Old Women Lift

Ageism: Biden and Me

“Honey, can I help you out with that box?”  the postman with the kindly eyes asks as he slides the not very large box across the counter.  I pick it up carefully.  The box doesn’t weigh more than a kitten. “It’s really light,” I sputter, confused about why he thinks I need help with the box.

Then I remember.  I’m old.  He thinks old women can’t lift. 

Illustration by Colin Sullivan-Stevens

On Thursday night Joe Biden proved old men can lift.  As Biden stood before the podium in that grand room to deliver the State of the Union, millions of eyes from all over the world were on him, millions rooting for him, millions hoping for a gaffe, a stumble, a frail old man moment.  This could be it I think as I scroll my phone for reports of the event.  Stumble on a word, mix up a name, lose your voice and the press will descend on you like flies on a piece of dead meat. 

My own old lady self, the one who has even more trouble with names now than she did when she was not an old lady, feels great empathy for Biden’s fight to prove he can still lift.  It’s a hard fight.  Ageism is loose in the world and it’s coming to get all of us with wrinkled fists and wrinkled cheeks. If I read one more media report about how worried people are about Biden’s “age”, I am going to turn into a raging mad woman. 

Biden flies halfway across the world to intervene in the Israeli-Gaza war, tours the country making speeches on immigration or labor rights or abortion rights, wakes up with and goes to bed with, literally, the world on his shoulders, all the while his family is being defamed and his critics, including the once fair New York Times, are, with magnifying glass in hand, examining him for signs of age, inch by painful inch. 

Last Sunday, New York Times Opinion columnist, Maureen Dowd, no spring chicken herself, followed David Axelrod in recommending that Biden acknowledge the shortcomings of his age and drop out of the race. She even took a pot shot at his Irish roots ascribing what she saw as his stubbornness to stay in office this way: “But he should not indulge the Irish chip on his shoulder.”

If that were happening to me, I’d crumble into bits and cry you a river or I’d walk around sputtering epithets at the top of my lungs, scaring the dog so much he’d be hiding under the bed.  But Biden keeps going.  Not out of narcissism, I believe, but out of deep commitment to values and ideals about this country. 

I hold my breath, scroll some more.  His voice is strong.  The next day, Susan Glasser writing for the New Yorker calls his speech “loud” in a tone that is just short of disdainful. If she were beside me, I’d give her an elbow in the ribs and tell her to leave him alone.  I picture myself by his side, a pair of boxing gloves covering my veined and brown-spotted hands daring people to take another shot at him.

I guess this is what today’s blog is: it’s my elbow to the ribs at all the people taking pot shots at him because of his age.  And a warning to all the people making assumptions about me and my white-haired friends because of our ages.  As Mae West said about herself when she was older, watch out, “we’ve been things and seen places.”

Let’s do the neuro-psych on this first.  For reference I recommend this article by Dr. Ranganath, a psychologist and neuroscientist.  Brains age.  After the age of 40, memory does decline.  But there is forgetting and Forgetting.  Retrieval failure happens when the memory is not available, not when it has disappeared forever.  If I forget your name when I next see you, rest assured, it is not gone forever, nor have I forgotten you. The minute you walk away, or kindly remind me of your name, I will remember that I remember.  Public perception of a person’s cognitive state is often determined by superficial factors, such as physical presence, verbal fluency, but these aren’t relevant to one’s capacity for emotional regulation, to process complex ideas, to access deep knowledge about complex systems.   

As an old person I would add that age contributes the most important characteristic needed at this moment in time: wisdom.  And wisdom is what Biden exudes in his speech. Listening to him, my spirits rise, he’s in this fight with his heart and soul. His Irish feistiness is in full flower: he is up there with courage and fierceness, with compassion and humor.  He communicated a much needed vision of American democracy as a democracy of caring, one responsive not to wealth and corporations, but to the middle class.  When Biden was bated and heckled by Republicans who called him a liar and again accosted his son, Biden was able to use that negative energy directed at him and fling it back at his critics. 

Now I want to ask one more question, what about the woman in the kitchen?  Poor Senator Katie Britt. She might as well have been barefoot and pregnant.  Even much of the Republican media was aghast at her performance.  While Biden was making every effort to overcome the flood of negative assumptions about him that rise out of ageism, Britt seemed to wade happily into the old pre-feminist ideas about a woman’s place in society.  Appalling. Gloria Steinem, 89 now, must be shaking her head in disbelief.

