This attitude--and it does lie beneath the Politically Correct surface, I assure you--toward people of a certain age is a part of American culture that relentlessly values the young and the new even if the new and the young may not be as novel as they think. But the young don't understand that because they have no sense of history (they weren't there) and as far as I can see, they don't want to know about history. They don't ask about pre-them time. (I know I am overgeneralizing, but there is at least some truth to this. And I do not limit this to the well-under-forty group by any means, and I do smile to myself when I hear people do "Woe is me" when they turn fifty. Oh, come on. I remember fifty.) As a friend says, "It's all new to them." For them, precedents don't matter at least in part because those precedents are associated with those of us who are either on their way to rocking chairs or already in them. And this happens during a time of alleged concern for diversity pretty much everywhere.
And it seems I am expected to adopt this attitude: I am old and infirm, obsolete, to be left rocking away.
Here's a word for you: ageism.
Hit a certain age and you are expected to say, "My rocker, c'est moi," I guess, if the choice of gifts is any indication.
But I am still here. I don't feel like a fossil.
Consider this: in some ways I am in better shape than I was ten (or maybe even more) years ago (then a time when I am sure to some I was already part of what they see as Jurassic Park). And I would like to suggest that my mind is in better shape than it has been for decades, if only because I am free (mostly) from the distraction and stress of work. I mean, I can finally think a thought.
Most people have no idea how it feels to be my age. (Or, depending on your age, dear reader, OUR age.)
I already had more lamps than I was using, and, to be honest, I did want something to mark my years of service. Perhaps (if it had been available, but then it wasn't, and after all, clocks perpetuate the stereotype too, tick-tock), a nice wall clock would have been more appropriate--but then some friends had already given me a very cool light-sensitive wall clock that plays Beatles tunes on the hour as a combined birthday and retirement gift, so another clock would have been neither here nor there. Instead of the rocker I probably would have been content to keep my oldish school-issued laptop rather than have to take everything off it, put it on my home laptop and my external hard drive and save, save, backup, backup, but that option was not to be. (Someone else had asked.)
As I write this, the rocking chair I received is serving as an informal clothes rack. In the four months since I received it, it has started to smell less-new than it did when I set it on the lawn in the backyard to take a photo of it once it arrived. I have tucked it between a tall bookcase and a floor lamp, near the heat vent, and I am hoping that in the winter it will serve as a place for me to sit and read.
I have always liked rocking chairs. The first piece of furniture I bought for myself as an adult was a rocker, dark-stained pine, now in hibernation in the garage (which functions as an attic since I have no attic). I also have two small rockers, one from my childhood bedroom, white, a sort of French Provincial, painted by my father, and a second that I took, much later, from my grandfather's workshop. The French Provincial one sits in the living room and serves as an extension of a bookcase, and the other, upstairs in my bedroom, has a cat sleeping on a pillow on it as I write this.
In addition, a few years ago, I bought and spray-painted red two pine rockers for the deck at the back of my house. On summer evenings there I sit, my feet up on the railings: backward, forward. I rest my head against the top of the chair and see the blue hour through the leaves. So all but the new rocker are old.
I like rockers and I was as gracious as I could be about this new retirement chair, all things considered. I was not going to kick such a gift in the mouth (so to speak), but I am wise enough to know that it is special since it recognizes thirty-nine years of work in one place. It is nice to have something that does that. As with other things, the new rocker may come to grow in sentimental value over time. Time might prove to be on the new chair's side.
But not now. It is just too new.
Old rockers: they have not just age but character from a time when people made-do (as my parents and grandparents used to say) and when perhaps "new" was not always the obvious preference for seemingly everything in the universe, including people. The old rockers have the occasional ding from pretty much daily use for years. This is all part of their beauty, their character.
Maybe it's not the retirement rocker per se that bothers me. A piece of furniture is a nice gift, after all, and it was well-intended. But I am bothered about the attitude that comes with it--and this is by no means limited to any single employer. I am finally free from daily work-for-pay. I have time, finally, for some balance. Time for myself, for a return to authenticity, to the genuine, to the possibility of saying no (to whomever since I no longer have a full-time supervisor or colleagues to play nice with, but anyhoo)--but also, as I choose, to say yes.
