If I'm 64

When I get old, and lose all my hair,....

Actually, my hair began to thin years ago when I was just a little kid because of sebhorreic dermatitis which got really aggravated by the 1980's craze for permanents combined with my mother's crusade to get my god-given thin and fine hair to look thick and wavy like the actresses' on television she adored from the decade prior. It took decades to get it under control, which it pretty much is now, too late for me to perfect the Farah Fawcett look for my mother, who still wishes I could. Somewhere, in some small town in Wisconsin, I bet, is a girl about 8, who ice skates and still has that hair style and whose mother just smokes and drinks all day, and is dying for my mother to just take her to the salon. It's not a tragedy, but it's a Beth Henley movie that never got made.

It's okay. Odds are, the little girl will grow up and be a delightful friend to a very nice queer boy and they'll make good roommates. Thankfully, he'll get rid of that hair, so, it will have a happy ending, at least for her. Perhaps he runs for Senator as a Republican, gets in, has an exalted career then comes out and has an even better one. Okay, now it's a Harvey Fierstein movie that he could still make.
Harvey? I would like this so much better than seeing you play my grandfather in A Catered Affair. Not that I don't like seeing you get work. It's just jolting because I've been thinking of you as my sister and my mother for years. But, you're very handsome, so don't worry about it. I'll buy it. You're one of those beings that probably NO ONE would throw out of bed. I wouldn't and you're not usually in my field of vision.

Reaching for the diet soda and reading glasses and hearing myself breathe, this is as close to the "promised end" as I think I can feel comfortable being. My teeth already are just thin postules with nerves rigged right to the center of my skull that shatter every time extremes of temperature hit them. And I could tell you where my mother's hip was most disintegrated because the same pattern has begun on mine. The generation before me either buckled down and exercised and took vitamins, or, like my mother, resigned themselves to their fate, dug into the ground deeply and drove their bodies like cars on "The Flintstones" -- grinding those rock wheels down until they were nothing and collecting their pensions. My mother worked 35 years for the New York City Department of Health at a Dental Assistant. The woman speaks fluent French, is a term shy of a BA, can outwit me at Chess half asleep, and outsmarted my father's legal team after five years of litigation basically by herself. And she handed doctors their instruments, filled in patients' charts, calmed little kids down for their appointments, kept the clinic from coming apart, commuted for about two hours each way across Brooklyn neighborhoods that ranged from the suburban-like to the urban-rap-video-audition-like day-in, day-out. All that to reach 64. Then the magic 65. My mother actually retired at 55. Her mind and her body could not endure more. I believe she was able to collect her pension at 57, but I'm not sure, but 55, was a mutual agreement between her and the Department of Health. Either way, by that time, the damage was mostly done.

I'm 40, and the exercise videos do not look inviting. A friend begged me to join a gym, even arranged for me to get into one free and I still would not go. When I leave my house, I feel no fellow-feeling from the world outside me. My city hates teachers and I move like a spy. There is no one I recognize to stop and say hello to, my friends are all in the various continuums of their lives. There is too much pressure associated with every task, too and almost all of us want privacy in doing it; we are embarassed by the compromises we must make and by the fact that we cannot help each other swiftly, easily or smartly. Sometimes what I said yesterday was flat out wrong, I didn't hear the person right. I'm not as up on things as I used to be. I don't have the "rightness" of my youth. I can't explain what that was.
It wasn't just confidence. When you're young, you hear about what people are buying because your parents are buying stuff for you. When you're old, you're not buying stuff, so you're out of the loop.

So, I conserve my stone wheels. I am not my mother's daughter. I am even looking at replacing the hip sooner, before it gets too painful -- which doctors now encourage you to do. Why wait? You know what's coming and so do they? It's not going to get better. NOTHING is going to make it better. I might as well "slouch toward Bethlehem" comfortably".

Our parents, I think, had a certainty about being 64. Paul McCartney didn't sing, "If I'm 64." My generation isn't very sure about it. Just as it's jarring to see people from my childhood now playing grandparents, there is also no plan in our generation for where we are going to go when we retire. This is the generation that is going to have to fight for its Social Security checks and imagines itself possibly living with children or in shelters. Or just can't think about it. We are barely managing to make it from year-to-year.

I have to keep my wheels comfortable because I may have to use them for as long as I am on the planet -- whatever age that is. For a good part of my free time, I did research on the best sneakers I could find to support my feet through my job. They also had to be "shoe-like" enough to be worn to school. That was my big investment of the summer.

Last night, I got into a tear-ridden conflict with someone over what computer to buy with the issue being weight over function, with the former being a major issue because the person has to carry the machine everywhere. Again, the issue of keeping the stone wheels and chassis as in-tact as we can raises its ugly head. We'd all love to go to the gym and some of us do and some of us will. The trouble for all of us is time. Our jobs get more and more labor-intensive every year. What Bloomberg and other business-driven managers do when they re-design systems is they put more work on fewer individuals and in so doing, give us all longer work days. Since schools do not generally have gyms open to faculty the way businesses have gyms, teachers can't work out in the course of a 12 hour day -- and it is completely inappropriate for teachers and students to work out together for obvious reasons. On weekends we have papers to grade, our families to see, errands to run, etc. You may find this hard to believe, but many teachers actually have to take their own children places on weekends and that then takes their own time and then they have little personal time of their own. So, teachers often become out of shape. Carrying around a 2 pound laptop vs. a 6 pound laptop can make a huge difference in a long day. Anyone who has carried around a baby, a set of books, groceries, etc. knows what this can be like.

So, I can't fathom it. 64. I just can't.