Time to enfeeble AGEISM

What I see when I look around is old people living solitary, silent lives; old people sequestered in old people communities – “active” for the healthy, “assisted” for the not; old people made to feel as if they need to apologize for being old, for clogging up the works, for showing us the future we don’t want to see.

Presumably we all have a soft spot in our hearts for our old people – grandpa, great aunt Tillie, old cousin Bill – but we lose patience with everyone else’s. The grandma at the grocery store. She’s looking through her cavernous handbag for coupons. She’s taking forever to count out the change from her purse. She’s holding up the line. Come on. The geezer in the car, the one whose gray head you can barely see above the top of the driver’s seat. He’s driving 22 in a 35 mph zone. He’s actually making a full stop at the stop sign and looking both ways before proceeding. Get off the road.

And maybe even, sometimes, we lose it with our own kin. Grandpa (Dad) pulls out the old photo album. Again. He launches into the story about…fill in the blank. Again. We roll our eyes and find the first excuse to leave the room.

Old and in the way.

“Old and in the way” was a music group Jerry Garcia formed in the mid-1970s (with David Grisman and the amazing Vassar Clemens.) I know this not from reading the Wikipedia entry but because I heard the group in Berkeley. I got there early and was hanging out in the alley behind the club when Garcia arrived. I held open the back door for him.

Just as my young self from those days – car-less, kid-less, 401K-less, a joker, a smoker, a midnight toker — could not imagine my mid-life self today, so too can I not imagine my elderly self in decades to come. Or maybe I should say, the (stereotyped) elderly self that comes to mind is not one I care to imagine: the little old lady in a mint green polyester pants suit gripping the steering wheel of a big Buick. The little old lady sitting on a vinyl couch in the TV room of an assisted living facility talking to other little old ladies about blood pressure medicine. Or about how she once held open the door for Jerry Garcia. No thanks.

I want my head full of other images, images of vibrant, engaged older people, funny, feisty, perceptive, talented, passionate, compassionate older people. Older people who not only have experience but still seek it. I want to be that kind of older person. Why is that so hard to imagine? Why do we have to think of aging as a long list of things we can’t do rather than a long list of things we can?

The photo is of my maternal grandparents who traveled every summer throughout the western U.S. landing in various college towns and talking their way (well, Nanny did the talking) into summer school classes. He was an engineering teacher with the soul of a poet. She was a pistol.