“Want to look current, hip, with it …YOUNG?” The question comes my way from more.com, and maybe that’s all I need to tell you. Of course I’m supposed to scream, “Yes!” Then read about how to do it. And buy stuff from the advertisers.
Aside from the risible dated language—what could sound older than saying “hip” or “with it?”—I dislike the question immensely. It’s not a question, actually; it’s an accusation. The editors of more.com clearly think I’m not doing all I could do to pretend I’m something I’m not.
Dear more.com: I live in Greenwich Village and dress it. I wear black leggings, as I’ve done since I went to Sarah Lawrence, ever so long ago, which means that every seven years I’m embarrassingly modish and the rest of the time I’m quaint. I haven’t owned a suit since 1964, when I had an actual job on a newspaper, unless you count the silly high-style thing in my closet: bright flowers in relief on a rich black background. I avoid clothes that look matronly to me, and probably always will, because matronly isn’t my kind of old; but I also make a point of not buying duds that would make me look like someone trying to pass for young. I resent the idea as if I were a rebel in Queen Victoria’s time—protesting the bustle designed to hide the truth of my shape.
A few months ago, I decided to stop fiddling with the color of my hair. Let the gray shine in. It’s not an opposition to artifice; I don’t believe it’s human nature to be natural. I recently indulged in a Brazilian fruit blast to add gloss and swing to my hair. But the point isn’t to look younger than I am (68). It’s to look as wonderfully old as I can look. Not old but wonderful; old and wonderful.
Old is a fact about me, along with woman, white, Jewish, agnostic, progressive, a mother, and other descriptors. It’s mine to interpret and present as I wish to; all these characteristics are. Increasingly we understand that identity marks may be blurry even in the lab—a neat example being the Australian person who was recently granted the right to be free of any gender label. It was a civil liberties triumph that old folks could take a cue from—alas, rescinded by the authorities when global excitement followed.
Is old age wasted on the old? Or is it just that there’s a conspiracy afoot to make us oldies regard our very age as some horrible anomaly, off-center, deficient.
I keep coming back to gender and race. Time was when white male was the default norm in shockingly many aspects of life. I think of the magnificent pioneer in identity studies, Texas-born John Howard Griffin, who medicated himself to turn his skin dark, that he might experience the reality of being a black man in America of the late 50s. Oh, tragic experiment; the medicine eventually killed him. But his book Black Like Me, published in 1961, lives on, a consciousness-raiser in a class by itself. Personal journalism sometimes seems a scourge of our times, but putting your ass on the line leads to an unmatchable sort of truth-telling if the motives are decent, the sentences strong, the conclusions complex.
Though I feel impudent mentioning my work alongside Griffin’s, I contrived a little experiment in passing in 1973. The Life Swap recounts my attempts to become another woman on the inside by wearing her clothes, eating her breakfast of choice (plain yoghurt, which I had previously thought inedible but now eat daily), making stabs at her work in academia, and regarding her husband, lovers, and friends as my cherished own. (She was meanwhile playing me downtown.) Meaning: I’ve been exploring identity for quite some time. Perhaps I don’t dread being old because I secretly feel I’m the 1970s Nancy trading places with her twice-as-old self. Isn’t that maybe a smart way to feel?
There is old and old, but of course. At this moment I’m a bit lucky. My version of old is neither dead nor seriously ill, at least not that I know of. I share my life with a kind, vital, very funny guy. Money issues are non-trivial, but I seem to be coming back as a writer, and I’ve reshaped my professional cooking life to reflect the realities of age: can no longer do fourteen straight hours in the kitchen unless I take unwise amounts of Fiorinal and Adderall to counter the downward drag of arthritis.
One of the reasons I’m letting the gray streak my hair is that I’m probably a healthier old if the mirror tells me the truth and others see it, too. I still leap to my feet on the bus if a pregnant woman or man with a cane needs my seat. But if some robust young un’ has the manners to offer me his or seat, I gratefully take it. Others should be grateful, too; my balance isn’t what it was, I tend to lurch.
And then there is sex. In the back of my mind lurks an erotica project, rudely titled Silver Snatch: wrinkled skin on crumpled sheets. I want to celebrate old sex that does not pretend to be young sex (which is surely how old sex works best). Tantric ceremonies involving Viagra and Astroglide. A long, slow period of arousal that culminates in sugary heat even if the earth doesn’t move off its axis. Age spots as targets for kisses. Let’s pretend you might be knocking me up, we’ll make the cover of AARP magazine. Ooh, wouldn’t the kids be grossed if they could see us!
Will anyone out there help me reclaim the word “old”? I want us to take ownership of it. No parade—I don’t like parades—but we need our equivalent of the gay pride rainbow. Maybe a silver flag? We could call it Old Glory. Long may she wave.