Our culture trivializes and diminishes the aging, ignoring them in the popular culture because they don’t have too many years to buy things, mailing them silly magazines with stories of GPS sneakers to track down Grandma and urging them to have friendly talks with our doctor to have artificial sex and make love to pharmaceutical companies so they can stay alive to be stuffed into nursing homes and sold more pills and procedures and entitlement programs. Should I be saying “us” instead of “them?”
I’m not in the mood for that, honestly. I ran into a man I barely knew who started in with what I call “Dumb Guy Talk,” slapping me on the back, yelled out that I was the “dog guy” and asking me if I was raking in big bucks with my books. I asked him how he was, and he said, “oh, you know, old boy, I am still upright!'” and he laughed and laughed, and then he added, “and I’m still buying Green Bananas,” and laughed some more. I have to confess to an urge to make him less upright, and when I told him I didn’t get the joke, he elbowed me and said, “you know, you know…you’re getting up there! We’re afraid to buy green bananas because we won’t live to see them get yellow!” He wanted so badly for me to be in there with him, laughing about standing up and buying produce that wasn’t quite ripe. What a sad joke, I thought.
I wanted to say, friend, I hate to hear you talk about yourself that way, please don’t. And please don’t try and pull me in with you. But I didn’t. I just walked away. I’m collecting phrases I hope vanish from the earth: In This Economy. My Dog Was Abused. In This Market. From Day One. At Our Age.
“Self-Portrait”
“I wish I was twenty and in love with life
and still full of beans.
Onward, old legs!
There are the long, pale dunes, on the other side
the roses are blooming and finding their labor
no adversity to the spirit.
Upward, old legs! There are the roses, and there is the sea
shining like a song, like a body
I want to touch
though I’m not twenty
and won’t be again but ah! seventy. And still
in love with life. And still
full of beans.”
Perhaps I’ll read that to this man if I see him again.
I love Mary Oliver’s poem, “Self-Portrait” which is good to read when people who don’t respect themselves and are not respected talk that way.