Remember when you were a teenager and spent an inordinate amount of time in front of a mirror, feeling despair over a new pimple on the chin or a lick of hair that wouldn’t lie down? When you desperately wondered if the face that stared back at you had any appeal for the boy or girl you had a crush on? When the decision of what to wear had an importance approaching that of international relations? When the question of what you were going to do with your life loomed like a grotesque menace from a science fiction movie, never allowing you a moment’s peace?
For anyone now facing those predicaments, I’ve got good news. When you reach your ninth decade, none of it will matter. In fact, you’ll likely spend little time contemplating your reflected image and even less with romantic fantasies about another person. The question of what you’re going to wear will be mostly limited to, “Is it clean?” and if your life hasn’t made that splash you tried so hard to imagine, chances are it won’t, so you can stop worrying about it. That, for me, is a succinct summary of the joy of aging.
In our kitchen there’s a copy of The Joy of Cooking, a tome I’ve used in a long, fretful history of preparing meals that require more than unscrewing a lid or opening a package and shoving the contents into the microwave. Somewhere in our less-than-perfectly arranged bookshelves is a copy of The Joy of Sex, which my wife and I perused together in the early years of our marriage before discovering that most of the illustrated positions were either ineffective or aimed at people who liked to practice contortions along with their lovemaking. I’ve never read The Joy of Connections by the late Ruth Westheimer, aka Dr. Ruth; The Joy of an Uncluttered Life; The Joy of Thermodynamics, An Introductory Text for Engineers; or The Joy of Costco: A Treasure Hunt from A to Z. I do remember, however, the indigestion brought on by the topic of thermodynamics in a college Physics class, and while I’ve had pleasurable moments in our local Costco, browsing the aisles for new and unexpected products, I wouldn’t quite use the word joy to describe my discovery of boxes of 100 green tea bags for $12.99 or 40 AA Duracell batteries for only $18.99.
The idea of writing a book called The Joy of Aging—with a subtly ironic slant— flickered momentarily in my mind, but was snuffed out by an Amazon search that turned up three books by that title. The latest appears to be a self-published volume by a woman named Jane Jorns van Santen; I clicked the “Look Inside” link and read a few paragraphs, but because I’m feeling merciful, I’ll only quote one here: “I want to talk about the aging experience to family and friends to take away the fears of growing old. Aging is a very long journey and a bit scary, I must admit. Always, for sure, there were many twists and turns along the very long way. Decisions to make, good days, bad days...”
No? I didn’t think so.
Another book of the same title, also published this year, is by a woman named Rebekah Luna Chavez. When I cautiously clicked “Look Inside” I found these lines in the opening paragraph of the first chapter: “Thanksgiving is four days away, and the cold frozen turkey is ‘dead still’ in the freezer. Our three adult children and grandchildren will bring noise to the serene, quiet, and lonely house. When two people get old, it seems the cheerfulness and liveliness of a once-upon-a-time starts to disintegrate into thin air. All that is left is the chirping of thousands of crickets dancing around in my head.”
Much more promising. If our house wasn’t littered with half-read books and magazines like leftovers in the refrigerator waiting to be eaten before they start growing mold, I might consider it, especially since it’s only 56 pages. Anyone who writes of “the chirping of thousands of crickets dancing around in my head” rather than “Like many older people, I suffer from tinnitus” gets a positive check mark for effort even if the metaphor falls somewhat short in terms of originality.
Amazon is selling two books on aging that pluralize the word “Joy” in the title. The first is The Joys of Aging by Martin A. Janis, published in 1988. The listing doesn’t include a description of the contents or anything about the author, and there’s no “Look Inside” feature. A clue, however, might lie in the assertively confident cover blurb by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale: “The best book on the subject.” Peale, as most readers will know, was the author of the perennial bestseller, The Power of Positive Thinking. (There was a copy in my parents’ small bibliographic collection, but I never did more than thumb through a few pages.) So whatever destination The Joys of Aging is heading for, we can probably assume that it will take the high road to get there.
Then there’s The Joys of Aging & How to Avoid Them, a wonderfully-titled 1981 book by the comedian Phyllis Diller. According to the brief description, “Diller takes aim at the technology of youthfulness—face lifts, peeling, waxing, coloring, slimming, firming, plumping, relocating and eradicating—in a book crammed with zany anecdotes.” The “technology of youthfulness” is certainly fertile ground for humor, although I’m pretty sure I don’t want to read 167 pages of “zany anecdotes.” A few of that ilk usually go a long way.
Both Diller and Peale lived to be 95, so maybe the writing of books has a positive impact on longevity. I can already hear objections from people who can cite any number of well-known authors who didn’t make it anywhere near the ninth or tenth decades. Stephen Crane, dead at age 29. Emily Brontë, Sylvia Plath, Arthur Rimbaud, all dead in their 30s. Franz Kafka died a month short of his 41st birthday. In this company, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who passed away at 43, was practically a white-bearded sage.
But any correlation between longevity and the authoring of books would require statistical analysis, a field that gives me a headache just thinking about it. Suffice to say that many writers lived into their ninth and tenth decades and even longer. The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti died at 101. Cormac McCarthy, one of my favorite novelists, died at 89. Others I admire who make the cut are Roger Angell, 101; Eudora Welty, 92; and Saul Bellow, 89. But the star of this august company is undoubtedly the Guyanese author, E.R. Braithwaite, whose 1959 novel, To Sir, With Love, is best known for its film adaption of the same title starring Sidney Poitier. Braithwaite departed the world in 2016 at the venerable age of 104.
I don’t know how they felt about the joys—or absence thereof—of aging. In June of this year, People Magazine teased the subject with the title, “23 Celebrities On the Joys of Getting Older.” The word “celebrity” in a title usually sends me elsewhere, but curiosity about the subject overcame my antipathy. The oldest of this cohort was comedian Carol Burnett, who professed to be happy about still having her hips, knees, and brain at the age of ninety-one. Dolly Parton, who is 78, said, “I’m grateful that I’m still here.” Not exactly quotes for posterity. That was it for anyone near, in, or beyond their ninth decades. Others included 60-year old Hoda Kotb, co-anchor of the Today Show on TV; supermodel Tyra Banks, who is fifty, and actress Reese Witherspoon, who won’t celebrate her fiftieth birthday for another two years. Should we care about their insights on the subject of aging, positive or otherwise?
Maybe all of this discussion of “joy” should have been preceded by an attempt to define what we mean by it. My dictionary defines the word as “Intense and especially ecstatic or exultant happiness” and the thesaurus lists “elation, exuberance, delight, and bliss” among a substantial number of synonyms. While I hope I don’t approach the subject of aging with a long face, exuberance and elation aren’t defining characteristics of my experience of having left youth far behind. There is a book, though, that I really want to read. It’s called The Joys of Getting Older, by Bertrand and Sarah Agee. It’s only 120 pages, and best of all, every one is blank.
Funny. Especially the last sentence
Thank you. I'm saved the trouble of looking myself.
The blank pages must be for us to fill in