I confess that as I’ve aged, I’ve stumbled on dark pockets of my own internalized ageism about old women.  In an effort to plumb that dark pocket, I wrote an essay about it five years ago.

Here’s a bit of what I wrote in that piece titled “Old Women Scare Me”:

Powdery souls, half material body, half ghost.  Faded, shrunken, wrinkled, like old bedsheets.  Invisible lives lived in half-step measure, shuffled into insignificance by the cool hand of time.  Blood red lipstick smeared beyond lip lines.  Lopsided eye linings.  Roughed cheeks bleeding streaks of strawberry pink.

Long before I became one myself, ageism had already burrowed its nasty message about old women into my imagination.  When sixty and then sixty-five and seventy rolled in like unfailing ocean waves hitting the beach, I was afraid my face too would scare people.   I looked for signs of fright in people’s eyes, particularly the eyes of children.  Or signs I had become invisible. When bank tellers and airport security men started calling me “young lady,” I feared it was the beginning of the end.  Oh, for a witch’s curse to hiss at the condescending phrases of the young.

I turned 74 this month, almost three quarters of a century. Old. I am here in my bright green dress to tell those of you who may also be infested by ageism: it was all a lie. If you are lucky enough to be healthy and your partner, if you have one, is too and if you aren’t worried about having a place to live or enough to eat, this is the best of times. Tomorrow one of those pilings holding up my luck could fall, but for now, I have a kind of happiness I’ve never had before.

With the horizon looms so close there is no time to seat pinch-faced regret or blue-lipped resentment beside me. Wonder has bloomed again.  Gratitude too.  As Albert Einstein said about the advantages of old age: “when someone tells you to wear socks, you don’t have to.”

Everything about being this age, this old, has to be re-written.  While it may be true that sometimes my plum lipstick strays below my lip-line, all the rest is made up.  My grandchildren believe me when I tell them every new wrinkle they discover is another sign of how much I love them and examine my face often for evidence of that love

Much has changed in the five years since I wrote that essay. If anything, I my love for the life I am about to leave makes me embrace even more fiercely the potential power and disruptive influence which “old” people can and should have on this very moment when both the planet and my generation are running out of time, when actions we take today will determine the history of mankind and all living things for thousands of years to come. 

Is there anything more important than speaking up and out right now, on insisting on our earned wisdom and influence? I fear internalized ageism has gotten hold of the minds of many my age and keeps them home, quietly worried but feeling they are “too old” to do anything about the catastrophic forces at work. 

I urge you if you are one of the quiet old people infested with ageism, to join with the old at Third Act and come out into the streets with your brothers and sisters infused with the fierce raucousness that Biden displayed and, like Biden, keep trying to make a difference. 

And Still We Row, Honey

Oblivious of the repercussions of the ripples floating
on the old pond of my face
I hand the pick-up-slip to the post man who
returns with a cardboard box.  “Honey,” he warns,
this box is trying to be heavy, 
use your knees to lift and be careful.”
which I do only to find it weighs no more than a kitten. 
“It’s light!” I say.

“Honey”, he repeats, eyes glowing 
with that sorrowful shine that accrues from soothing 
customers with lost packages,
“It’s because you’re in such good shape.”  

Well, I’ve news. Old Women Lift.  
Pails of water, root balls of magnolia trees, 
small children up to age 6, wooden canoes, 
hooked rugs, pots of stew, trussed turkeys. 

We’ve been things and seen places. * 

We’ve carried on through those long dark nights, 
risen from the crumpled bed,
fed our loved ones toast and sweet jam, 
combed their tangled hair and sent them out 
with hope tucked in their pockets. 
We’ve dug openings inside our bodies
where we’ve laid down our dead. 

We’ve rowed across the pond of our lives
in bright mornings and cold headwinds,
our arms and backs are strong, 
the opposite shore is growing close
and still we row, Honey.  	

*Mae West

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Here’s a really good weekly newsletter for Old people about climate action by Rick Moody, PhD, a psychologist who has worked in the field of ageism for over 50 years.

https://climateandaging.org/?page_id=1811