AGING GRACELESSLY

I struggle with the fact I’m getting older. We all do, I know. A newborn at five days is older than it was at birth. Obviously. To be more precise, I’m at least at the trailhead of the path marked with the sign Growing Old. I cringe just typing that. I’m an anxious person and the thought of aging has always been an issue. Sure, I couldn’t wait until I reached sixteen. I can drive a car! (Actually, in Texas, you can get a “hardship” license that allows you to drive to work and school at fifteen. No open beer or unregistered gun though. Even the Lone Star State has a few limits.) Twenty-one was kinda cool, too. I could drink without my are-you-kidding-me fake ID. It’s not that I was a lush—getting drunk has never had any appeal, much less been a Friday night (AND Saturday night) goal; it’s just that I happened to be two years younger than my peers and didn’t want to have youth highlighted by the possibility of a server denying me my amaretto sour. Youth. If only.

 

I took hitting thirty hard. It was my premature midlife crisis, prompting me to walk away from my career as a lawyer (after a whopping two and a half years), and move from Los Angeles back to Canada, not to the area where I grew up, pre-Texas, but to Vancouver where I knew only one person.

 

After that, deep funks over getting older didn’t wait until I hit a new decade. Instead, every single birthday was cause for sorrow instead of celebration. Another year older…why the woo-hoo? As my mother is fond of saying, “Beats the alternative.” Sure. Technically so, but is that cause for cake? I’m not a cake fan even in general terms. I don’t tell people when my birthday is and I certainly don’t want parties or gifts. Let it pass. Don’t remind me. 

I don't want to board airplanes before everybody else.

 

Does it feel worse because I’m gay? I’ve long passed the threshold for being dead in gay years. I’m supposed to be settled down, out of sight, shopping for antique hutches with a partner, or I must submit to buying a one-way ticket for an aimless trip on an ice floe, waiting for a polar bear to scramble up after a swim and have breakfast. It would be easy to blame gay culture but, if anything, that’s only reinforced a mindset that was already there.

 

When I dated a guy last year, my running joke—which wasn’t funny at all—was that I was thirty-four, as if I’d undergone that cryonic frozen-in-time procedure without any of the problematic side effects like being in a block of ice. For a number of years now, I have truly felt like I was thirty-four in mind and body. Frozen in time, figuratively anyway. I’m more hyper than I’ve ever been, always rarin’ to go. My daily tasks are all punctuated with urgent exclamation marks. Jog! Bike! Write! Hike! Read! Work out! Thirty minutes after I finish a run, I’ll step outside, see someone else jogging and my mind automatically thinks, I should do another run. Now! I don’t but I really, really want to. 

 

I see the difference in my friends. My closest friend talks about his body turning pear-shaped (“like my [eighty-nine-year-old] father”) and spoke with pride this past weekend about how he likes to just sit and watch the morning show with Gayle King and her colleagues for three hours straight. While younger gay men send butt and dick pics to strangers, I send my friend pie pics (and, lately, croissant shots). He’s overjoyed. Another good friend has spent the past three years recovering from foot surgeries and considers an annual chat a significant investment. I hear lots about people’s aches and pains, frequent references to the way things used to be and all that talk about stocks, mortgages and pensions that made me cringe thinking about in my twenties, a sentiment that hasn’t changed. They aren’t willing to try oat milk, wonder out loud if they should get an e-bike (“It’d probably just sit in the garage”) and don’t believe meat-eating younger people would actually choose to eat at a vegan spot sometimes—just another option like Thai or Lebanese. 

 

What happened to fun? What about spontaneity? What happened to being open to new things, someday at least, if no longer with that sense of right away? It should be no surprise that the person I hang out the most with now is—you guessed it—thirty-four. This morning she sent me a TikTok video. I couldn’t figure out how to get it to play, but she filled me in after a couple follow-up texts. I’m (sorta) in the loop with the cool kids. On the weekend, I met her and her boyfriend to do a canopy walk in the forest. They drove there; I biked it. Afterwards, we sat on the grass and chatted. Friends my age look for benches. (“It’s too hard to get up,” one said recently.)

 

Ah, yes. Growing old takes some getting used to. My TV-watching friend talks about it with his own exclamation marks. Mushroom videos on YouTube! Pie! TV news! Horror movie marathons! I’m neither exaggerating nor making fun of him. I’m even partially in awe. He fully embraces the slower pace and, as he says, “doing nothing.” I was aghast this weekend on our “hike”—his term; I called it a walk—when he said, “What’s so great about our virtual world now is that I don’t have to travel anymore. I can just watch it all on my screen.” Sometimes you just know when not to argue a point. Sometimes people’s views are just too far apart. 

 

I do realize being sedentary isn’t solely for people growing older—there are plenty of twenty-something couch potatoes and nonstop gamers—but this friend of mind used to be on volleyball, softball and curling teams. He was my tennis bud. He backpacked across Europe and climbed Kilimanjaro. He’s three years younger than me but has a much older mindset. 

 

It used to be that my fear of growing old was about being alone. I didn’t want to be single and die alone. I’ve let most of that angst go. I still don’t want to die and go three weeks in my condo, body decomposing, only to be discovered because neighbors wondered about the bad smell in the hallway. Of course, I won’t be around to face them or be duly mortified, but it still seems more than a tad undignified for a final exit. I think I’ve solved this by deciding that, at some point, I’ll get my pastry pal to agree that we’ll text each other hello every morning. No text by noon requires investigation. Problem solved.

 

I’ve also worried aplenty about becoming invisible. I’ve observed many times how an elderly person walking with a cane has to stop at the edge of a sidewalk as a chatty couple or a group of younger folk (at that point, they’re all younger folk) pass by, oblivious to the gentleman’s need for space and constant concern about the possibility of falling and breaking a hip. I’m already getting a taste for being unnoticed and irrelevant. It’s one part freeing and two parts depressing. I’m learning to deal with it.

 

I may feel thirty-four, but that’s not what passersby see. I get called “sir” a lot and, while it’s supposed to convey respect, I hate it. The checkout person, the barista, the computer tech guy who has to show me how to download photos…to all of them I’m a sir. The only way I’ve “earned” the reference is in a “respect your elders” kind of way.

 

For all my denial about aging, the signs are surfacing. Six years ago, I got my first pair of glasses and now I can’t read anything without them. If I take a selfie, I’ll glance at it and think the crow’s feet and deep, saggy crevices under my eyes are an indicator of the low-quality camera on my cell phone. (I should get a newer version, but I can’t bear to hear all that gobbledygook about giga-somethings and some sort of cloud in the sky that stores my stuff. (What happens on a sunny day?) Even more telling, I can be as sour as those two old Muppets, Statler and Waldorf. Early onset of “cranky old man.”

 

Every time I forget something (What was that brilliant writing idea? Why did I open the fridge? Why am I holding this whisk?) I immediately attribute it to aging and fret that maybe I’m in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Did I forget things when I was twenty-three? No, never. Of course not!

 

Worst of all, I’ve had to ease up a bit on my hiking for the last six weeks because my left knee has a persistent pain. Running is totally on hold. This is the beginning…