Positive Aging

This is a charming romantic fantasy that takes place at two age levels. It portrays a young, spacey, good-natured waitress who works in a New York diner, and falls in love with a cab driver/hopeful novelist. The film revolves around the "comedy of errors," the chain reaction of misunderstandings that takes place between them. It allows director Amos Kollek to have fun cruising his camera over the New York scene.

I had never thought much about aging. Even now, at 63, I continue to proclaim, "I don't take my age personally," in spite of the fact that the human forest in which I live is thinning out. Many friends and members of my family, cousins with whom I grew up, even a younger sister, have died, crossed from the land of the living to Hamlet's "undiscover'd country from whose bourn/No traveler returns." I have somehow not attributed it to age.

They say that old age is always 15 years older than you are. I can remember when the truth of this hit home most forcibly. When I was a young mother with four small children, 16-year-old Lucy used to come after school occasionally to baby-sit for me. One day I returned from shopping and she told me I'd had a caller, but she didn't remember her name. "What did she look like?" I asked.

As people live longer and retire earlier, the third stage in life, euphemistically called "the golden age" or other such pretentious titles, often stretches out like an empty expanse before the newly retired. He (and certainly she) can expect to live twenty or thirty years after retirement, but the question in "modern society" is how to fill those years? In western society, addicted to the Protestant work ethic, people are afraid to grow old, to be unproductive. After all, for many years, their identity was closely tied up with what they did.

My mother is going into her retirement years with a bang. "Rage, rage against the dying of the light," said Dylan Thomas-- Nobody had to tell my mother. She went on a cruise to Alaska and met a man. Now they are an item. The man is 29. My mother is 59. My mother is never one to let petty things like age stand in her way. She has always had young friends. She has always known how to have a good time. Once she wanted me to spend a week in Greece with her.

The Talmud tells us that: "Youth is a garland of roses; old age a crown of willows." (Sabbath 152a). It is hard to admit to growing older, and we always think of old age as 15 years older than we are. The truth is that once you have passed 60, society sees you as "a golden ager". A well-known American advertisement for moisturizing cream declares: "I won't grow old gracefully. I intend to fight it every step of the way!" I always imagined I would share that philosophy - that I'd dye my hair and look for clothes that were very youthful, but it hasn't happened. My hair is white and my clothes reflect my maturity.

Great poets and writers, whether young or old, live with a sense of mortality: all men die; we live our lives under the shadow of its end. Writers make us conscious of the passage of time, and the loss that it entails, which we, who reach our elder years, are only too aware of as we increasingly confront loss. Great works of literature are the best self-help guides. They're not into "denial" of life's difficulties. Instead, pain and the fear of death, are confronted, and transformed through art and help us cherish the world all the more.

At the age of 75 the Japanese painter Hokusai (1760-1849) said, "All that I have produced before the age of 70 is not worth taking into account. At 73, I learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence, when I am 80, I shall have made still more progress. At 90, I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at 100, I shall certainly have reached a marvelous stage; and when I am 110, every thing I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive." Hokusai teaches us that the wisdom of old age lies in renewal, in meeting new challenges and looking for fresh meanings.

It's no longer rare to hear about people living into their nineties or even over one hundred and remaining well and alert. A friend's mother who reached the ninety mark was bluntly asked, "Aren't you weary of this world? You're not independent any more. Do you want to continue living?" Without skipping a beat, she said, "But I'm still curious. I'm curious about what kind of people my grandchildren and great-grandchildren are turning out to be, how the world is changing with the new technology and all.