But I have known for twenty-plus years that the human body replaces cells every seven years (apoptosis, in case you were wondering), so it is not as though I have just started aging. Pay attention here: even babies age. More than that, why should youth necessarily represent the only perfection of any kind? Why is what somebody thinks of physical perfection as it is narrowly defined by the culture important? Why does beauty have to be conceived only as the conventional beauty of the young? Character can seem to be a little unformed or amorphous or just not visible in those conventionally beautiful and young. (But perhaps I am missing something or not looking carefully enough.)
Why is perfection determined only by the exterior, primarily by looks, a notion that I would like to think anybody with a functioning brain might admit is....well, maybe important in its way, but also superficial?
As far as I am concerned, my age means that I have been successful. Aging means that I am still alive. Retirement does not necessarily equal illness. Nor does aging have to mean what Anne Karpf in The Guardian on November 5 characterized as "the pastel-ization of old age"--as if we of a certain age fade, fade until we become faint and old and enfeebled versions of our former selves, asexual prune-eaters with arthritic hips and sore knees. Among other ailments.
In this version, we start our lives, apparently, in whatever the latest technicolor, saturated colors are.
Until we fade into invisibility and move to The Great Beyond.
The Big Lifelong Fade Away.
It's as if, after a certain age, the culture expects me to morph into human and fading Muzak. At best. Yes, for over ten years my hair color has not been natural, and for nearly twenty years I have used reading glasses. (I have had glasses, plain old glasses, since second grade. So?) I have always liked to walk and now I can do more of it because I have more time to myself. Do I value comfort more than I used to? Not really. I never was a fashionista and I am not going to start now. (Does it really matter if I wear jeans that are more mom than gangsta or skinny?) Do we really want to be that superficial? (I have resolved to be the last person on the face of the earth without a tattoo or a piercing aside from one piercing in each year for earrings which in my case long predates the current fashion for body art.) If anything, thus far retirement has made possible a rejuvenation of my sense of self-possession. (And I still do have all my original body parts. So far, anyway.)
I do know this: this mortal coil is only temporary. Yes, the wolf is at the door, but then it always has been. Maybe other people have spent their lives thinking they were invincible, but for the most part, I have not. My world has always seemed a but too risky, too fragile. I could get hit by a bus any day. Fall in the shower. Choke on a vitamin or a piece of rigatoni. Not to mention all the risks that come from interactions with others: think "going postal" or 9/11 writ small or large. Sometimes I am surprised we are not all agoraphobic. (Yes, this is written by a person who has gone to Southeast Asia by herself multiple times. The wolf if everywhere. So be it. I go anyway.)
But still. I prefer--as of this writing, anyway, and I do touch wood again as I write this--to think of aging not as decline (I hope I have good genes) but also as a time for growth. Youth to me never equaled perfection, I don't think, just busyness and obligation. Or maybe I missed the perfection stage. I do know that people less than half my age have all kinds of energy and aspirations, and good for them. But they don't have a corner on the market.
Old rockers, I am convinced, are cool.(And I assure you that I am about to make a deliberative, associational leap here; I am not unknowingly wandering off to another related-enough subject. I am far from demented. Just come along with me here.) Consider the musicians I came of age with (so to speak) and who are still around: half of the Beatles. All of the Rolling Stones. (Okay, so now they are without Brian Jones, Mick Taylor and Bill Wyman, and Bobby Keys recently joined the horn section in the sky.) The Who. Granted, some of their voices may not sound the same as they did fifty years ago, but whose does? Why is a younger voice necessarily better to sing rock and roll and blues? We are not talking about a boys' choir here, for crying out loud. (Coincidentally, "Not Fade Away" was the first song Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote.)
The pre-Socratic philosophers knew you can't step in the same river twice--sing into the same microphone twice. Play to the same audience twice. Have the same job twice. No Groundhog Day for most of us, not complete life do-overs. The only constant is change--and with that change comes a wolf of one kind or another, even if sometimes we manage to forget he is there. Life is fragile. Life is iffy. Tempus fugit.
But wait a minute: what about that which prevails given all this risk, all this change?
Back to the old, more experienced rockers: name a song that is more of a rocker than "Helter Skelter." Or "Helen Wheels." More of a rocker than The Who's "Baba O'Reilly." Or the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" or "Gimme Shelter."
The songs still rock, and as far as I am concerned, so do the singers. Rock and roll, like play, is an attitude, not an age. It's fun, exuberant, even if at this point it may not always aspire to appear totally unrehearsed. (That would be disingenuous.)
Rock and roll prevails. That's what prevails.
