Maude McDaniel, Columnist
The older you get, somebody once said, the more things turn into symptoms. I suspect today’s column is a good example of that. When you’re young or middle-aged, you don’t write columns about it. Still, I’m going to forge right ahead anyway and point out some more of the developments that prove I am getting very old indeed. Here’s how I can tell:
I don’t bother to finish a book if I don’t feel like it. For the first 65 years I doggedly finished every book I started, on the theory that, if it gets published, there’s gotta be something good about it. And I persisted in that theory throughout many years of private reading and public book reviewing, until I came across a book I hated so much I refused to review it. Even then I conscientiously read it to the bitter end before I decided. However since then I seem to have no trouble in my private reading to put down a book when I’m only partway through it. Oh, there may be a pang or two, stemming from such a deliberate trashing of traditional values, but life is too short, and the list of unread books is too long. I didn’t realize that until I got old.
I’ve kind of given up on the diet thing. If I got this far this way, the rest of my time is icing on the cake, right? (Don’t eat that!) And that diet business can take over your life. You know you’re in trouble when you find yourself looking forward to eating your evening pills.
When you get old, you don’t expect any more that buying the right lotions will make you look like J-Lo. (In my case, it was more like Jello.) But, you know what? I really don’t care. These days J-Lo starts to look pretty callow and inexperienced, and even the older stars don’t twinkle that much. I can’t tell you the last time I looked at any of the Oscar or the Emmy awards. Sometimes the clothes are interesting, but, since I got old, seems as if I’ve seen them all before.
It’s getting harder and harder to recover from Halloween. In fact, I think we’re finally reached the stage where you get Halloween all year, whether you want it or not. Yippee — 365 days of zombies and vampires and werewolves and demons! In fact, the constant public attention to scary movies and shocking monsters makes you think you somehow wandered into an alternate world. And you’ve got to wonder how being raised in that world, also including the ever-present car crashes and explosions, must affect the inner life of children exposed to it all from three on up. (And that’s not even counting the daily news.)
Your Christmas card list has dwindled down to a precious few. Going over it at Christmas has turned into a funeral service. There are far more crossed-out names on every page these days than there are current ones. Probably I should make up a new address book, but I almost feel obligated to read each name as I go, as a sort of personal memorial to all the dear folks I knew so well at one time - and now have, face it, a little trouble summoning up from the past.
I no longer feel shame at talking about the good old days. Doggone it, some things were better in the 30s and 40s. And, it could go without saying, of course, many things weren’t. Still, you can always find a good excuse to be an old fogey — after all, as I may have said before, every so often the old fogey generation is right! Certainly when Rome fell, there was one generation who hit the nail on the head when they said, “Look out!” And countless civilizations have fallen since then in world history — and each one had an older generation that said,”The good old days were better.” I don’t yearn for the racial or financial suffering of the 30s and 40s, and certainly not for the terrible tragedy of World War ll. But I sure do wish it were possible to raise children with the simple values of that time, no matter how many failed to live up to them.
Some folks say they don’t want to get old because by then they’ve done it all. Nothing is new anymore. Well, in my experience, getting old is new, and not all of it is bad. People are kinder to you than they used to be. Thanks to a very successful version of the “public option,” most of us old folks don’t have serious money worries anymore. Being retired has its advantages. And, although you get to know a lot more doctors than before, some of them are very nice.
As I get older, the class entries in my college alumni magazine keep shifting toward the front. I’ve learned to appreciate the color yellow. I have come to use a letter opener instead of living dangerously and risking paper cuts. And, far more than before, I have become a lover of subtleties. Like this, by Tagore, one of the most beautiful things that was ever said: “The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.”
Maude McDaniel is a Cumberland freelance writer. Her column appears on Sundays in the Times-News.
