This is Getting Old

by Susan Moon

  I stayed for a week, in the hot Texas summer, leaving the house only twice to go to the grocery store in the mall. I did a lot of cooking while the family napped. I danced around the living room with Paloma, trying to soothe her when she was fussy by swinging her in my arms and singing to her. The more vigorously I jiggled her, the better she liked it, and she didn’t care when I couldn’t remember all the words to the songs I dragged up from the basement of my mind—Christmas carols and old Beatles songs. When she fell asleep in my arms, I lay down on my back on the couch, holding her carefully against my chest, and I let her sleep on top of my heart for as long as she cared to. In that time out of time, in that air-conditioned suburban living room, I smelled her sweet head and watched the oak leaves shifting in the hot breeze out the window.

  I learned new things about taking care of babies—unfamiliar to me, but based on ancient wisdom. I learned about the five S’s for soothing fussy babies: swaddling, swinging, letting them suck, holding them sideways, and making shushing noises. Noah was particularly good at the swaddling, and would coo to Paloma in a deep voice—“There, there, Pumpkin Head, now you’re all cozy”—as he tucked the blanket corners around her arms and wrapped her into a snug little package. During the course of my visit I also heard her addressed, by both parents, in torrents of affection, as Petunia, Little Miss Piglet, Florecita, Sweet Pea, Calabacita, and even Bunion Cake.

  As for me, to my great delight, Arcelia called me “Abuelita.”

  Sometimes I carried Paloma out into the back yard, even though it was 102 degrees. She instantly quieted. She looked up at the trees and the big space of sky, and I could see her feeling the unconditioned air on her cheeks. I could see she knew things were different here, in the big outdoors. Noah, too, had loved to look at leaves when he was a baby.

  Zen Master Dogen, founder of the Soto School of Zen in Japan, had a student who was a sincere and disciplined monk, but he had one weakness—he did not have “grandmother mind.” Dogen told him, “You can understand all of Buddhism, but you cannot go beyond your abilities and your intelligence unless you have robai-shin, grandmother mind, the mind of great compassion. This compassion must help all of humanity. You should not think only of yourself.”

  You don’t need to be a grandmother to have grandmother mind. You can even be a celibate monk in a monastery.

  Parents have to have a different kind of mind than grandparents. Parents have to attend to the nuts and bolts of their children’s needs—feeding them, sheltering them, keeping them warm. They have to protect them from cars, from too much sugar, from kidnapping. Parents take care of the foreground. But grandmothers—both literal and metaphorical—can pay attention to the background, to the water and the air. We can tell the babies stories about the stars.

  Sometimes, grandmothers have to take the place of parents. Sometimes the parents are in prison, or are children themselves, or they have died of AIDS. Sometimes their ability to take care of their children has been destroyed by warfare, homelessness, addiction. More and more grandmothers are heads of household, heroically raising their grandchildren in circumstances that don’t leave them much time to waltz the babies around the house singing “Norwegian Wood.” I want to keep all those other grandmothers in mind.

  One day in San Antonio, I rose, made tea, and brought the New York Times in from the doorstep, while the rest of the family were having their morning nap. A front-page story about the bombing of Beirut was continued inside—I turned the page and suddenly there was a photograph of an infant half buried in rubble, her face coated with dust, a small hand showing between broken boards. I closed the paper and put it back on the table.

  Later, when Noah sat down with his bowl of granola, I saw him open the paper to the same photo. I saw his eyes looking at that dead baby in the broken concrete and I heard him make a low groan in the back of his throat as he closed the paper even faster than I had done. It was harder for me to see him see the picture than it had been to look at it myself. I’m still a mother, as well as a grandmother. We didn’t speak of it.

  But, looking at Noah looking at Paloma—that was quite another matter. Arcelia told me the experts say you’re supposed to gaze into a newborn’s eyes in order to promote its healthy emotional development, but it was obvious that when Paloma’s parents gazed into her eyes they weren’t just following directions from a book.

  To see your child happy to be a parent affirms the whole spiraling project—our ancestors coming down from the trees so long ago, and the babies staring back up into the branches.

