No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

In Your Spare Time

October 2010

I GOT A questionnaire from Harvard for the sixtieth reunion of the Harvard graduating class of 1951. Of course my college was Radcliffe, which at that time was affiliated with but wasn’t considered to be Harvard, due to a difference in gender; but Harvard often overlooks such details from the lofty eminence where it can consider all sorts of things beneath its notice. Anyhow, the questionnaire is anonymous, therefore presumably gender-free; and it is interesting.

The people who are expected to fill it out are, or would be, almost all in their eighties, and sixty years is time enough for all kinds of things to have happened to a bright-eyed young graduate. So there’s a polite invitation to widows or widowers to answer for the deceased. And Question 1c, “If divorced,” gives an interesting set of little boxes to check: Once, Twice, Three times, Four or more times, Currently remarried, Currently living with a partner, None of the above. This last option is a poser. I’m trying to think how you could be divorced and still none of the above. In any case, it seems unlikely that any of those boxes would have been on a reunion questionnaire in 1951. You’ve come a long way, baby! as the cigarette ad with the bimbo on it used to say.

Question 12: “In general, given your expectations, how have your grandchildren done in life?” The youngest of my grandchildren just turned four. How has he done in life? Well, very well, on the whole. I wonder what kind of expectations you should have for a four-year-old. That he’ll go on being a nice little boy and learn pretty soon to read and write is all that comes to my mind. I suppose I’m supposed to expect him to go to Harvard, or at least to Columbia like his father and great-grandfather. But being nice and learning to read and write seem quite enough for now.

Actually, I don’t exactly have expectations. I have hopes, and fears. Mostly the fears predominate these days. When my kids were young I could still hope we might not totally screw up the environment for them, but now that we’ve done so, and are more deeply sold out than ever to profiteering industrialism with its future-horizon of a few months, any hope I have that coming generations may have ease and peace in life has become very tenuous, and has to reach far, far forward into the dark.

Question 13: “What will improve the quality of life for the future generations of your family?”—with boxes to rank importance from 1 to 10. The first choice is “Improved educational opportunities”—fair enough, Harvard being in the education business. I gave it a 10. The second is “Economic stability and growth for the U.S.” That stymied me totally. What a marvelous example of capitalist thinking, or nonthinking: to consider growth and stability as the same thing! I finally wrote in the margin, “You can’t have both,” and didn’t check a box.

The rest of the choices are: Reduction of the U.S. debt, Reduced dependence on foreign energy, Improved health-care quality and cost, Elimination of terrorism, Implementation of an effective immigration policy, Improved bipartisanship in U.S. politics, Export democracy.

Since we’re supposed to be considering the life of future generations, it seems a strange list, limited to quite immediate concerns and filtered through such current right-wing obsessions as “terrorism,” “effective” immigration policy, and the “exportation” of “democracy” (which I assume is a euphemism for our policy of invading countries we don’t like and trying to destroy their society, culture, and religion). Nine choices, but nothing about climate destabilization, nothing about international politics, nothing about population growth, nothing about industrial pollution, nothing about the control of government by corporations, nothing about human rights or injustice or poverty…

Question 14: “Are you living your secret desires?” Floored again. I finally didn’t check Yes, Somewhat, or No, but wrote in “I have none, my desires are flagrant.”

But it was Question 18 that really got me down. “In your spare time, what do you do? (check all that apply).” And the list begins: “Golf…”

Seventh in the list of twenty-seven occupations, after “Racquet sports” but before “Shopping,” “TV,” and “Bridge,” comes “Creative activities (paint, write, photograph, etc.).”

Here I stopped reading and sat and thought for quite a while.

The key words are spare time. What do they mean?

To a working person—supermarket checker, lawyer, highway crewman, housewife, cellist, computer repairer, teacher, waitress—spare time is the time not spent at your job or at otherwise keeping yourself alive, cooking, keeping clean, getting the car fixed, getting the kids to school. To people in the midst of life, spare time is free time, and valued as such.

But to people in their eighties? What do retired people have but “spare” time?

