You're Old, I'm Old . . . Get Used to It!

by Virginia Ironside

  I called endless fancy pigeon societies and asked if anyone might take him off my hands, but no one was interested. “But he’s cold and lonely,” I said, tearfully, to one pigeon-lover who answered the phone. “Lonely? Not likely!” he scoffed. “Why would ’e need a friend when ’e’s already got one?”

  “But he hasn’t got a friend, that’s the problem,” I wailed.

  “Oh yes, ’e ’as,” the pigeon-man replied. “It’s yew!”

  The RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) said that his breeder had probably deemed him a dud specimen and chucked him out of the aviary. My heart bled for him. I knew he was a wretched, lonely outcast. I was indeed his only friend. He, for a while, was mine, too. A terrible responsibility.

  After consulting a biology professor friend, I hoped that come the spring his sex drive would force him into a relationship with another pigeon rather than an old lady, but after a winter of complete misery in which my pigeon spent his days and nights lonely and bedraggled and sitting alone on my neighbor’s drainpipe, huddling into the wall with his beak turned into the corner when it rained, the spring arrived and the only other pigeons on the horizon were a greedy gang of ferocious, dusty, feral birds who arrived every morning to steal his food. He disappeared for a week once, but arrived back shivering, his feathers all awry, more gray with dust than white, and clearly traumatized. Now he never left his pipe except to make nervous forays for his corn. I became consumed by worry and compassion for this sad, abandoned bird.

  Eventually the situation grew intolerable. Not only did my house become infested with cockroaches (“And that bird can’t help,” said the exterminator darkly, peering up through the pigeon’s lavatory and giving it a dirty look as he put on his mask to spray the entire house), but I began to worry that by feeding him I was condemning him to a life of loneliness. His presence became a source of guilt and misery to me, too, as if I had my own personal Guantánamo Bay prisoner, wretched and alone, haunting me every day.

  Everyone gave me different advice. “Stop feeding him!” was the most frequent. But how could I? He just hadn’t been brought up to feed himself. And I knew I couldn’t resist him if, thin and bedraggled, he came pecking at my windows on cold mornings.

  I just had to find a home for him. And, luckily, a friend said she knew of somebody who lived in a beautiful cottage in the middle of the Fens who absolutely adored birds. Not only did he have herds of guinea fowl racing across his lawn, he also had flocks of bantams. He also owned a dovecote (or pigeonnier if you want to be fancy) in the garden. If I could catch my pigeon, he would welcome him.

  I devised a Heath Robinson kind of trap, which involved putting an old cat basket on the sill, with its door innocently open, and placing the pigeon’s food and water inside. Eventually he started to venture quite deep inside—as did the other pigeons, of course—but on an appointed day I slammed the door shut on him, and, shaking with anxiety, dismantled the basket from the sill, locked it up, and covered it with a cloth.

  My friend and I popped the bird into the trunk of her car, and drove for two and a half hours. I was sure he’d be dead of fright when we arrived, but he was still hanging on in there. When we reached our destination, the saintly bird-lover immediately took the pigeon up to his new home—a special kind of waiting room where he had to spend ten days before being released among the other birds, with his own covered balcony. After lunch, he emerged onto his balcony, looking as if he’d died and gone to heaven. I have never seen a bird look flabbergasted with delight before.

  Not only that but other beautiful white male doves and fancy pigeons were flocking to see my bird, displaying all over the place. My mistake: it now became clear that “he” was a female bird.

  Ten days later she was free, flying with the other birds, hopping along the lawn, preening herself on the trees in the autumn sunshine. Today, she is the mother of one. And, crazy as it is to get so attached to a pigeon, I miss her.

  But, for a year, she certainly assuaged any feelings of loneliness.

  Facebook

  This is a tricky one because although various people have asked me to be their friend on Facebook, I’ve so far turned them down. So embarrassing. And it’s almost as hard to refuse online as it is in real life. Up comes the e-mail: “Jonathan Bunter (or whoever) would like to add you as a friend on Facebook.” And then you either have to ignore him, which seems incredibly mean and rude, or get in touch with Jonathan, whom you probably haven’t seen for years, if ever, and explain very politely and friendlily, why you don’t want to get involved, adding, of course, that it’s nothing personal and ending with a sympathetic “Hope you’re well” or some such. You then start an e-mail correspondence with him that can be almost as time-consuming as Facebook itself.

  That’s why I don’t want to join Facebook. It would take up too much of my time. Time better spent missing my pigeon. “You won’t have a moment to yourself,” said a friend who’d gotten hooked. “Having joined Facebook, I now spend my entire life on the computer talking to friends, old school friends around the world . . . their friends . . . friends of their friends . . . it’s completely addictive.”

  It’s nice to know, however, that it’s always there in case of a loneliness emergency.