  Noah, the “too-much-trouble-to-have-kids” boy, is a dad. It is a lot of trouble, he’s right about that. It’s trouble getting up in the middle of the night, it’s trouble doing all that laundry, it’s trouble working to make the planet a safe place for children. It’s trouble, but not too much.

  It was hard to tear myself away at the end of the week. Noah put my bag in the trunk and we got in the car. Arcelia stood in the doorway with Paloma in her arms. As Noah backed the car out of the garage into the blazing Texas sun, Arcelia picked up Paloma’s hand and waved it for her. “Good-bye, Abuelita!” Arcelia called.

  “Good bye, Calabacita, little pumpkin,” I answered.

  What If I Never Have Sex Again?

  I MAY NEVER have sex again. May never lie spoon to spoon with another person. I don’t feel like having sex right this minute, which is fortunate because I don’t have anybody to have it with. But I’m not sure I’ll keep on not wanting to have sex right this minute for the rest of my life. When I was younger and didn’t have a partner I didn’t think, “What if I never have sex again?” I assumed I was in between relationships. Now, in my mid-sixties, I wonder if I have quietly passed beyond “in between.”

  Even if I did want to have sex, maybe nobody would want to have sex with me. Confidence ebbs away as skin sags in private as well as public places. I suppose you could always resort to the cover of darkness, or never taking off your nightie, but can’t fingers still feel the sag? Couples who grow old together get used to each other’s sagging in slow increments, but it’s a whole other matter to get to know somebody new when you’re already wrinkled up. Plus, I’m not as bendable as I used to be.

  I used to like sex a lot if I liked the person, but when I didn’t have it, I didn’t miss it much. Sometimes I missed the person. Saying I miss sex is like saying I miss wearing my hiking boots, when what I miss is standing at Paiute Pass watching the cloud shadows run across the lake below. I miss going where the hiking boots take me. “Having sex” isn’t something that I can miss, all by itself, because I could never peel it away from the person who, moments before, might have been reading aloud to me in bed, and who, shortly afterward, might be snoring beside me just loud enough that I nudge him to quiet him.

  Not having rolled in the hay for a while now—never mind exactly how long—I hardly ever think about it. I’m lucky not to want what I don’t have. It’s convenient. I want, as in lack, sex, but I don’t want, as in desire, it. At the movies, in the erotic parts, I’m like an eight-year-old: “Oh gross! Hurry up and finish this scene! It has nothing to do with me!”

  I used to be just plain interested in the whole subject of sex, and I liked writing about it, too. Now I prefer writing about not having sex.

  I get annoyed with the way people are always saying, out of political correctness, that old people are sexy, too, that old folks can have rich sex lives, etc., etc. Yeah, but do we have to? Whatever old people want to do in bed is fine with me, but I don’t want to feel like there’s something wrong with me if I’m not doing it, too. I claim the right to lose libido as I get older. (Still, I’m not promising.)

  I suspect that more people share my lack of desire than admit it. In the 1940s, Alfred Kinsey discovered that quite a few people were up to all kinds of tricks they had not been admitting, but now, post-Kinsey, post–sexual revolution, it’s hard for people to admit what they’re not doing.

  I do miss some of the side effects of sex
. You get to touch and be touched by another warm-blooded being. There are other ways to accomplish this: getting a massage and going to the dentist are two of the most expensive. Grandchildren provide cuddling for free, but my granddaughter lives more than a thousand miles away.

  There are also pets. When I went on a solitary retreat in the woods, I took my sister’s dog, Satchmo, with me for company. His fur felt good under my fingers. I groomed him with a curry brush every morning when we came back from our walk, to get the burrs out of his coat. Each time he saw me pick up the brush, he would come right to me and lean his body into mine. Sometimes he licked my face as I was brushing him, and I took it to mean, “Thank you. I love you.” I missed his hugs and kisses when I returned him to my sister.

  It feels like I sometimes go for as long as six months, the length of time between my dental hygienist appointments, without being touched by another human being. It’s not really so, because I hug people in greeting, but those hugs don’t last nearly as long as having my teeth cleaned.

