I have been watching the portrayal of older people in the movies with interest now that I have reached that frontier. I admire some of the actresses, especially the British ones, who are willing to face the camera, actually looking like they are old. (You notice I do not mention actors, who even when looking their age, are involved with lovely, young blond things. Ah, well….)
There seems to be a dichotomy in these portrayals. Either the performer is crochety, unshaven if male, and angry with the world or ditzy and foolish, crashing through life with gay abandon. Are these the only options open to those of a certain age?
I do agree there is some distillation that comes with age. As a ninety-year-old friend of mine commented, ‘You can no longer hold up a façade that is unreal, and it begins to crack.’ If you have pretended to like lima beans for 80 years, maybe now is the time to say, ‘to hell with it’ and announce you are never going to eat them again.
But moving on from vegetables, what cannot seem to be given up is memories, perhaps not always accurate, of our youth. As our younger years gently fade into that dim, long-ago time they gain a certain luster that they never had while we were living it. Was everything really that perfect, harmonious, and wonderful compared to today? I doubt it. But in comparison with a world that has changed and left us behind, it has the ring of the familiar which may be what we are really after. We no longer wake up in a world where the telephone is mounted on a wall in the kitchen attached to the receiver by a long, curled cord, or men wear baseball hats only if they play the game and those hats are never worn backwards, or teenage boys pump gas for customers at the local station, or the music of one’s rebellious youth is now Musak.
Older people who complain about the current scene are often asked when the nation was better, and their replies irritate me as a student of history. I want to answer their vague responses with, ‘Oh, perhaps you mean when I didn’t have the vote, or perhaps you mean when our African American citizens were enslaved, or perhaps you mean when we were facing a desperate depression or engaged in a world-wide war. Times change, and if at our age we cannot change with them, perhaps we just need to sit back and let those who are younger and more agile than we are work it out. And while we do, we can just be grateful we were born into this country at this time.