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aging
A Call to (Old) Arms: Don’t Let Trump Define What It Means to Age
We have to weaponize old age for good causes and shake a mindset that allows us to warehouse people because their presence is an inconvenience while covering up for those with money and power.
Oct 11, 2024
After U.S. President Joe Biden was shuffled off stage on trumped-up charges of senility, I started thinking seriously about the weaponization of old age in our world. Who gets credit for old age and who gets the boot?
At 86, I share that affliction, pervasive among the richest, healthiest, and/or luckiest of us, who manage to hang around the longest. Former President Donald Trump is, of course, in this same group, although much of America seems to be in selective denial about his diminishing capabilities. He was crushed recently in The Great Debate yet is generally given something of a mulligan for hubris, craziness, and unwillingness to prepare. But face it, unlike Joe B., he was simply too old to cut the mustard.
It’s time to get real about old age as a condition that, yes, desperately needs and deserves better resources and reverence, but also careful monitoring and culling. Such thinking is not a bias crime. It’s not even an alert for ancient drivers on the roads. It’s an alarm for tolerating dangerous old politicians who spread lies and send youngsters to war, while we continue to willfully waste the useful experience and energy of all ages.
Once you’ve accepted that you’ll look, feel, and be treated differently in old age, you’re also ready to accept the fact that you can be the master of your attitude and response.
We have to weaponize old age for good causes. We have to shake a mindset that allows us to warehouse people because their presence is an inconvenience while covering up for those with money and power. Out of shame or guilt or that feeling of elder helplessness, even smart old people all too often go along with arbitrary cut-off dates. I remember my dad, at 75 and retired, inveighing against the “dead wood,” especially in his field (education) that blocked progress and discouraged young energy and innovation. By 75, he maintained, people were sliding downhill, which was his way of justifying being shelved himself. He became increasingly depressed and listless, not because he was too old but because he had been made to feel useless.
Then, at 76, he was given the chance to help other old people with their tax returns and, ultimately, their confrontations with local government. He promptly perked up and became an active advocate for elder rights until his accidental death at 100.
My old friends and I talk constantly about our aging, how to suffer it, outwit it, gang up on it, or even strategically give in to it. We’ve decided that nobody in power is doing anything meaningful about it because, beyond exploitive eldercare, they haven’t figured out how to turn a profit.
Meanwhile, the really rich coots like Rupert Murdoch, at 93, are still tomcatting around and fussing with succession plans, while Warren Buffet, at 94, is cagily toying with his billions to avoid inheritance taxes.
Those old boys are anything but role models for me and my friends. After all, they’ve been practicing all their lives how to be rich old pigs, their philanthropy mirroring their interests, not the needs of the rest of us. In my pay grade, we’re expected to concentrate on tips from AARP newsletters on how to avoid telephone scams and falls, the bane of the geezer class. And that’s important, but it’s also a way of keeping us anxious and impotent.
Those Falls
This screed isn’t just the product of my stewing over old age. An incident in the parking lot of a big box store on the day after The Great Debate set me off.
Here’s what happened: An elderly man in the car beside mine stepped out of the driver’s seat, lowered his cane to the concrete, and pitched over flat on his face. His wife immediately ran to him from the passenger’s seat. I got there next, phone out, and asked her if I should call an ambulance. She was adamant: No! Within two minutes there were six of us, including four elderly gents, helping him turn himself over and sit up. There was no blood on his face, just one skinned kneecap.
He shook off attempts to help him stand, looking angry, humiliated, and embarrassed. I finally rolled a shopping cart next to him and he used it to clamber to his feet. Even with his cane planted on the concrete, he still seemed shaky, but he got right back in his car with his wife and hurriedly drove off. The rest of us looked at each other and wordlessly drifted away.
I then sat in my car trying to sort out what I had just experienced. On the one hand, the quick response of a largely elderly crew was thrilling proof that we were still up for the game, that we could still help each other. But I found the embarrassed, almost hostile response of the fallen man—and the wife who obviously knew what he wouldn’t stand for—discouraging. Why hadn’t he acknowledged our desire to help him? Why had he driven off so brusquely without even checking himself out?
And why should he have felt so obviously mortified by a common accident? Because it was such a marker of old age? Why hadn’t the rest of us, me included, tried to be more persuasive about helping him? Were we too inappropriately understanding of old age’s sense of vulnerability, weakness, helplessness? The seeming diminution of manhood? Would a woman have acted differently?