  Talk to People

  Another friend of mine, widowed a few years ago, told me that although she has hundreds of friends and is out every night, she sometimes finds that she needs the sound of another human voice in the day, just to reassure her of who she is. I know the feeling. I’ve sometimes simply got dressed in order to go to the local library, discuss the weather with the librarian, exchange a book, and come home again, just to make clear the whole idea of who I am. It’s all too easy, when being alone, to start to feel that you are just a nonperson, a glass of water poured into another glass of water. Without the boundaries that the presence of other people gives you, it’s easy, in no more than a few hours, to imagine yourself as just a blob of nothingness. A small bit of conversation can usually put things right.

  Recently I sat next to a man at supper who was, as so many people are doing these days, bemoaning the lack of community spirit in his street. “No one says hello anymore,” he whined. “No one knows anyone.”

  “Do you say hello to your neighbors?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t know them,” he replied, shaking his head gloomily.

  “Well, why on earth don’t you say hello first?” I asked, incredulously. “Why don’t you start a residents’ association? Ask them all to a party? Why don’t you, instead of complaining, get out and do something for your community?”

  “Um, yes, perhaps you’re right,” he said, rapidly changed the subject and started moaning about something else, while I turned to my other neighbor and hoped I’d find someone more interesting. (No such luck. He was a psychoanalyst.)

  Get a Girlfriend

  For those for whom an animal—be it a pony, a pigeon, or a cockroach—is not a suitable companion, here are two final thoughts. When I was young, lunch with a girlfriend or, worse, supper with a girlfriend was always a slight—very slight—sign of failure. There was always that feeling that appearing in a restaurant together meant you were two desperate females who couldn’t get a guy. As we get older and the urgency to “get a guy” recedes, women friends are no longer second best. I’m not saying that a date with a man—any man (almost)—doesn’t always hold a certain frisson for a woman. There is something about being with someone “other,” be he three years old or ninety years old or gay as a Christmas tree, that still puts any woman on her mettle (and no doubt vice versa); in the presence of a man a woman will always feel more like a woman, and slightly sparklier.

  But that’s a different experience from being with a girlfriend. And, indeed, a good meet with a girlfriend can, if you have close enough contact (and I’m not talking here about physical contact or even confessional exchange, just the wonderful feeling of two people completely at ease with each other), be an experience that’s almo
st as good as a brief moment during a love affair.

  Because, as the lack of sexual interest makes men more accessible as real friends, so the same lack lessens the underlying tensions in female relationships. Other women are no longer a threat. And a lot of fun can be had looking back on the silly ways we behaved when we were younger, anxieties about being grandparents, not to mention a myriad ailments that you might not especially want to discuss with a fellow.

  Get a Guy

  It’s true that “when an old man wants a young wife, it’s for a nurse; when a young woman wants an old man, it’s for a purse,” but there’s nothing wrong with that—it’s a deal of a kind. But what about older women? Well, George Eliot first got married at sixty. And sixty-eight-year-old Barbara Windsor’s latest husband is twenty-six years her junior.

  Anyway, according to a survey by the American Life Project, the fastest-growing group of users of dating services and online daters is the sixty-five- to seventy-year-olds. So, if you really can’t bear being on your own, try Internet dating. I have a single male friend whose romantic life consists of wining and dining different strange women he meets on the Internet. Some stick around for a couple of months. Some he sleeps with. Some he has one date with and then never again. But for him the steady flow of partners is almost like a permanent relationship, simply because there’s no gap between women at all, as far as I can see.

  I don’t think that would suit me, but I do have two women friends who have met people on the Internet and have actually gotten married to the men they unearthed. Admittedly they changed their ages, losing about fifteen years apiece before, some months into the relationship, revealing the truth. And they did have to sift through hundreds of the creepiest, vilest, yukkiest frogs before they found their princes. But find them they did.

  And if they can, you can.

  16. Old Friends

  Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

  —Marcel Proust

  Senescence begins

  And middle age ends

  The day your descendants

  Outnumber your friends.

  —Ogden Nash

  WHEN YOU’RE YOUNG it’s impossible to have old friends. True, you can still keep up with someone from nursery school, but such a friendship can hardly be called “old.” You need to have put in at least thirty-plus years of knowing each other before you can place each other into the “old friend” category, and by the time you’re sixty, some of your friendships may well have lasted as long as fifty years. We have laid them down like bottles of wine in our youth, and now we can savor them—and often their flavor is good simply because they’re old. Often, of course, it’s not (they’re corked, as it were), and we can curse ourselves with our lack of perception when we were younger as, year after year, we’re obliged, simply out of good manners, to lunch with some turgid bore who, while no doubt huge fun to meet when we were making little figures out of plasticine when we were both three years old, has turned into a right-wing ranter at the age of sixty.

