Random Thoughts from an Aging Brain

AGING

You hear the word aging and you cringe. Unless, of course, you happen to be a piece of Roquefort cheese, happily ripening in a cave somewhere in France. But for most of us living within the shadow of this altar to youth, and factory of celluloid fantasies, known as Hollywood, the fear and loathing of advancing age is almost inescapable. It’s gotten so bad that otherwise mature adults start dreaming of time travel.

If you could go back in time, what age would you like to be?

The question comes from a friend at a recent dinner party, where we range in age from late forties to late seventies.

Ah, to be twenty again! sighs the youngest.

Twenty. I see myself, a pregnant college drop-out, riding the train from Berkeley to San Francisco, where I’m doing a mind-numbing job at an insurance company. I hope I make it to the restroom at the end of the line before throwing up. No thanks.

Thirty, maybe? Now I have two kids, I’ve finished college, and I’m teaching seventh grade English—until I land in the hospital with an ulcer. No thanks.

But if you had it to do all over again, wouldn’t you do things differently? someone asks.

My first thought is: Then I wouldn’t be me, would I? My second: What would I do differently? Not have children? How impoverished my life would be without my gorgeous son and brilliant daughter. Actually, this started out to say brilliant son and gorgeous daughter—until that daughter read it. Well, actually they’re both gorgeous and brilliant, I just didn’t want to brag that much. There are also seven grandchildren, some of whom are turning out spectacularly well. I can hardly wish them all out of existence.

Skip the career? What meaning would my life have without the dual blessings of learning and teaching? They are what keep me going to this very day.

Certainly it was a struggle, and yes, I made mistakes. Lots of them. But life being what it is, and I being who I am, wouldn’t I just exchange one set of mistakes for another? And then there were the good times.

Forty. Now we’re talking. I’m bicycling through Africa and the Middle East with a man I love, having one exhilarating adventure after another. But I know how that story ends. There was this twenty-four year old graduate student, and he was forty-eight. You get the picture. Anyway, I’ve done that. Why would I want to do it again?

Fifty. Now there was an interesting decade. Alone at last. Free to do whatever I wanted—work, study, travel, sample some interesting new relationships, friendships, careers.

Sixty. Things keep getting better. I finally meet the man with whom I want to spend the rest of my life. We even get married. I retire from the university and find a host of new and exciting opportunities. I design and teach in a program to help welfare mothers finish their high school education. I write a science column for a local journal. I teach a course for retired people who share my fascination with science. What a decade!

Seventy. I’m back in California, the paradise I left more than half a century ago. I have a husband I love, and he pretty well puts up with me. We have enough money to live on and enough health (between medical emergencies) to enjoy it. I teach one class, take another, participate in at least one antiwar demonstration a week. I enjoy my family, my friends (both old and new), even casual encounters with the remarkably friendly people who inhabit the streets and shops of Los Angeles. And there’s no snow to shovel.

Do I care that when I happen to catch sight of myself in the mirror I see a wrinkled old woman I barely recognize? I can’t deny that I do not greet her with pleasure, but then we so rarely meet. Do I mind not being able to recall the names of my daughter’s friends—no matter how often I meet them—or even some of my own on occasion? Of course. But then I’ve always had a lousy memory. There’s nothing new in that. Only now, I can make a joke about my senility. At twenty I had no such handy excuse.

Ah, there’s another advantage. Old age works well as an excuse in all sorts of situations. The checkout clerk at the grocery store has an impenetrable accent. I can’t understand a word she says, but I don’t want to offend her. So I point to my hearing aid and say, I’m sorry, I’m a little deaf. She smiles, speaks more slowly, more clearly, and we communicate.

Exercise is another perfect occasion for the old age excuse. I’ve always hated exercising. It seems such a silly, narcissistic activity. Now I can say, Sorry, my back hurts, my arthritis is acting up, I just don’t have the energy. I’m not as young as I used to be, you know. So we go to the movies instead. My husband overlooks my failure to complain about the distance we walk to the theater, or the time we stand in line for tickets.

And finally there’s the freedom to say anything I like. Who listens? And to dress as I please. Who looks? And to act any way I like, as long as I don’t frighten the horses. It’s a whole new life.

There’s this myth that as you age you become wiser. Nonsense. I think a former philosophy professor of mine got it right. As you age, he said, you just get more so. Of course he did get wiser, but that was clearly a case of more so. As for me, I think I got more curious, and more impatient. I want answers, and I want them now! To me, life is a page-turner. I can’t wait for the next thing to happen, for the next puzzle to get solved, for the next scientific discovery, for the next social breakthrough. Of course that means I spend a lot of time being sadly disappointed, but that’s all part of the game.

I can hardly wait to see what eighty will bring. As Picasso said, It takes a long time to grow young.