More than that, if you have never lived through an event that metaphorically connects one way or another with the chaos, the angst suggested in "Gimme Shelter," then you haven't lived much. If you don't understand "Midnight Rambler" in some visceral way even if you have never been physically, violently threatened....then you need to get out more. Risk more.
Or develop an imagination. Which also means a sense of play. Which also means possessing an agile mind and an open heart. All of which may or may not be common characteristics of people much younger than I am and who, God help me, seem to be selfie-driven. (No offense, but enough with the photos of you. I already know what you look like. I may be overgeneralizing, but I don't think by much.)
The Rolling Stones are supposed to have the best concert around when it comes to spectacle, especially when compared to their beginnings in north London fifty years ago. And there is a lot to be said for seeing Keith Richards, hard rocker of hard rockers, sing and play. He's an outlaw, a pirate. A man with gnarled fingers and not too much of a dad bod, all things considered. (He is over seventy.) A man still with some swagger and rawness. Still. Given how he has lived and the amount of drugs and alcohol that has gone through his body, he should not be alive. He just shouldn't. Yet the Rolling Stones seem to enjoy what they are doing, the sheer physicality of it. And they keep doing it.
Only in the last year or two has Keith Richards let his hair go white as he plays the iconic riffs that the fans go to see in person: the dum dum/dum dum dum beginning of "Satisfaction", for instance. Or think of the beginning "who-whoo"s of "Sympathy for the Devil."
Granted, he may not always be clearly playing as many notes as he used to, all things considered, but, well, the only constant is change, and who cares if things are not totally the same? Here's a thought: Keith Richards' and Mick Jagger's voices may not have the same tone and power that they had fifty years ago, but that occasionally gravelly sound complements the lyrics and finally adds character.
In a time of hyper-speed marketing and elevator speeches: character. Integrity. Not words that you hear often these days.
It s not overstating it to say that Keith and Mick are still badass motherfuckers.
They cannot need the money. Maybe they want to further secure their legacy. Maybe they just want to play. Sentimentality (as some of you may think this is all about) aside, these old rockers do hark back to a simpler AM radio kind of time when all they wanted was to play and write the music they loved--and when all the listeners wanted was to listen and to, in a small way, maybe feel a moment of transcendence.
Along the way, the Rolling Stones learned to work the crowd as well as the music.
Rock and roll is the opposite of rocking in a chair. (Not surprisingly, recently I read that--surprise!--singing and dancing promote brain health.)
If you have any doubts about the Rolling Stones' resilience and resonance, their energy these days, then take a look at their concert at the Glastonbury Festival in 2013 on YouTube. Keith's Chuck Berry moves during "Satisfaction." Mick running miles without losing his breath and singing "It's Only Rock and Roll." His strutting and prancing (his father was a physical education teacher, by the way). About four minutes into "Brown Sugar" he calls out "Put the lights on, Patrick" without missing a beat. Think about this: it may be this exact dancing, their energy, even now defining rock and roll so it is no longer solely the game of the youngest. "It's only rock and roll/But I like it, like it, like it." Grandfathers belting it out while they wear clothes that very few men their age (and in some cases, men far younger than they) could carry off.
BUT if you are short on time, check out only the 2013 Glastonbury "Gimme Shelter," seven and a half minutes of what I hope is your long life. Look at the moves and listen to the voices and backup singer Lisa Fischer sounding as good as she ever has and dancing in boots with impressive (and likely painful) heels. Think about that, about keeping old sings fresh and energized requiring a certain talent. That talent makes the music look the right kind of effortless. Age does not seem to slow them down much, really. (If at all.)
By the way, please tell me exactly what it is YOU are planning n doing when you are in your seventies. Hmmmm?
And if the Stones have more special effects than they used to have in the Ed Sullivan days, so be it. More power to them. Pyrotechnics and confetti are all part of rocking these days. They are still edgy in their way: I mean, Keith Richards is a white-haired pirate rocker.
There is nothing pastel about them.
They are playing their hearts out. And from the music: fun, and making possible transcendence, too.
Old rockers are the best.
Or as Keith Richards says in his recent biographical film Under the Influence, "You're never grown up until they put you six feet under." The film shows him recollecting in New York, Chicago, Nashville. At home. "Nobody wants to get old. Nobody wants to die young," he says. Keith Richards is all cigarette smoke and blues headband or cool fedora, all gravelly voice and deeply-lined face. He earned that face. And he has a great smoky, rumbly laugh.
"I'm not getting old," he says. "I'm evolving."
And he is right.
May we all keep rocking.
Copyright Sandra Engel