I am not exactly retired, because I never had a job to retire from. I still work, though not as hard as I did. I have always been and am proud to consider myself a working woman. But to the Questioners of Harvard my lifework has been a “creative activity,” a hobby, something you do to fill up spare time. Perhaps if they knew I’d made a living out of it they’d move it to a more respectable category, but I rather doubt it.

The question remains: When all the time you have is spare, is free, what do you make of it?

And what’s the difference, really, between that and the time you used to have when you were fifty, or thirty, or fifteen?

Kids used to have a whole lot of spare time, middle-class kids anyhow. Outside of school and if they weren’t into a sport, most of their time was spare, and they figured out more or less successfully what to do with it. I had whole spare summers when I was a teenager. Three spare months. No stated occupation whatsoever. Much of after-school was spare time too. I read, I wrote, I hung out with Jean and Shirley and Joyce, I moseyed around having thoughts and feelings, oh lord, deep thoughts, deep feelings… I hope some kids still have time like that. The ones I know seem to be on a treadmill of programming, rushing on without pause to the next event on their schedule, the soccer practice the playdate the whatever. I hope they find interstices and wriggle into them. Sometimes I notice that a teenager in the family group is present in body—smiling, polite, apparently attentive—but absent. I think, I hope she has found an interstice, made herself some spare time, wriggled into it, and is alone there, deep down there, thinking, feeling.

The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time. In my case I still don’t know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It always has been and it is now. It’s occupied by living.

An increasing part of living, at my age, is mere bodily maintenance, which is tiresome. But I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. I am free, but my time is not. My time is fully and vitally occupied with sleep, with daydreaming, with doing business and writing friends and family on email, with reading, with writing poetry, with writing prose, with thinking, with forgetting, with embroidering, with cooking and eating a meal and cleaning up the kitchen, with construing Virgil, with meeting friends, with talking with my husband, with going out to shop for groceries, with walking if I can walk and traveling if we are traveling, with sitting Vipassana sometimes, with watching a movie sometimes, with doing the Eight Precious Chinese exercises when I can, with lying down for an afternoon rest with a volume of Krazy Kat to read and my own slightly crazy cat occupying the region between my upper thighs and mid-calves, where he arranges himself and goes instantly and deeply to sleep. None of this is spare time. I can’t spare it. What is Harvard thinking of? I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare.

The Sissy Strikes Back

November 2010

I’VE LOST FAITH in the saying “You’re only as old as you think you are,” ever since I got old.

It is a saying with a fine heritage. It goes right back to the idea of the Power of Positive Thinking, which is so strong in America because it fits in so well with the Power of Commercial Advertising and with the Power of Wishful Thinking, aka the American Dream. It is the bright side of Puritanism: What you deserve is what you get. (Never mind just now about the dark side.) Good things come to good people and youth will last forever for the young in heart.

Yup.

There is a whole lot of power in positive thinking. It is the great placebo effect. In many cases, even dire cases, it works. I think most old people know that, and many of us try to keep our thinking on the positive side as a matter of self-preservation, as well as dignity, the wish not to end with a prolonged whimper. It can be very hard to believe that one is actually eighty years old, but as they say, you’d better believe it. I’ve known clear-headed, clear-hearted people in their nineties. They didn’t think they were young. They knew, with a patient, canny clarity, how old they were. If I’m ninety and believe I’m forty-five, I’m headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub. Even if I’m seventy and think I’m forty, I’m fooling myself to the extent of almost certainly acting like an awful fool.

Actually, I’ve never heard anybody over seventy say that you’re only as old as you think you are. Younger people say it to themselves or each other as an encouragement. When they say it to somebody who actually is old, they don’t realize how stupid it is, and how cruel it may be. At least there isn’t a poster of it.

But there is a poster of “Old age is not for sissies”—maybe it’s where the saying came from. A man and a woman in their seventies. As I remember it, they both have what the air force used to call the Look of Eagles, and are wearing very tight-fitting minimal clothing, and are altogether very fit. Their pose suggests that they’ve just run a marathon and aren’t breathing hard while they relax by lifting sixteen-pound barbells. Look at us, they say. Old age is not for sissies.