HOME

I hate it when people ask me Where do you come from? It’s not that I have anything to hide. It’s just that I have too much to reveal—more than anyone cares to hear. It’s all very well when a young man at my son’s birthday party in St. Louis asks me where I’m from. I smile and say, I flew in from Los Angeles last night. But what would I say to the lady sitting next to me on that plane, should she ask the same question? We both got on at LAX, so I’d have to come up with something better.

I might say, I moved to Los Angeles from Boston not long ago.

Oh, you’re from Boston, she might exclaim. I went to South High. Where did you go?

If I replied, I went to Santa Monica High School, I’d have a lot of explaining to do.

I thought you said you were from Boston, she would say, and the tone might be quite accusatory.

The fact is, I lived in twnety-seven different houses in sixteen cities, in four states, in four countries on two continents during my seventy-three years on this planet, and I don’t feel as though I’m from anywhere. The question implies that there is some place in one’s past or present that one considers home. I have no such place.

It’s certainly not Austria, which we left in 1938, not a moment too soon, or France, where we wandered around for a year and a half before escaping at the last moment in December of 1939. Nor is it New York, where four of us spent a miserable six months in a small hotel room, though I must say I always hoped to return there. To New York that is, not to the hotel room.

In June of 1940, we moved to Los Angeles, which I disliked for the entire decade of that stay. In New York, they understood about refugees. In LA they did not. And everything was so far away. Hours of riding on buses. And all that boring sunshine. I couldn’t wait to leave.

Berkeley next. I loved it. My kind of place, with lots of intellectual and political ferment. Then I made the mistake of getting pregnant and married, and the next thing I knew, we were living in Boulder, Colorado. Very pretty, but hardly a center of any kind of ferment—at least not in the early Fifties. Three years of that and then another move.

Binghamton, NY wasn’t even pretty. It took my husband seven years to fail achieving tenure, and off we went again.

Boston. Talk about culture shock. When a young man actually spoke to me as we waited in line at a movie theater, I couldn’t resist asking, Do I know you, or are you from California? He laughed and replied, Neither, but I’m planning to go there, and I’m getting in practice.

Well, eventually I adjusted. Thirty-five years in a place will do that. Especially if you end up with a house on the water in the friendly little town of Hull and also have access to a small apartment on Beacon Hill. But I never got to the point of thinking of Boston as home.

Then there’s a larger picture. Home is not just a city, it’s also a country. Austria? Hardly. The United States? How can I feel at home in a country where half the population still supports a President who first cheated his way into office with the help of his brother and his father’s Supreme Court appointees; a President who lied his way into a war that devastated two countries, killing innocent Afghani and Iraqi people and American soldiers, while alienating the rest of the world; a President who ruined his country’s economy to the point where unemployment is constantly increasing and the national debt is out of sight (despite the rising GNP, which seems to benefit only the rich); a President who is causing, in myriad ways, the devastation of the environment. And then is re-elected. Maybe with less cheating the second time, maybe with more. I’m not sure which alternative is more disheartening.

So I’ve got to accept it. There is no home that I come from. But there is an unexpected advantage to this situation. While no place is home, any place can feel like home, at least for a while. I notice this especially when I travel. Living in Boston, we would spend a week in a small Mexican resort town every winter. Now I don’t usually like resorts, but Ixtapa was different. It seemed to attract people from all over the world. There, we met Europeans, Canadians, lots of Mexicans, and once a charming couple from Pakistan. Even people from the United States showed up on occasion. I felt at home there because we were all visitors. Now we visit various Mexican cities at any season. Every year I promise myself I’ll learn Spanish before the next visit, but I never do. Maybe it’s just as well. That might spoil the illusion.

Perhaps the strangest place I’ve felt at home was a small village in the highlands of New Guinea, where I had the great good fortune to spend a week some years ago. While in Port Moresby, the capital, I met a young college student who invited me to visit his village, where he was going for a short vacation. What a great home that was!

And now here I am, back in Los Angeles. This time around I love all that sunshine. (Amazing how aching joints can change one’s aesthetics.) I marvel at how friendly the people are. (Interesting how one learns to appreciate what one once took for granted.) And then there’s that vast array of things to do and see—theaters, concerts, museums. (Los Angeles has changed somewhat too in the last half-century.) But do I feel like I’m back home? Again I ask, What is home?

Home is where the heart is, they say. Perhaps I have no heart. Or maybe I have several? How is it that no place feels like home, yet every place feels like a kind of home? I find that there are two aspects to feeling at home. First there’s the physical environment. When I lived in Hull, I would look out of my study window and see the sparkling water of the bay, rejoicing that my dream of living by the ocean had finally been fulfilled. Now I sit on my balcony, here in Los Angeles, and look out at the eucalyptus trees filled with birds—everything from crows to humming birds—and I’m totally happy, appreciating all the beauty that our genes predispose us to enjoy.

