Young Old Age


I am listening to violinist Erica Morini play Mozart. The telephone is ringing. It doesn't seem that long ago that I'd have to pick it up to find out who's there. Now I have more information. It's not anybody I want to talk to. At 60, I am into the youth of old age, the first symptom of which seems to be less concern with other people. Especially people who annoy me.

When I was young I was assigned a magazine article on Sun CIty, Arizona, one of the first large scale communities built to house exclusively old people. There were a couple of security guys, who were actually just residents who volunteered to patrol the community, and one of them was about my age now. He was fit and he moved with a deliberate accentuation of his youthfulness. He had a big smile on his face.

"In Sun City," he said, "you've got your young people, your middle aged people, and your old people, just like in the larger society. It's just compressed here, like a dog's life."

"You know pilgrim," I said, "someday I'll remember you and put words in your mouth that I wish you'd say, because I keep drifting off." He didn't really say it's like a dog's life. But it is. Other than the concept of young, middle-aged and old still applying, what I remember most about Sun CIty was that it was in the Peoria School District and because the old people didn't have children, they voted against any property increases for the schools. "Not my problem," was the general attitude.

I was doing journalism for mass consumption then, so that the emphasis was on a cultural point of view. The writing needed to catch the feel of the arizona culture. I had a feel for other people, and after a conversation with somebody could reproduce their basic body attitude in my memory. I grew up accepting the idea that family members can contact each other wirelessly, without the telephone. When my uncle was in Korea my grandmother reportedly went into a trance each day to visit with him, and reported that she had seen him and he was okay. One night my dad woke up and said his friend's house was on fire, and the next day confirmed that it had burned during the night.

This probably provided an interest in dreams as the royal road to the unconscious, as Jung described them.

In the final scene of, "No Country for Old Men," the Sheriff says he had a couple of dreams and his wife asks if they were interesting. He says they are always interesting to the one who dreamed them, but he tells them to her. Being close with other people has something to do with sharing some of that inside space, and not letting the ordering part go unconscious of everything it can't control.

Young old age is a vantage point. It's like in a myth, where the chariot is crossing the sky, a poetic description of the sun. From this vantage point the chariot has moved to the golden mean on the right, because I face south. And though it's a beautiful day out, I'm writing this instead of being out there, though I'm limiting it to an hour. Then Arnold is coming by and we'll have a wide ranging conversation and laugh a lot, as usual, unless his dog fell in the well or something.

The past is too big to remember, and too boring. It has to be put in some form where it can be stored and transported. The only containers I know of are stories with an abstract core. Don Juan said that the sorcerer is an empty man except for a collection of stories with a universal application.

I know what he means, and how he arrived at that conclusion. This becomes more clear with age, that letting go of personal history makes sense, because it's too dense to transport. It has to be reduced to a few abstract cores.

Posted: Tue - February 12, 2008 at 01:05 PM