I then mentioned it to a woman—my wife Lois and she promptly asked me, “Did it remind you of your fall?”
How had I forgotten that?
Just last winter, while walking the dog, my legs had slid out from under me on my icy driveway. I was suddenly flat on my back. I thought about inching down the driveway to a fence where I might be able to pull myself up. It would be a long trip, but…
A voice suddenly boomed out behind me. “You alright?”
“I’m fine, thanks,” I said as cheerily as I could.
“Yeah, right. It’s Jim Read.”
The local chief of police! I felt embarrassed. Strong hands boosted me up, guided me down the driveway to safe ground, and frisked me for broken bones. I barely had a chance to say thanks, before he was back in his patrol car, pulling away.
A few months later I ran into him. He shrugged off my thanks, as if he either didn’t remember my fall or considered it too commonplace to dwell on.
Role Models
Those incidents stay in my mind as symbolic of how routinely we oldsters shrink from confronting our vulnerabilities. And then I thought about two people I had once known and one I still see who faced them head-on
My prime role model, my dad, helped form my attitude toward aging and, in my own old age, he—or at least his memory—lives with me still. Above all, he taught me not to be afraid of the whole process. The second crucial figure—remember for years I was a sports reporter for The New York Times—was New York Yankee and then New York Mets manager Casey Stengel who showed me how aging could be used, for better and for worse. And my current inspiration, the 95-year-old artist Jules Feiffer, continues to offer me a blueprint for having a late working life. What they’ve all taught me is this: Once you’ve accepted that you’ll look, feel, and be treated differently in old age, you’re also ready to accept the fact that you can be the master of your attitude and response.
I met Stengel in 1962 at the first spring training of the New York Mets. He was then 71 years old, incredibly old to the 24-year-old sportswriter Robert Lipsyte. (And remember that “old” started much sooner then.) He was bitter at having recently been fired after a long and historic winning career with the Yankees. “I made the mistake of getting old,” he would tell me.
It does seem that old age almost always arrives at a bad time and it’s hard to kick the bad guys in the butt when you can’t raise your knee.
Most sportswriters readily accepted the decision of the Yankees and treated Stengel as a comical figure, too old to manage effectively. They wrote him off as “the ol’ Perfesser” and his rambling monologues as nonsensical “Stengelese,” when all conversation with him required was careful attention. (Mind you, I’m not innocent here. More than 60 years later, I still cringe at descriptions in articles I wrote then of his “pleated face” and scuttling, crab-like gait.)
Stengel could be cruel. One spring, he called a press conference and trotted out the two least talented rookies in training camp. He regaled the sportswriters with predictions about their potential and how they represented the future of the brand-new Mets. National and local press and TV outlets featured them. A few days later, they were cut from the team and never heard from again, corollary casualties of Casey’s revenge on the media.
At the time, I felt sorry for those young players. But even as one of the victims of his nasty prank, I couldn’t help appreciating how he had used our ageism against us. We swallowed his story. After all, how could that old coot bamboozle us?
But there was another side to Casey. That same first season with the Mets, on a muggy night in Houston during pre-game batting practice, I watched him respond to a middle-aged man, dragging a sullen-looking teenage boy, who beckoned from the stands. “I wonder if you remember me, Case,” he said, mentioning his name. “I pitched against you in Kankakee.” (He was referring to a pre-World War I minor-league team in Illinois at the start of Stengel’s long playing career.) The teenager kept trying to pull his father away.
Casey read the situation. He said, “The old fireballer himself. Why I was sure glad when you quit that league, I never could hit you a-tall.” Casey kept talking until it was time to manage the game.
The man and the boy returned to their seats, grinning, shoulders bumping. When I caught up to Casey, he just shrugged and then admitted he had no memory of who the man was.
Later, I told the story to one of the “Stengelese” sportswriters and he suggested Casey had staged the scene to impress The New York Times’ soft-hearted, liberal rookie reporter. “You should write that,” I responded. “It’s another way of looking at him, proves he’s still pretty sharp.”
“It’s not what the fans and the editors want,” the older sportswriter said. “They like the nutty old-fart stuff. It sells.”
The nutty old-fart stuff still sells—in the case of Joe Biden as a way to diminish, dismiss, or even demonize him. Soon after his debate debacle with Donald Trump, a stylish young editor at GQ asked me to write an old man’s take on the president’s situation, a welcome nod to experience. The first thing I thought of was how hard it is for any of us to give up what I call “the warm,” that cheering spotlight of attention. I thought of heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, who I had ever so long ago covered as a reporter and how, in his final fights, he was humiliated because he couldn’t acknowledge getting older, losing strength and power, stuck as he was in the victory culture male’s sense of power and triumph, of never surrendering.