But probably a more important part of home is the people, the social environment. This is largely a matter of degree, as I felt more at home in Hull than in Boston, more in Boulder than in Binghamton. Perhaps home is the place where one can feel most oneself. Like Papua New Guinea. I felt at home in that utterly exotic place because I could be me, and be accepted as I was. Now, when I go to the writing class I take, or the science class I teach, or the weekly anti-war vigil I participate in, I get a similar feeling of well-being. Clearly I will have to admit that in returning to Los Angeles after all these years, I have found another home. At least it will do nicely until I find myself in the next one.

CHANGE

How was it that I ended up in Los Angeles again after so many years? Things add up, over the months, over the years. And then it seems, quite suddenly, to be time for a change. Not that there hadn’t been changes in my life, even during those thirty-five years. Three husbands, (or their equivalence), six homes, and twelve jobs, not counting the volunteer work.

Some of these changes were significant, others minor. Certainly changing partners mattered. But changing homes? Often I felt, what difference does it make where you live, as long as you have a roof over your head? Yet the move to Hull, an exceptionally attractive community, had a considerable impact. All attempts at finding alternatives to teaching (one year as textbook editor, another as technical writer) were insignificant blind alleys. The change from teaching at a state college to joining the faculty of the College of Public and Community Service of the University of Massachusetts in Boston was of great significance, but that decision was not really mine. Yes, I applied, but they had to decide to hire me.

Some of these changes were a long time in coming. Others seemed to happen in the blink of an eye. Here then is an account of how the momentous decision was made, to change from living in our two homes in Boston to inhabiting a condo in Los Angeles.

At first glance, the decision seemed impulsive, made in an instant, but when did it really start? When the weekly commute between Beacon Hill and Hull became less attractive? When the night driving which that entailed became an issue? My eyes never did adjust well to those oncoming beams. While my husband David didn’t mind taking the wheel, I’d been getting more and more nervous about his driving. Now there’s impulsive. You wouldn’t think so, meeting him. His deliberate way of talking, his consideration of every possible angle before uttering an opinion, and then in the end hedging that. But behind the wheel, he’s instantly transformed into someone else. Eval Knieval perhaps? I couldn’t live with the guilt if he got me killed.

But it wasn’t just the driving. Think of the time! Commuting to work in any large city can easily eat up two hours a day. Living in two places, spending half the week in each, may seem like only commuting once a week. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was more like moving once a week. Even though both places were fully equipped, we still had to pack every time. What was I going to read? What would spoil in the refrigerator in the next three days? That dress I wanted to wear to the theater on Saturday, was it in Boston, or was I wearing it coming back to Hull from that concert last month? Then there was forwarding the phone, setting the thermostats, watering the plants. Would we be back in time to take out the garbage? And had I remembered to call Donna to tell her she could come early to clean on Monday? No matter how carefully I considered all this, I’d find—half way down Nantasket Avenue—that we’d have to turn back because I’d left my hearing aids on the bedside table, or my wallet in the kitchen. No wonder this two hour commute took the better part of two days.

We considered the possibility of consolidating. Living in one place. But which? Hull was so beautiful. The view of the bay, with the Boston skyline in the distance; the beach to walk on, and the water to swim in (for two days in August anyway); and the sea gulls. Even the crows hanging out and griping at them. Not to mention the house itself. All that space! And perfectly arranged to suit our needs. Surely we couldn’t give up all that.

But if driving was the problem, well, Hull as a full-time proposition came up a little short—on theaters, (both movie and legitimate), concert halls, museums. The library was charming, but hardly a research facility. Of course there were friends. But most of them lived in Boston. It wasn’t easy to lure them down to the South Shore, even in summer. No, Hull alone would just be too limiting. Sigh.

So we considered Boston. Of course we couldn’t live full time in the condo, with its one bedroom, and worse yet, one bathroom. A solution seemed in sight when a larger unit came on the market. We were the first to see it, and could have gotten it before it was snapped up by the next viewer. But we made an awful discovery. We could afford to buy it. Or we could afford to live in it. But not both. And on further inspection, it wasn’t all that glorious. Back to the drawing board.

One week-end of inspecting open houses on Beacon Hill was enough. Every home we saw was even less glorious than the one in our building, and even more expensive. But who says you have to live on Beacon Hill? Ok, Back Bay. South End. Waterfront. Nothing. Sigh.

Vacation time rescued us from our misery. We went to Key West. I loved it. It’s warm. It’s crazy. It’s the Sixties all over again. I wanted to live here. Well, no, not really. I was still somewhat wedded to living in the real world. But it sure was fun. We went to LA. Daughter Celia, for the hundredth time, said, Why don’t you guys move to LA? Yeah, yeah. As everyone knows, a double positive is a negative, and anything said a hundred times automatically goes unheard.

Still, it was great to be in LA. What a wonderful family I have. I found Celia looking terrific and doing all that good work. And the children were amazing. Sean seemed to know more physics than I did. Erica was already a full fledged artist,