Look at me, I snarl at them. I can’t run, I can’t lift barbells, and the thought of me in tight-fitting minimal clothing is appalling in all ways. I am a sissy. I always was. Who are you jocks to say old age isn’t for me?

Old age is for anybody who gets there. Warriors get old; sissies get old. In fact it’s likely that more sissies than warriors get old. Old age is for the healthy, the strong, the tough, the intrepid, the sick, the weak, the cowardly, the incompetent. People who run ten miles every morning before breakfast and people who live in a wheelchair. People who work the London Times crossword in ink in ten minutes and people who can’t quite remember who the president is just now. Old age is less a matter of fitness or courage than of luck equals longevity.

If you eat your sardines and leafy greens and wear SPF 150 and develop your abs and blabs and slabs or whatever they are in order to live a long life, that’s good, and maybe it will work. But the longer a life is, the more of it will be old age.

The leafy greens and the workouts may well help that old age to be healthy, but unfair as it may be, nothing guarantees health to the old. Bodies wear out after a certain amount of mileage despite the most careful maintenance. No matter what you eat and how grand your abs and blabs are, still your bones can let you down, your heart can get tired of its incredible nonstop lifelong athletic performance, and there’s all that wiring and stuff inside that can begin to short-circuit. If you did hard physical labor all your life and didn’t really have the chance to spend a lot of time in gyms, if you ate mostly junk food because it’s all you knew about and all you could afford in time and money, if you haven’t got a doctor because you can’t buy the insurance that stands between you and the doctors and the medicines you need, you may arrive at old age in rather bad shape. Or if you just run into some bad luck along the way, accidents, illnesses, it’s the same. You won’t be running marathons and lifting weights. You may have trouble getting up the stairs. You may have trouble just getting out of bed. You may have trouble getting used to hurting all the time. And it isn’t likely to get better as the years go on.

The compensations of getting old, such as they are, aren’t in the field of athletic prowess. I think that’s why the saying and the poster annoy me so much. They’re not only insulting to sissies, they’re beside the point.

I’d like a poster showing two old people with stooped backs and arthritic hands and time-worn faces sitting talking, deep, deep in conversation. And the slogan would be “Old Age Is Not for the Young.”

The Diminished Thing

May 2013

NOT WANTING TO know much about getting old (I don’t mean older, I mean old: late seventies, eighties, beyond) is probably a human survival characteristic. What’s the use of knowing anything about it ahead of time? You’ll find out enough when you get there.

One of the things people often find when they get there is that younger people don’t want to hear about it. So honest conversation concerning geezerhood takes place mostly among geezers.

And when younger people tell old people what old age is, the geezers may not agree but seldom argue.

I want to argue, just a little.

Robert Frost’s ovenbird asked the operative question: “What to make of a diminished thing?”

Americans believe strongly in positive thinking. Positive thinking is great. It works best when based on a realistic assessment and acceptance of the actual situation. Positive thinking founded on denial may not be so great.

Everybody who gets old has to assess their ever-changing but seldom improving situation and make of it what they can. I think most old people accept the fact that they’re old—I’ve never heard anybody over eighty say “I’m not old.” And they make the best of it. As the saying goes, consider the alternative!

A lot of younger people, seeing the reality of old age as entirely negative, see acceptance of age as negative. Wanting to deal with old people in a positive spirit, they’re led to deny old people their reality.

With all good intentions, people say to me, “Oh, you’re not old!”

And the pope isn’t Catholic.

“You’re only as old as you think you are!”

Now, you don’t honestly think having lived eighty-three years is a matter of opinion.

“My uncle’s ninety and he walks eight miles a day.”

Lucky Unk. I hope he never meets that old bully Arthur Ritis or his mean wife Sciatica.

“My grandmother lives all by herself and she’s still driving her car at ninety-nine!”

Well, hey for Granny, she’s got good genes. She’s a great example—but not one most people are able to imitate.

Old age isn’t a state of mind. It’s an existential situation.

Would you say to a person paralyzed from the waist down, “Oh, you aren’t a cripple! You’re only as paralyzed as you think you are! My cousin broke her back once but she got right over it and now she’s in training for the marathon!”