Biden must have shared that until he committed what functionally was political suicide, even if it was acclaimed as a selfless sacrifice.
My current inspiration, my friend and former neighbor Jules Feiffer, the famed Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, is seriously hearing- and sight-impaired and can barely walk. But he can still think, laugh, and draw. Every day.
Jules is one of those “shining examples”—especially after his first attempt at a graphic novel for middle-graders, Amazing Grapes, just got a rave review in The New York Times and tons of attention (“mostly because I’m so old,” he assured me). But it’s his spirit, often mislabeled as “youthful” instead of humane, that offers hope. Even as he admittedly struggles to hang on to what’s left of his Bronx-born American dream in the Age of Trump, he never gives up on himself or his ability to keep nudging his readers toward their own sense of possibility and change. His nearly completed next book—yes, there already is one!—will be an illustrated commentary on his (and our) strange times.
Okay, so where do I go from here? In fantasy, Dad, Casey, and Jules would make a fine team to deal with this increasingly disturbed and disturbing world of ours. If only. But how exactly do we put such a team together? We’re all short-timers, no matter how old we get, but we can’t let the bad guys wait us out. We need to treat old age as an identity and ourselves as part of an ethnic-style group deserving attention.
Yes, it does seem that old age almost always arrives at a bad time and it’s hard to kick the bad guys in the butt when you can’t raise your knee. And somehow the shining examples of individual super seniors like Dad, Casey, and Jules tend to remain just that—shining examples—rather than models for small-scale collective action.
But consider this my call to (old) arms. After all these years, haven’t we earned the right to be loud and obstreperous?
A Gang of Elders
As the former president of my town’s senior citizen organization let me tell you this: Old age is just a wrinkled extension of who you’ve always been, whether you end up frolicking in a golf cart at a luxury retirement community or waiting in semi-darkness for Meals on Wheels.
The board of my group was made up of a dozen oldsters who variously worked remarkably hard or were remarkably lazy, proved innovative or simply obstructive in distinctly alert or zombie-like modes—pretty much, I thought, as they must have acted all their lives. The nice ones could be passive, the mean ones relentless. Institutional memory was generally a good thing, but all too often presented itself as numbing anecdotage. Those seniors I dealt with then defined themselves by class, education, or economic position, but rarely age. Beyond creaky joints, treated with wry humor, and recommended doctors, old never seemed to be a shared identity.
Why not? Maybe because we didn’t have a clear social mission. The group’s main job was supporting—by fundraising and lobbying—the town’s senior services, mostly nutritional and logistical. We did that well, from buying an $85,000 wheelchair-accessible bus to renovating the local church kitchen that serves much of the food at senior events. But we could never get it together for the next major step—creating a political force. Maybe we could get seniors out on election day, but we couldn’t get them to vote for the candidates that might serve their immediate interests, much less help deal with climate change, water quality, community housing, medical and healthy food accessibility, and the like.
We couldn’t mount a resistance. We couldn’t recapitulate the spirit of the Gray Panthers, the group formed in 1970 to combat forced retirement, reform nursing home practices, and protect social security. Founder Maggie Kuhn said: “Old age is not a disease—it is strength and survivorship, triumph over all kinds of vicissitudes and disappointments, trials and illnesses.”
The Gray Panthers were created to be an intergenerational group although its energy came from the anger and experience of its older members. The Gray Panthers exist, working for peace and equal rights. Understandably it’s not a commercially sexy group and doesn’t get a lot of publicity. Still, in the age of Donald Trump, go join them anyway and remind the world that he is not what it means to be old, although statistically he would be our oldest president if the worst-case scenario occurs in November.
Or start your own club. Be a club of one. Register old people to vote and drive them to the ballot box. Don’t be shy. What have we got to lose? They can’t eat us, can they? Sharpen the end of your cane, affix spurs to the front of your wheelchair. Die trying.
While you’re at it just try not to fall. And if you do, let someone help you up.
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Resisting Giveuptitude: I Can’t Do It Alone
The following words are a contemplation of the great unknown, whose presence becomes increasingly more visible as the aging process obfuscates more and more of my certainties and, indeed, rattles my optimism.
Feb 25, 2024
Excuse me as I ponder eternity—briefly.
