On Getting Old

Two years plus a couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column that began thus: “I am and always have been a creature of routine.” And that was very true (sometimes to a comical degree). Much of what followed in that column, though, had to do with another truth, to be held in tension with the first: the special quality of “moments that in one respect ‘break in’ or ‘break through’ routine but that also, like ‘routine,’ come with no big fuss, no planning, no ‘ceremony’ (to which I am congenitally allergic).”

Today I find myself in a very different place, as the saying goes. My longstanding sense of routine has been disrupted to a degree I couldn’t have imagined two years ago. Of course many discrete fragments of routine persist: the way I make toast each morning for Wendy and me, for instance; bringing in the Wall Street Journal and the Chicago Tribune at the start of the day (for a long time now, ours has been the only house on the block to get “the news” in the old-fashioned way); and so on. But the familiar order of things? Gone.

To some degree, this reflects a very widespread experience of “aging,” taking many different forms but sharing a fundamental sense of dislocation—an experience that gets “reported” a great deal, sometimes with “therapeutic” advice (pieces in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, for instance) delivered in an upbeat manner, sometimes a bit more grim. This kind of thing is commonplace. What’s conspicuously underrepresented is sustained imaginative engagement with this huge reality.

“Well,” some observers might say, “what else would you expect? I mean, do people really want that? If you’re young or middle-aged, you don’t want to think about what might be waiting for you down the road, you don’t want stories about the indignities and losses that come with getting old, and if you’ve reached that doddering stage yourself, you’d prefer imaginative escape from it, so long as you possess your faculties.”

Count me unpersuaded. In 2014, before I myself was really “old,” I reviewed Ruth Rendell’s superb novel The Girl Next Door for Printers Row, the book supplement of the Chicago Tribune (when the Trib was still a real newspaper). “Rendell,” I said then, “is not only writing from the perspective of old age; she’s writing explicitly about old age—about the way diverse individuals experience it, and the way it’s perceived by people who haven’t yet reached that stage in life. (Her wit, always mordant, has never been sharper than when she skewers patronizing assumptions about the ‘elderly.’)” On other occasions I’ve proposed a new category, parallel to “Young Adult” fiction: “Old Adult” fiction.

Why not? As I have argued in the past, there is no shortage of potential material for such a genre, and for the time being, the potential audience is huge. To get the ball rolling, a geriatric gazillionaire could endow a prestigious annual prize for the best OA novel of the year. It would get a ton of coverage (some mocking, some appreciative, but certainly the phenomenon would be noticed). Nor would such books be written exclusively by authors who themselves (like Rendell) were old.

But time really is of the essence in getting this ball rolling. OA fiction would best be launched when there are a great number of old people still around, people whose experience is too rarely “represented,” engaged with, brought to life.

As I typed these words, a flash of memory came out of nowhere. When Wendy and I met and fell in love, we were eighteen years old. Most people that age are not particularly attentive to “the elderly” (to put it mildly) or to small children. Wendy was conspicuously different. And that continued throughout our life together. Now we ourselves are unmistakably, inescapably old. How utterly strange life is! But we are not without hope. And there are still blessed moments to share, even now.