  Then there’s the matter of intimacy, one of the most famous side effects of sex. Some would even say that sex is a side effect of intimacy. In any case, sex is an excellent way to blur the distinction between your innermost self and someone else’s—probably the best. I’ve heard it said that sex is for making babies, but there are other ways of doing that nowadays; I think sex was invented for the very purpose of enabling us to discover that we are not separate.

  I do miss intimacy. I have close friends and family members with whom I share intimacy in the form of talk. We tell each other our deepest concerns. But this is still not the boundary-blurring intimacy I’m talking about. It’s not the well of clear water you fall into together when you and your lover look into each other’s eyes from a few inches away. The last person with whom I had prolonged eye contact was my sister’s dog.

  At least not having sex simplifies the business of time management. I’m usually doing something else anyway. If I was having sex right now, for example, I wouldn’t be writing these sentences, and you wouldn’t be reading them. Writing itself provides a kind of connection, although the intimacy between us is one-directional.

  And even if I never have sex again, it’s not as if I’m going to die a virgin, wondering what I missed out on. My life has included plenty of good times that I won’t describe to you here. Also, sometimes I had a headache.

  Celibacy is another way to think about not having sex; celibacy is chosen as a positive path. (Perhaps I could take a retroactive vow of celibacy and get credit for time served.) It’s a way to extend your love to the whole universe. If you don’t have one particular sexual partner, you are equally married to everyone in the world, even if you’ve never met them. And not just people, but trees and rocks and streams and stars.

  When I swim in Lake Anza in the hills behind Berkeley, I get completely wet. When I lie on my towel on the beach, gravity holds me against the earth and the sun touches whatever part of my body I turn to it. When I take a deep breath, the wind moves into me and fills me up. I’m intimate with water, earth, fire, and air. So, what if I never have sex again? So what?

  Still . . .

  Becoming Invisible

  WHEN MY EIGHTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD mother and I took a plane trip together, the wheelchair we had ordered for her was not waiting on the walkway when we got off. The flight attendant said it would be coming shortly, so we stood and stood while all the other deplaning passengers passed us by. Prolonged standing was painful for my mother, and finally she lost it: “Where’s my fucking wheelchair? Shit! That’s the last time I’ll travel on this fucking airline!” I was mortified, but the wheelchair appeared immediately. Once she was seated, she apologized graciously to the flight attendant and they parted on friendly terms.

  I, on the other hand, have never had a knack for yelling at people, even when I feel like I’m becoming invisible.

  Last week I was waiting to buy envelopes in a crowded stationery store. A vigorous young woman with glistening black hair got waited on first, even though she came in after me, and it wasn’t because she pushed her way ahead of me—it was because the cashier didn’t notice me.

  I, too, even as I become translucent myself, have been guilty of this blindness. Yesterday, standing in line at the post office, I watched a young man at the counter put tape on his package. I was startled when a voice said, “Hi, Sue!” It came from the gray-haired woman who was just ahead of me in line—a friend of mine. I’m afraid the reason I hadn’t even seen her was that my mind’s eye had registered grayness and slid right on by.

  I attended a conference of “Buddhist teachers in the West,” where two hundred men and women, all mostly older than fifty-five, met together for several days. One distinguished-looking gray-haired man commented to me, “As I look around, I see a lot more gray-haired men than women, and since we’re all in about the same age range here, I can only assume that many of the women are dyeing their hair. But these women are Buddhist teachers! Why would a Buddhist teacher dye her hair? You’d think, being a Buddhist, she’d accept herself as she is!” My gray hair was undyed at the time, so he must have assumed self-acceptance on my part.

  I tried to tell him: It’s not so much that she doesn’t accept herself as she is but that others don’t. It’s the invisibility factor. Gray hair shrouds you in fog, and you want to shout, “I’m still here! I still have a physical body! I still have ideas in my head!”

  I even have a different understanding of facelifts now. Getting a facelift could be less an act of counterfeiting than an attempt—however futile—to be real, to tear away the veil that society projects onto our faces. I can’t blame the sexist, ageist culture for my wrinkles, but it’s not the wrinkles themselves that hurt, it’s the meaning they are given, a meaning that is mostly unconscious and unspoken.