Like it or not, this is the essence of... uh, aging. As I wrote a year ago: “...once you actually hit it—that three letter word, ‘old’—watch out: ‘An aged man (as Wiiliam Butler Yeats pointed out, as he sailed poetically to Byzantium) is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick...’”
Nonetheless, hooray for my good fortune! I’ve been dancing around at age 77 for a while now, and before I start complaining about the aches and pains that come with it, I have to acknowledge—indeed, revere—the mere fact of making it this far. So many people don’t, due to the random will of fate, but also due to the hell of war, which remains humanity’s cancerous addiction. How can I complain when the bombs I help pay for are killing children?
So the following words are not meant to be complainy—just, rather, a contemplation of the great unknown, whose presence becomes increasingly more visible as the aging process obfuscates more and more of my certainties and, indeed, rattles my optimism. The core of this optimism is the mantra that helped me make it through middle age: Be positive and productive! It was my psychological—my spiritual—cane. Now it feels broken.
The aging process seemed to be in control of things now, in a deeply emotional way, rather than my sense of productive purpose.
In its place I seem to have an anti-mantra, which I refer to simply as giveuptitude. You know, life is just a doggone inconvenience. Addressing it pragmatically—paying bills on a regular basis, for instance—doesn’t seem to yield the benefits it used to. The negative consequences of not doing so are still present, of course, but I am feeling less and less a sense of “equality,” you might say, with the process of life. The difficulties of living keep mounting, no matter how many damn bills I pay or chores I do. And giveuptitude, which for me amounts to surrendering my day to computer games, junk food, and a random wandering through YouTube, becomes ever more enticing.
Come on, Bob. Be positive and productive! Work on your book—you know, the book that will explain the nature of peace to Joe Biden and those other war-addicted pols out there. This book (and I quote its beginning):
Let’s start the book with a moment of silence. Nine minutes and 29 seconds of silence, maybe, in honor of a man who lost his life to a retributive, fear-driven system of justice, and in honor, as well, of the uprising that began to emerge in the wake of his death.
This book hopes to be a continuation of that uprising.
The man is George Floyd. Nine minutes and 29 seconds was the length of time a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck, suffocating him, in October 2020. He (or somebody) had supposedly tried to use a counterfeit bill at a grocery store. His death was caught on video: one more video captured on a passerby’s cellphone, overturning the police “justifiable homicide” version of events, and outrage—deep, historic and, oh Lord, complex—began sweeping across and beyond the country.
This is a time of consciousness shift. Humanity is altering its understanding of, and relationship with, power. The goal of this book is to help this shift along: to give some language to it.
But first, the silence.
Yeah, that’s the book I’ve been dancing with for a decade. Perhaps sharing a few paragraphs of it in public will help bring it back to life. I think what happened is that I shrugged and gave it back to infinity a few years ago—after an absurd bicycle accident that apparently shattered my belief in “being positive and productive.” What’s the point?
I was on a borrowed bike, riding with family through a nature preserve in Wisconsin. We were on an asphalt path. The group stopped for a moment and.. well, the bike I was riding was slightly higher than the one I normally rode and for some reason—still a mystery to me—rather than dismounting I simply stayed on the seat, holding the handlebars. The bike fell sideways. My face hit the asphalt. Big ouch!
I won’t go into further details, except to note that the big, psychological ouch never quite went away and suddenly, so it seemed, eternity wasn’t on my side any longer. My mind was still intact, I wasn’t sick (didn’t get Covid), but... the aging process seemed to be in control of things now, in a deeply emotional way, rather than my sense of productive purpose. This was something I hadn’t experienced before. I began making a completely unconscious decision: to surrender to giveuptitude. Or at least partially surrender. I still write my weekly column, but the book... felt lost in infinity.
In sharing a fragment of it publicly, I think I’m saying this: I can’t do it alone. I don’t even know what I mean by that, except I know it to be true. I have to be humbly vulnerable as well as positive and productive. This is how that first chapter (tentatively) ends:
What if we organized ourselves, socially and politically, in reverence not to some linear certainty—the law—but to this unknown, which demands of us not obedience and submission, but rather an ongoing openness to that which we don’t know: the infinite universe? What if we organized ourselves around our best efforts to absorb, connect, and understand?
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A Few Thoughts on This Admission: I Am Old
As more and more of us live to advanced years, it is crucial to accept and even embrace our condition.
