O•S•C•A•R© - Old Ottawa South

Page 16 The th OSCAR - OUR 37 YEAR
July 2010
AFTER THOUGHTS
from Richard Ostrofsky
of Second Thoughts Bookstore
(now closed)
www.secthoughts.com
quill@travel-net.com
This is my 68th summer. I’m
definitely growing old before
my very eyes and trying to
understand what is happening to the
man I used to be. By an odd coincidence,
all my friends who were born
around the same time as me are doing
much the same. Accordingly, this column
seems timely, in every sense of
the word. If memory still serves, one
of Trevanian’s books (I think it may
be The Summer of Katya), begins
with the hero asking himself “that
most banal of all questions, ‘Where
did it go?’ followed by “that rather
less banal question, ‘What was it?’”
As a suggestion on what to do with
one’s later years, this may be the best
I’ve ever seen. I don’t intend to answer
it here, whether for myself or
anyone else. Rather, this is a column
on the problems of adaptation to this
time of life, and my exploring of its
uses.
One of my father’s finest moments
was his response when some
patronizing functionary referred to
him as ‘senior citizen.’ “I’m not a
senior citizen,” he replied with anger.
“I’m an old man!” I was still a boy
when I heard him say that. Today I
think that in rejecting that obnoxious
euphemism, he was raging at our society’s
whole way of thinking about
aging and death. We hide it away. We
deny it. We try to look young and feel
young forever. I don’t feel my father’s
rage exactly, but I share his point: Not
By Bertolt Brecht
Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of
stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed.
Who built the city up each time? In which of
Becoming an Elder
that people are entitled to any special
respect because of their years, but
that patronizing the old is stupid and
self-defeating. The young will be old
someday, if they have the luck to survive
youth and middle age. And then
they will face the issues that my father
was facing, and that I am feeling
now: not just their aging bodies, but
the loss or retirement from life-roles
(notably, parenting and work) and the
corresponding loss of status.
They will need a new identity
for this time of life, because the selfunderstanding
of earlier years no
longer serves. Children grow up and
have children of their own. You retire
not just from work, but from your
place and function in society. Your
bodily drives and capabilities diminish.
You see “the eternal footman hold
your coat and snicker,” as Eliot put
it. And you feel the fear, at least the
awareness, of your own mortality.
I’ll suggest that there are compensations
in all of this, for persons who
can let go of their previous lives –
mourn them briefly perhaps, but then
turn creatively to their present reality.
You are an old person now, but also,
in a real sense, you are a new one. No
longer in the midst of worldy affairs,
you have the privileges of an elder,
contemplating life’s tumult as now,
fundamentally, the problem of others.
But you can still comment as you see
fit. If people pay attention, you have
a new and useful role to play. If they
don’t, it is (you can see it as) their
loss, and you’ve had the fun of selfexpression.
If it’s true that the prospect of
death “wonderfully concentrates the
mind,” then you can enjoy the pleas-
ures of concentration: writing, painting,
puttering in your garden, playing
with your grandchildren – really doing
whatever turns you on, with fewer
distractions. And you can learn – at
last, at last – to take each day as it
comes. There’s nothing to gain by fear
or whining. I’ve already had a lucky
and interesting life. What remains of
it is still mine to make the most of. I
have no cause for complaint.
The basic existential problem
in this time of life is that you could
easily live another 20 years or more,
or die from a fatal heart attack tomorrow.
You have to be prepared for
either case, use whatever time and
energy remain to you, and greet death
when it comes.
At first, I resented it when young
people offered me their seats on the
bus. Thankfully, I’m still in pretty
good shape, and still able to stand on
these aging legs. “What do you take
me for?” I wanted to say. But I’ve gotten
over this silliness, and learned to
appreciate their courtesy. There’s little
enough decency in the world, and
we should cherish what there is. Now
I either accept the seat gratefully, or
decline with thanks if I feel like standing
– as I often do because I spend so
much time sitting – reading, writing,
surfing the Web whether for knowledge,
or the remaining other interests
of a dirty old man.
For what it’s worth, I’ll repeat a
conversation I had in a park in Montreal,
just the other day. My 3-year-old
grand daughter was with me, playing
happily by herself, and I was sitting
on a bench keeping an eye on her. A
bit later, a really old man, easily in his
eighties, sat down next to me. He had
A Worker Reads History
Lima’s houses,
That city glittering with gold, lived those who built
it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up?
Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song.
been walking in the park alone – without
a cane even – and I think he wanted
some company. “Enjoying your age?”
he said, seeing a smile on my face as I
watched the little girl. I shrugged. “It
has its ups and downs,” I answered.
“How old are you?” he asked next.
When I told him, he exclaimed, “Oh,
you’re still a youngster!” All I could
say was that he looked pretty spry
himself. And then we just sat, watching
the child play and the grass grow.
I have no idea what he was thinking,
but my own thought was that I had
never gotten such a comment before,
nor felt so much like a codger.
There is a novel by Robert Graves
called Seven Days In New Crete, (also
published as Watch the North Wind
Rise), about a utopian, matriarchal
society of the future, dominated by
its poets. One of its conceits is the
so-called ‘Nonsense House’ to which
its citizens retire when they reach a
crtain age. The point of the place was
to serve not just as an old folk’s home
but as a playpen for their eccentricity.
These ‘seniors’ had earned the privilege
of doing as they pleased, and
could now be as silly as they liked,
because no one paid any attention to
their games. I can tell a similar story
about one of my step-grandmothers,
a woman in her nineties at that time,
who liked to ‘hisass’ her husband by
pinching his bum. She played similar
games with almost everyone she
liked, including me – at that time, a
mere boy of 45. Whenever someone
commented, she would explain solemnly,
“I’m getting old you know!”
Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis
of the legend
The night the seas rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.
Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?
Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet
was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?
Frederick the Greek triumphed in the Seven Years
War.
Who triumphed with him?
Each page a victory
At whose expense the victory ball?
Every ten years a great man,
Who paid the piper?
So many particulars.
So many questions.
(Public Domain)