  We see other people get old, but we can’t believe we’ll succumb. If we remain firm in our resolve, if we exercise and eat the right foods, surely we won’t catch the old-age bug. Or science will figure it out for us. A cover of Harvard Magazine asked: “Is Aging Necessary?” But thus far, time keeps passing, signing its name across our bodies as it goes.

  I’m still on the cusp. I have one foot on each side of the border—the border between getting-old and just-plain-old. It’s a shifting border. Remember “Don’t trust anyone over thirty”? I recall the time when I thought forty was old, then it was fifty, then it was sixty. But at a certain point, “old” will have no place left to recede to, and, like it or not, I’ll be settling my porous bones in a rocking chair on the senior side of the border.

  My mother told me she, too, felt invisible as she aged. When she was in her fifties she started an artists’ retreat center. She was in her prime; she was taken seriously. But by the time she was seventy, she claimed the board and staff didn’t pay any attention to what she said because they thought she was a silly old lady. She sometimes lost her temper and shouted at people in meetings, just as she did on the airplane walkway—she said it was the only way to get people to listen to her. I used to think she was being paranoid, but I’m beginning to see what she means.

  In a planning meeting connected with my work, a man brought up a suggestion I had made and credited it to a male colleague about my age: “As Bill so cogently pointed out . . .” I don’t believe he was trying to slight me. He must have heard my words when they came out of my mouth, but in his memory, he had heard a man say them. Older men are easier to see than older women. Is it just my imagination, or did my words carry more weight when I was younger and prettier? I don’t know. I should also explain that in this case, I was crocheting a shawl during the meeting, so it was partly my fault. If you’re a woman over forty-five, it’s better not to do any kind of needlework in important meetings.

  I’m inspired by the admirable example of the Raging Grannies, who take the stereotype of the little old lady and run with it. They are peace activists who go to demonstrations in theatrical flowered hats and aprons, looking sweet and inn
ocent, which they are not. For example, some Raging Grannies were arrested when they attempted to enlist at a U.S. Army recruiting center in Tucson, saying they wanted to be sent to Iraq so that their grandchildren could come home.

  Last year I dyed my gray hair bright red. (There weren’t any Buddhist conferences coming up at the time.) My hair was never red all by itself, and I wasn’t trying to fool anybody. When the hairdresser asked me what effect I was going for, I said I wanted to do something wild. I said I didn’t care if the color didn’t look natural, but I did want to look . . . well . . . not to put too fine a point on it . . . younger. I wanted a hair color that would make people interested in what I had to say.

  The hairdresser was expensive but skillful. For about two weeks, the red was very bright, and I was startled to discover that it made a difference. Strangers looked at me directly. From a distance I did look younger, more powerful, maybe even more passionate—a redhead! I became visible to clerks in crowded stores.

  After a couple of weeks the color faded to a chemical orange: it’s an uphill battle, editing out the marks of age on an aging body. It’s expensive, too: if older women didn’t mind looking old, a huge sector of the economy would collapse.

  I was complaining to my younger sister about feeling invisible as an older woman, like a dry leaf, and I think she felt annoyed with my self-concern, though she didn’t say so. She said gently, “What about the idea of dignity? Why don’t you cultivate a sense of dignity?” I put the word dignity into my pocket like a smooth stone, and held onto it, finding comfort in it.

  Not long after, I saw an old woman in the airport in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. She must have been about ninety. We were both sitting in the departure lounge, waiting for a plane to California. She was wearing turquoise jewelry, a long denim skirt, and a bright pink Mexican shawl, and her extremely wrinkled face, bent over a paperback book, was full of character. Her white hair was rolled into a bun on the back of her head and fastened with wooden sticks—I think they were chopsticks. She looked like an artist, I thought—an old artist. She seemed to be traveling alone, but she didn’t look afraid or tentative; she looked happy, sitting there reading, with her boarding pass tucked into the pages of her book. She didn’t know it, but she was a visitation—a messenger of age. The opposite of invisible, she shone for me—her white hair, her fuchsia shawl. She reminded me not to feel sorry for myself. She got up when they called for early boarding, and walked, slowly and stiffly, with a cane, and smiling, onto the plane. She had dignity.