Encouragement by denial, however well-meaning, backfires. Fear is seldom wise and never kind. Who is it you’re cheering up, anyhow? Is it really the geezer?

To tell me my old age doesn’t exist is to tell me I don’t exist. Erase my age, you erase my life—me.

Of course that’s what a lot of really young people inevitably do. Kids who haven’t lived with geezers don’t know what they are. So it is that old men come to learn the invisibility women learned twenty or thirty years earlier. The kids on the street don’t see you. If they have to see you, it’s often with the indifference, distrust, or animosity animals feel for animals of a different species.

Animals have instinctive codes of etiquette for avoiding or defusing this mindless fear and hostility. Dogs ceremonially smell each other’s anuses, cats ceremonially yowl on the territorial borderline. Human societies provide us with various more elaborate devices. One of the most effective is respect. You don’t like the stranger, but your carefully respectful behavior to him elicits the same from him, thus avoiding the sterile expense of time and blood on aggression and defense.

In less change-oriented societies than ours, a great part of the culture’s useful information, including the rules of behavior, is taught by the elders to the young. One of those rules is, unsurprisingly, a tradition of respect for age.

In our increasingly unstable, future-oriented, technology-driven society, the young are often the ones who show the way, who teach their elders what to do. So who respects whom for what? The geezers are damned if they’re going to kowtow to the twerps—and vice versa.

When there’s no social pressure behind it, respectful behavior becomes a decision, an individual choice. Americans, even when they pay pious lip service to Judeo-Christian rules of moral behavior, tend to regard moral behavior as a personal decision, above rules, and often above laws.

This is morally problematic when personal decision is confused with personal opinion. A decision worthy of the name is based on observation, factual information, intellectual and ethical judgment. Opinion—that darling of the press, the politician, and the poll—may be based on no information at all. At worst, unchecked by either judgment or moral tradition, personal opinion may reflect nothing but ignorance, jealousy, and fear.

So if I “decide”—if my opinion is—that living a long time just means getting ugly, weak, useless, and in the way, I waste no respect on old people, just as if my opinion is that all young people are scary, insolent, unreliable, and unteachable, I waste no respect on them.

Respect has often been overenforced and almost universally misplaced (the poor must respect the rich, all women must respect all men, etc.). But when applied in moderation and with judgment, the social requirement of respectful behavior to others, by repressing aggression and requiring self-control, makes room for understanding. It creates a space where appreciation and affection can grow.

Opinion all too often leaves no room for anything but itself.

People whose society doesn’t teach them respect for childhood are lucky if they learn to understand, or value, or even like their own children. Children who aren’t taught respect for old age are likely to fear it, and to discover understanding and affection for old people only by luck, by chance.

I think the tradition of respecting age in itself has some justification. Just coping with daily life, doing stuff that was always so easy you didn’t notice it, gets harder in old age, till it may take real courage to do it at all. Old age generally involves pain and danger and inevitably ends in death. The acceptance of that takes courage. Courage deserves respect.

So much for respect. Back to the diminished thing.

Childhood is when you keep gaining, old age is when you keep losing. The Golden Years the PR people keep gloating at us about are golden because that’s the color of the light at sunset.

Of course diminishment isn’t all there is to aging. Far from it. Life out of the rat race, but still in the comfort zone, can give the chance to be in the moment, and bring real peace of mind.

If memory remains sound and the thinking mind retains its vigor, an old intelligence may have extraordinary breadth and depth of understanding. It’s had more time to gather knowledge and more practice in comparison and judgment. No matter if the knowledge is intellectual or practical or emotional, if it concerns alpine ecosystems or the Buddha nature or how to reassure a frightened child: when you meet an old person with that kind of knowledge, if you have the sense of a bean sprout you know you’re in a rare and irreproducible presence.

Same goes for old people who keep their skill at any craft or art they’ve worked at for all those years. Practice does make perfect. They know how, they know it all, and beauty flows effortlessly from what they do.

