older than God and by the time he left office he looked to me as if the Almighty had been leaning on him.  Vietnam, riots, domestic upheaval, the ceaseless grinding gears of power—all of it had left visible marks—yet, he was only 55 when he became president, and he died at 64.  Those numbers simply refuse to line up with the images stored in my head.  My memory insists on a man who looked weathered, battered, and Biblically ancient.  The facts say otherwise.

Actors can be equally disorienting.  When Spencer Tracy played Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, he was only 57.  Fifty-seven! Watching that performance and seeing the gauntness, the heaviness, and the air of a man who had seen every hard thing the sea could offer, I would have guessed much older.  Consider, too, that Ernest Hemingway, himself, committed suicide at the distressingly young age of 61.  Hemingway hated Tracy’s portrayal of his protagonist, reportedly saying Tracy looked more like Gertrude Stein than a fisherman, which is one of those literary insults too specific not to admire.  The truly alarming part, from my point of view, is that I am not only older than Tracy and Hemingway were when they died, but older than Gertrude Stein was when she died, too!  There are certain comparisons one does not enjoy winning.

War ages men in especially merciless ways.  You can see it in the faces of soldiers, of statesmen, and of generals who have spent too long keeping company with Death.  Robert E.  Lee and Ulysses S.  Grant are perfect examples.  Given what both men witnessed, commanded, and endured—as well as the memories they carried afterward—it is no surprise that their faces show more than years:  They show the knowledge.  They show the strain.  They show the physical toll of having lived through catastrophe on a scale no decent person should ever have to contemplate.  And yet both Lee and Grant were only 63 when they died.  In the photographs taken near the end of their lives, each looks much older, as though the war had reached forward and stolen extra decades as interest.

That, I suppose, is part of the lesson:  People in the past often looked older at younger ages, partly because Life was harder, medicine was cruder, work was more physical, smoking was more common, stress was more visible, and leisure was less available and less therapeutic.  There were fewer serums, fewer treadmills, fewer kale evangelists, and fewer dentists making everyone look as if they had been issued the same teeth by the Department of Modernity.  They took on adulthood harder and much sooner.  They also “dressed older”.  Nobody ever looked youthful wearing a frock coat, a stiff collar, and an expression suggesting concern about tariffs!

Still, the shock remains.  There is something unnerving about discovering that the “old men” of your memory were, in fact, younger than you are now.  It rearranges the furniture in your head.  It makes you wonder whether age is not merely counted in years, but accumulated in burdens, in wars, in cigarettes, in grief, in high office, and in the plain wear and tear of living before antibiotics, statins, sunscreen, ergonomic chairs, and the magical modern assumption that 70 is the new 50.

I do not entirely object to being old—there are compensations.  Old age allows certain freedom of opinion, a welcome indifference to fashion, and the right to keep maps in the car without explanation.  But I must confess that I do object to opening a history book, to studying some exhausted-looking monument of a man and then discovering that he died at an age I now regard as annoyingly youthful.

There ought to be a law against that.  Or at least a warning label.