Thoughts on Aging

Dec 03, 2023
Interesting perspective on getting older and some good humor

What They Don’t Tell You About Getting Old

 
A cartoon-style illustration of aging fruit, including a wrinkled apple and a browning banana, dressed in human clothes to look like a group of elderly people. They’re clinking glasses and popping a bottle of champagne.
Credit...Lauren Martin
 
A cartoon-style illustration of aging fruit, including a wrinkled apple and a browning banana, dressed in human clothes to look like a group of elderly people. They’re clinking glasses and popping a bottle of champagne.

Mr. Rosenblatt is the author of several novels and memoirs, including “Cataract Blues: Running the Keyboard.”I recently turned 83, and while there are many joys to getting older, getting out of taxis is not one of them.What you don’t want to do is get your left foot caught under the front right seat before you try to swing your right foot toward the door; otherwise, you’ll topple over while attempting to pay the fare, possibly injuring your ankle, and causing the maneuver to go even more slowly. If you make it past the taxi door, there is still the one-foot jump to the street. You’re old. You could fall. Happens all the timeAnd that’s when it’s just you in the taxi. If some other old person is with you — a friend, a spouse — there’s a real possibility of never getting out of the vehicle. You might live out the rest of your days in the back seat, watching Dick Cavett do real estate ads on a loop“Old People Getting Out of Taxis.” I was thinking of making a film with that title, if I knew how to make a film. Figure it would run four hours. I asked an actor friend, also old if he’d star in it. His response: “If I can get out of my chair.”

 

 

I can’t think of anyone who has come to me for wisdom, serenity, authority or power. People do come to sell me life insurance for $9 a month and medicines such as Prevagen, which is advertised on TV as making one sharper and improving one’s memory. Of course, that is beneficial only to those who have more things they wish to remember than to forget.

One thing I need to remember is which day for which doctor. Two years ago, my wife and I moved back to New York City after 24 years of living by the sea. The city is safer, we thought — just in case we may ever need to be near medical facilities. Since our move, not a day has passed without one of us seeing a doctor, arranging to see one, or thinking or talking about seeing one.

Activities such as getting out of a taxi are not only degrading and humiliating; they take so much effort, they simply make you tired. You may reasonably say, “Why not take the subway?” I would, except for the two hours needed to get up and down the stairs. Still, it’s all a matter of adjustment. It took me three or four years of taxi rides to finally admit to myself that I’m old.

Old. Even the word sounds like a sigh of surrender.

I wrote a book called “Rules for Aging” 25 years ago when I used to leap in and out of taxis like a deer if you can picture such a thing. The rules were less about aging than about living generally, one of the first being “Nobody’s thinking about you.”

In old age that’s true in spades. And that’s another of aging’s unnerving surprises. You disappear from the culture, or rather, it disappears from you. Young women and men shown on TV as world-famous, you’ve never heard of. New idioms leave you baffled. You are Rip Van Winkle without having fallen asleep.

To be sure, old age has compensations. Grandchildren. Their company is delightful, partly because they think you have something useful to impart if you could remember to impart it. Waitresses tend to treat you sweetly. Doormen and maintenance crews show respect. And there are positive or harmless activities for the over-the-hill. Women take up watercolors and form book clubs. Men find loud if pointless camaraderie in diners and on village benches all over the country. Hey, old-timer.

 
My point is: Who ever expected to spend time wondering if Madison Beer is a beverage honoring a founding father? Who ever expected that one’s social circle would consist of Marie, who does blood work, and an M.R.I. technician named Lou? Who ever expected that getting out of a taxi would be so momentous an issue that one is a bundle of nerves planning exit strategies halfway through the ride? Who ever expected old age?