Sep 24, 2023
Much to my surprise, I find that I’m now part of a large minority that is often ignored, frequently disdained, and regularly segregated.
I am old.
And indeed, it’s quite a shock to find that the world in which I worked, struggled, dreamed, and loved now regards me quite differently than it did only 10 years ago. Growing old, it seems, is a condition that Western post-industrial society and culture do not consider meaningful, useful, or even valid. And yet, the truth is, and this is also a surprise, that as we become old, we enter a time of life, even with its losses and deficits, that is not a defective version of youth or middle age, but is something quite different, with its own qualities, discoveries, and surprises.
But as the world becomes perhaps more distant and out of our control, we begin to see patterns we had never imagined or only dimly sensed.
“Ageism” is an attitude people inflict on themselves. Old people are what almost everyone will become. But somehow, this part of existence is treated as something that must be actively ignored, as if old age were an infectious disease transmitted by acknowledging it. Or a misfortune that can be averted by denying it. “You’re only as old as you think you are,” said my son recently. “Only young people think that,” I snapped. Contemplating dying and death is, it seems, more appealing than imagining being old.
Most books and articles on aging offer brisk, hard-nosed advice about patient management or wishful thinking packaged as self-help. But Atul Gawande has written with unsparing clarity about the bleak fate of institutional powerlessness, offered in the name of “care” and “safety,” which almost half of us face in old age. The number of euphemisms for “old” proliferate, as if by not using the word, we could forestall the fact. But the intense and complex inner experiences that come with aging are rarely probed.
We cannot escape the fact that old age is a time of loss. Old, we experience depletion in many parts of our lives. Our bodies and senses weaken, become unreliable in unforeseen ways, fall subject to illness, and require more attention simply to continue a reasonable level of function. More difficult is the loss of friends and family and the changes in the social institutions where we once had a place. Most difficult and certainly most frightening is the threat or actual loss of mental capacity. None of these occurrences are part of how we thought of ourselves or planned our future. As we age, our lives become strangely unrecognizable. We realize that life is no longer in our control. And old age ends only when we enter a terrain that is truly and completely unknown.
Thus, more than any other time in life, old age is the time of deepest and most pervasive uncertainty. The uncertainty regarding our financial sustainability is not the least of these, but somehow comes to epitomize the perilousness of our situation. How we will manage being ourselves, being in our world, is no longer obvious. So we feel the world moving away from us. We can no longer reach out and grasp and cling, control and shape what’s happening. Our future is no longer limitless. It is genuinely and utterly unknowable.
But as the world becomes perhaps more distant and out of our control, we begin to see patterns we had never imagined or only dimly sensed. Our world, our selves become less stable and less secure. Everything is more intensely transitory. Situations, objects, places, people become, moment by moment, very deeply to be cherished, valued; loved, not in spite of being impermanent, but because they and we are only together for this moment. Colors become more vivid, momentary smells, sudden sounds, temperatures and textures, memories, ideas, gestures appear, vanish, and only briefly detach themselves from the flow of sensoria. We take less and less for granted.
Late in their lives, Titian, Michelangelo, O’Keeffe, Tagore, Jean Rhys, Palladio, Daisy Loongkoonan, Paul Cézanne, Janáček, Maria Martinez, Stravinsky, and many others found new and unexpected ways of looking at themselves and their world. They continued and even extended their arts. In old age, as their bodies weakened and the world changed, they did not look away. Instead, in worlds of decline and loss, they experienced new tonalities, new music, new patterns. Having exhausted more conventional possibilities, they discovered new relationships to melody and harmony, to narrative, to color, form, light, and space. They found unforeseen paths, articulated subtleties and beauties never before encountered. The work they have left us and the stories of their lives are signposts for us.
This is not to say that we, the old, will all accomplish extraordinary things. But our situation, the actual experience of aging, is an opening for all of us. We here encounter something unexpected, sometimes frightening, sometimes revelatory. And now, as more and more of us live to advanced years, it is crucial to accept and even embrace our condition. This time of life offers new viewpoints in a world that cannot stop its habitual obsession with consuming and polluting. It does so, even as those who care for us cannot imagine our inner life, the uncertainty, peril, and, above all, the continued restless searching which is mind itself. Old age may seem too painful to contemplate and explore, but indeed we must. It is a time of life we might wish to ignore but which all of us, the living, will and must share. It is inevitable. And it is, in its own way, a gift.
For, as Thoreau once said, “Not ‘til we are lost… not ‘til we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”
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