In My Own Write: An ode to age

The fountain of eternal youth doesn't exist. But there are people who behave as if they've discovered it.

By JUDY MONTAGU
judy montagu 88 (photo credit: )
judy montagu 88
(photo credit: )
But maybe I ought to practice a little now? So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple. - From 'Warning' by Jenny Joseph One of the most enduring images from my first years in this country, back in the '70s, isn't of a historic locale, religious site or natural beauty spot, though I saw quite a few of those and they were gripping and very splendid. It's of an elderly woman I encountered briefly in an office on the top floor of a old building in Tel Aviv, where I was helping out a friend of a friend with some secretarial chores (the company imported YKK zippers from Japan). Now two words in that last sentence - "elderly woman" - while perfectly accurate, do absolutely nothing to advance this story. I could write "old woman," but that wouldn't be any better. So I'll just tell it. There we were, about six of us in that long, stuffy room, heads bent over invoices, when the door opened and a figure wafted in. Clad in some pastel-colored floaty garment, she flitted - there's no other word - from desk to desk, bestowing here a word, there a smile. When she passed me, the merest fragrance remained in the air. Then she was gone. "Who was that?" I asked a co-worker, bemused. "That's the big boss's wife," she answered. I learned, too, that she was a woman in her 80s. It was late summer, but those few moments were a breath of spring. THIS EPISODE hardly fits with the general perception of old age - but that's my point. In a secular Western culture that worships youth and, lip service apart, doesn't consider being "full of years" as having much going for it, older people themselves can, as never before, define what being 60, 70, 80 and older means. Call it gray pride. There was a time when rigid social structures decreed that matrons must wear frilly caps and black bombazine. Widows, most of whom weren't very merry, receded into near-obscurity. Today, every color of the rainbow is there for women of any age to enjoy; for men, too. A woman of nearly 90 I saw at a wedding was dressed in sky blue from her hat to her shoes and looked as fresh as a flower. My neighbor, 78, told me about the life-drawing class she was enjoying. "I haven't told my grandchildren about the nude models," she laughed. "They'd probably disapprove." A TV documentary I saw a while back focused on a group of centenarians in America, hardy folk of 100 and over who looked far from calling it quits. One, a chemist, was still being driven daily to his laboratory, where he put in a few hours' work. A comment he made was instructive. "I know I'm going to have to give this up one day," he told the interviewer. "But I'm having such fun." I'd rather have fingers than toes I'd rather have ears than a nose; And as for my hair I'm glad it's all there I'll be awfully sad when it goes! - Gelett Burgess (1866-1951) 'I DON'T mind getting old," a colleague confided to me. "It's the baggage that goes along with it." Now the most dishonest, least useful thing one could do is romanticize old age and pretend that 60 is fitter, healthier and happier than 40. In many respects, it isn't. Bodies become frailer and more vulnerable to disease; joints wear out. Dear ones can die. But for those spared serious illness, who have a reasonable standard of living and the blessing of family and friends, getting old could, I imagine, be like slowly climbing a great oak tree and, the higher you go, seeing more and more of the countryside below. Perhaps, too, from that vantage point the perspective is better, the important things standing out and the rest softened. EVIDENCE suggests that those who make it into the oldest age are those whose occupation gives them the drive to carry on. In Short Stories About Long Lives, former Jerusalem Post journalist Helga Dudman looks at a whole gamut of people - famous and ordinary, Jews and non-Jews - who lived into their 90s and beyond. "The only basic rule that emerges," she concludes, is that this group includes "personalities who were devoted to their work and their causes, often to the point of obsession." Like Irving Berlin, the phenomenal American composer of hit songs. He published 190 of them between 1907 and 1914 alone, and lived to be 101. Though "Alexander's Ragtime Band" (1911) took him, he said, only 18 minutes to write, his subsequent efforts were far from a walk in the park. "I work (ideas) out between eight at night and five in the morning... I sweat blood between three and six a.m.... and when the drops that fall off my forehead hit the paper, they're (musical) notes," he said. Berlin's secret, Dudman writes, was work, work, and more work. ONE NEEDN'T look further than the Sam Orbaum Jerusalem Scrabble Club to find people Dudman could have put in her book. Co-founder Sara Schacter, nearly 93, plays at least three games of Scrabble every day, more if she can, and is still one of the club's top players. Feisty Roz Grossman, 82, has written and performed hundreds of songs and says she remembers the words of most of them. Another club member, 80-something, told me: "I've just had my whole apartment redone - new bathroom, new kitchen... it's gorgeous." She sounded like a young bride, which made me think: Enthusiasm. It's part of the answer to remaining young while growing old. OUR ENGLISH literature teacher at London's Brondesbury and Kilburn High School for Girls, Margo Rowlands, was not above shocking her impressionable charges, sometimes to the core. A professional actress, she once stole a pupil's wallet, to the amazement of those who witnessed it - in order, as it turned out, to demonstrate the folly of carrying money in a back pocket. The class was stunned when she calmly began a lesson with: "Girls, do you realize that you are one day nearer to your deaths?" For us 13-year-olds, it was almost impossible to conceive of life as finite, and of ourselves as anything but immortal. But it is, and we aren't; and had our teacher known about Rabbi Eliezer ben Horkanos, she might have followed her shocker with his well-known "Repent one day before your death." How does one know when one will die? the obvious question would have arisen. Aha, Rabbi Eliezer would have answered, that's exactly the point: You must live as if every day was your last. That recommendation might, if you think about it, be no less beneficial than the doctor's prescriptions the not-so-young carry regularly to their pharmacists. For what would we do, where would we go, and to whom might we reach out if we knew we were cashing in our chips at midnight? OH AND, by the way, if a decade or three from now, you should happen to see a person wearing a floaty garment of beautiful color, flitting here and there and spreading good vibes - it'll be me, doing my best to emulate an "elderly woman" in a Tel Aviv office who has stayed in my mind and heart these 30-odd years.