But all such existential enlargements brought by living long are under threat from the lessening of strength and stamina. However well compensated for by intelligent coping mechanisms, small or large breakdowns in one bit of the body or another begin to restrict activity, while the memory is dealing with overload and slippage. Existence in old age is progressively diminished by each of these losses and restrictions. It’s no use saying it isn’t so, because it is so.

It’s no use making a fuss about it, or being afraid of it, either, because nobody can change it.

Yes, I know, we are, at the moment, in America, living longer. Ninety is the new seventy, etc. That’s generally taken to be a good thing.

How good? In what respects?

I recommend studying the ovenbird’s question long and seriously.

There are many answers to it. A lot can be made of a diminished thing, if you work at it. A lot of people (young and old) are working at it.

All I’m asking people who aren’t yet really old is to think about the ovenbird’s question too—and try not to diminish old age itself. Let age be age. Let your old relative or old friend be who they are. Denial serves nothing, no one, no purpose.

Please understand, I’m speaking for myself, for my own crabby old age. I may get told off for it by hordes of enraged octogenarians who like being told they’re “spry” and “feisty.” I don’t begrudge the fairy tale to those who want to believe it—and if I live longer than I think I want to, maybe I’ll even come to want to hear it: You’re not old! Nobody’s old. We’re all living happily ever after.

Catching Up, Ha Ha

October 2014

IT’S BEEN TWO months since I blogged. Considering that I am on the eve of my eighty-fifth birthday, and that anyone over seventy-five who isn’t continuously and conspicuously active is liable to be considered dead, I thought I should make some signs of life. Wave from the grave, as it were. Hello, out there! How are things in the Land of Youth? Here in the Land of Age they are rather weird.

The weirdness includes being called a liar by Hugh Woolly, the famous self-publisher of How, because I was rude to amazondotcom, the famous philanthropic organization dedicated to supporting publishers, encouraging writers, and greasing the skids of the American Dream. Various other weirdnesses have arisen in my life as a writer, some quite enjoyable. But the important and dominant weirdness of life this autumn consists of not having a car—a condition that to a lot of people is the American Nightmare.

We do have our nice Subaru, but we can’t drive it. I never could. I learned to drive in 1947 but didn’t get a license, for which I and all who know me are grateful. I’m one of those pedestrians who start to cross the street, scuttle back to the curb for no reason, then suddenly leap out in front of your car just as you get into the intersection. I am the cause of several near accidents and a great deal of terrible swearing. It’s awful to think what I might have done armed with an automobile. In any case, I don’t drive. And since August, sciatic pain from stenosis keeps Charles from driving, and from walking much at all. I can walk (I have the same thing he has, fortunately much less severely), but after a few blocks I go lame on the left hind. We’re ten steep blocks from our co-op market. So we’ve lost the liberty our legs or the car gave us to pop out and get what we needed when we needed it.

It’s a wonderful freedom, much missed. I’ve had to go back to the routine of my childhood, when we did the shopping once a week. No running down to see what looks fresh and good for dinner or to pick up a quart of milk—everything has to be planned ahead and written down. If you don’t get the cat litter on Tuesday, well, you don’t have any cat litter till next Tuesday, and the cat may have some questions for you.

There’s no hardship about shopping this way; in fact I look forward to it, since my friend Moe takes me, and is a really good, intense shopper who notices bargains and things. But still it’s tiresome always having to think about it instead of just doing it.

Just do it!—the motto for those who run twenty miles every morning in swoosh-covered shoes, the mantra of undelayed gratification. Yeah, well. Charles and I do better with Sí, se puede. Or, with Gallic philosophy, On y arrive.

As for doctors’ appointments, one of the finest paradoxes of senility is that the oftener you have to go to the doctor, the harder it is to get there. And haircuts! Now I know how the world looks to those little dogs with the bangs all over their eyes. It looks hairy.

All in all, the main effect of being inordinately old and carless is that there’s even less time to do things other than what has to be done than there was before. Keeping up with answering letters, and writing blog posts, and getting the books in the basement organized, and a whole slew of things like that all get put on the back burner—which may or may not be functioning, as we have had the stove since 1960.

But you know, they don’t make stoves like that anymore.

THE ANNALS OF PARD