  These old friends are extremely strange beings. Almost certainly, if you both bumped into each other for the first time in the present day, you wouldn’t dream of becoming firm friends. You might find each other likable enough, but nothing to write home about. Yet an old friend who has shared so many experiences with you, often whose separate memories can almost duplicate your own, can be like wonderful old cardigans. They may have some holes in them, they may be cobbled up with bits of wool a slightly different color from the original, and the buttons—well, some are certainly missing and those that remain are sewn on with thread that doesn’t match, and there may be a lack of stitching in the pockets, which means all your loose change slips through. But you can’t bear to throw them away. They’re just so comfortable. So old.

  New Old Friends—Is This Possible?

  A new old friend is something that sounds rather like a scientific impossibility, like perpetual motion. But the reason I always love meeting people whom I used to know slightly in my youth is that I think they can perhaps be transformed, against all the rules, into a brand-new old friend. God knows, we need them. As some poet said, “As life runs on, the road grows strange,/The milestones into headstones change,/Neath every one a friend.” If we didn’t constantly replenish the supplies, we’d soon be able to fit our entire address book on a postcard.

  This is partly why reunions are such fun. You can’t have a reunion when you’re straight out of college (well, you can, but no one will have changed very much since you last saw them). But throw a reunion forty years later and talk about coups de vieux. (See “Looks.”) Some people look so ancient as to be unrecognizable. Some people are unrecognizable. Thank God (we each think privately) that at least we have kept our looks up to a point. But then we find that within a couple of minutes the age in these old friends’ faces just slips away. Suddenly we can barely remember them as they used to be—and yet they seem like the same old pals, all over again. And, as with finding all kinds of old trash in an attic, we root through these groups of old class-mates in an effort to find, perhaps, someone valuable, someone special whom we’d completely ignored at the time or forgotten about; someone whom, maybe, we could dust off and who could then become transformed into another new old friend.

  Bringing Old Friends Back to Life

  Old friends, too, can be resuscitated, even if they’ve been chucked aside in your youth because of some falling-out. When you’re old you can see things in much better perspective. Arguments with your ex, perhaps, which seemed insuperable at the time, now get less and less important the farther away you are from the incidents that prompted them. And another plus about getting old is the ability to forgive slights that have been harbored for years.

  Even people you haven’t spoken to for ages can be rehabilitated, simply because time has washed soft the hard edges that caused so much conflict in the first place. Age is a great forgiver. Suddenly it seems such a waste to chuck all that love and fun, which you must have experienced at some point for them and with them, down the drain. It’s like throwing away a chicken carcass without making it into soup. Or digging and manuring an entire garden and then, just because of some stupid misunderstanding, refusing to plant anything in it. The passage of time means you can drag these old castoffs from the bottom of the psychic black sack to which they’ve been consigned, and realize that there was something worth preserving in there, after all.

  They’re important, these funny old things, often like gnarled, blackened old potatoes. Forget about them as people per se. One of the sad things about old friends and relations dying, apart from the obvious grief of losing them simply as people, is that you lose with them shared experiences, phrases, nicknames, jokes . . . that can never be revived with anyone else. So it’s often worth hanging on, even to unsympathetic old friends, just for shared memories.

  Warning

  Do not under any circumstances introduce these old friends to anyone else. You may find them charming because of a buildup of memories and past kindnesses, but new friends will be horrified when you produce these smelly old Labradors, as it were, out of the woodwork. They would not dream of introducing their old friends to you—they are personal and private, and they’d no more want to share them than they’d want to share an old bath mat, particularly a bath mat covered with old black mold at the back (see Anxiety in “Ailments”). In case you think I’m being cruel, I’m completely aware that I am also other people’s “old friend,” and hope that they’ll keep me in the background rather than introduce me to their newer models. When someone introduces me to a new friend of theirs as an “old friend,” I cringe inside. I know that what they’re saying is shorthand for, “Forgive my stupidity in accidentally getting you together. You won’t understand her at all. She was someone I knew when I was young and silly, so please don’t judge me on the basis of my knowing her. It’s true that I love her, but it’s just a foible.” I imagine they feel l
ike I might feel if someone submitted to the editor of the Independent a poem I’d written in elementary school.

  With any luck, we’ve built up a bank of old friends to cushion us in our old age, rather like taking out a pension. It’s true that some of these friends may, like pensions, have proven to be duds and barely deliver anything forty or so years on, but others prove surprisingly fruitful. And remember, as they say in the financial services, the value of your friendships can go down as well as up.

  But on the whole, as a friendship consultant I’d always advise that unless they are toxic, it’s worth hanging on to old friends, however dreary they may seem at the moment. You never know when the friendship market is going to change. It’s always worth having a few cozy old friends in a dusty drawer for use in emergencies.

  17. Time

  ... A letter from a lady who has described me in a French newspaper—“a noble lady with a shock of white hair”—Lord, are we as old as all that? I feel about six and a half.

  —Virginia Woolf, in a letter to Vanessa Bell

  I will never be an old man. For me old age is always fifteen years older than I am.