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I recently wrote about the strange never-never land I found myself in when I turned 85. I realized, not long after finishing that piece, I’d omitted a few additional items that all combine to make turning 85 a uniquely traumatic event.
First, aspects of my new age struck me as an instant return to childhood. I and my friends might just as well have stepped–collectively–onto Aladdin’s Magic Carpet from one of my favorite fairy tales. On it, we were instantly whisked back to that long-ago time in my life when I forever heard adults order me to stop reading and go play with my friends outside. I would hear this admonition not once but often several times a day, in all kinds of weather. It could be drizzling; it could be snowing–the more snow the better, in fact, to go find our sleds or tie on our ice skates, and out we’d be sent. None of our parents seemed ever to worry lest we catch a cold or worse.
All this is different these days, however. At the first drop of rain, or the first few flakes of snow, my friends and I–each of us, in our way, a parent substitute–are on the phone pleading with each other to show a little sense and be sure not to set foot outside.
Sleds or ice skates these days, of course, are buried deep in our memories, rarely to resurface–so distant a role do they play in our lives. We might as well have each of us morphed into the Wicked Witch of the West—apt to melt away to nothingness as the first few drops of water or flakes of snow brush our bodies.
“You don’t want to end up like my friend Lil,” one close friend reminded me one week, even before the threatened rain had materialized. "She insisted on walking the block and a quarter to the bus stop, slipped, and doctors found she’d broken her hip."
“Well, at least that’s no longer the instant death it used to be,” I said.
“It can still be dangerous, you're laid up in bed for weeks, all but immobile,” my friend replied.
A second throw-back to childhood in my eighties relates to my teeth. Not since my earliest years, when a loose tooth brought happy thoughts of a tooth fairy reward, have my teeth been such a focus. Only these days, it's more like the Tooth Dracula who haunts my mouth, and those of my cohort. One friend recounts having several times returned home to relax with a drink of wine, only to have a tooth fall out of her mouth. "My teeth might just as well have become pop-it pearls, " my friend said.
I myself have only to bite into a piece of caramel or other tempting tidbit, when - BOOM! An alarming sound, and a strange substance that I spit out reveals one half of a neatly broken tooth.
"There's not enough tooth left," my dentist said - for the second time in less than a year, informing me that the broken tooth will need to be extracted.
It's said that nature abhors a vacuum. It wasn't until after I turned 85 that I realized the saying applied to my tongue. That's what really abhors a vacuum. With my tooth removed, that's where my tongue insists on roosting: high up in the empty space inside my gums, where my tooth should rightly be. And there's nothing more frustrating than trying to distract my tongue from its endless probings.
Prior to turning 85, I'd lost to some of my closest friends to illness. But in recent months, my friends are not just apt to call up just to ask, "How are you?" They also will at times make a positive comment about my memory. Truth be told, many of my friends are waging staunch but losing battles with their memories. When we're together, I find I have to make an increased effort not to unduly tax their fragile powers of recall. One friend recently kept complimenting me at lunch, saying, "Joan, your memory is so much better than mine." I replied, "It's not me; it's just genetics!" This new attribute is not something I have conscious control over. Still, I can't say I regret this apparent unlooked-for edge over my contemporaries. It compensates, if only a little, for my having to go about forever tethered to a walker lest I fall again and incur a serious injury.
Holding ourselves virtual captives to the weather, and battling to retain our teeth and remain mentally alert, is just the start of our newfound, advanced-age related indignities. Another odd dislocation I grapple with today relates to my sense of the age differences between my friends and I. Growing up when I was in fourth grade and my older sister in seventh, there’d seemed almost a generational gap between the two of us—so few commonalities did we share. But by my twenties, and for the long decades of my middle life—which ended seeming only yesterday – age differences melted away. For me, this started when, in my early twenties, I married a man not quite seven years older than me. Our friends—his, mine—boasted ages of our own and anywhere in between, and some of our friends were even decades younger or older than we were. But any age difference seemed completely irrelevant. Lately, however, I've noticed something odd. I've started to perceive age differences the same way I recall having viewed them growing up. This strange occurrence hit home when I was still reeling from turning 85. That’s when I remembered to call my sister, whose birthday was scarcely a month after mine.
“So how does it feel to be…” my voice trailed off. “How old are you now?” I joked.
“88!” came the familiar voice.
“No!” The word burst out of me. “I can’t believe it.”
Just about three years older than me, for so many decades we’d bantered and related as if we were equals. Now, suddenly, I couldn’t get my head to process her words. 88. It sounded, literally, decades older than my paltry 85. Exactly the same feeling I’d get when that fourth grade me would think of her exalted status so many years ago as a sophisticated seventh grader.
And what about our younger sister? She had turned 80 a bit over a year ago.
Now, thinking of her and her Johnnie-Come-Lately into her own 80’s act, it struck me that she, of the three of us, was still sitting home with miles to go before going anywhere bad.
