I Grow Old, I Grow Old: A Quiver Full of Comparisons
Contest Winner
It’s common to compare ourselves — usually unfavorably — with others. I don’t recall such experiences in my southern Nevada childhood, but I probably felt envy for the kids who could roller skate without skinning their knees and could puff out a Sousa tune on their clarinets while marching in the Fourth of July parade. Adolescence, however, whets envy. In my Salt Lake City junior high school, the privileged girls wore Jantzen sweater sets and Joyce shoes and shopped at ZCMI and Auerbach’s. Shoulders slumped, I clomped along in my Sears specials, which my mother claimed were much more economical and just as well made. On the high school newspaper staff, I worked with a group of bright young men who favored the debate squad rather than athletic teams and considered constant punning indicative of their remarkable IQs. They teased me so unrelentingly about the inferior status of females that the newspaper advisor took me aside and told me that IQ scores weren’t important. I don’t think he took the guys aside.
At the University of Utah, I learned that if I worked very hard, I could compensate for a not-remarkable IQ — at least in all classes in which grades depended on essay-writing skills and memorization. I didn’t have a lot of respect for memorization, but some professors did. And I was exposed to women that I wanted to emulate. The most notable of these was Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, an English and journalism major two years ahead of me. Laurel did the unthinkable — she married while she was an undergraduate and still pulled close to a four-point GPA (these were the days when four-point was as high as you could get), won debate tournaments, served in the student senate, was a member of the important senior honoraries, and delivered the valedictory address. I didn’t marry young, I lost most of my intra-collegiate debates and my bid to be a class senator, but I did manage to check off some other items on Laurel’s list. When I graduated, I realized my attempts to equal her achievements resulted in a few achievements of my own.
The next threescore and three years were filled with people, so many people — family, friends, students. As I sat beside my brother on his deathbed, we talked about how lucky we were: we were born under the covenant of love-no-matter-what, and that made it possible, whatever our differences, for us to sing around the player piano or laugh around the cassette recorder that was absorbing our memories. With dear friends, I shared hopes, doubts, fears, silly things, splendid things, music and art and literature, the great indoors and the great outdoors. There were men who were more than friends — until I finally met Ben, who could complete my sentences as I was articulating them. Instead of the children we chose not to have, I nurtured students, some of whose faces mirrored the excitement in my own. I coaxed and prodded and praised the less excited.
Those years were filled, too, with paper: reams of student assignments and class discussion notes, others’ stories and my own, others’ essays and my own. They were years with not enough hours in the days or the nights. There were so many breathtaking things to learn, places to explore. I don’t remember ever being bored.
Those years taught me I was a worthwhile person. I understood what I tried to teach my students: I was enough.
And then the years became less kind.
The older I get, the more I return to my adolescent angst. I make comparisons of myself and others, even though, as my therapist sister-in-law has cautioned me, “to compare is to despair.” I ponder friends who are older, but abler, than I. Sue does an hour of comfortable laps most mornings in the deep-water pool at the Berkeley YMCA, and climbs, with little effort, the stairs to her third-story walk-up after a day’s sightseeing in Paris. Carla plays golf in Mexico and chops wood and keeps two houses going — one a few blocks from me, the other three hours away, in the Sierra foothills. Nancy refuses to have a clothes dryer and hangs sheets and towels and the rest of the laundry on a clothesline and sings protest songs with a women’s group and is writing a fantasy teen novel and a biography of her mother. My own mother, in her 80s, flew around the country to family birthday parties, weddings, bat mitzvahs, tennis matches, and, once, a gathering of female relatives dubbed the Great Arkansas Yakadoo. Now, out my living room window, I watch people effortlessly dog walking on the uneven sidewalks of my street. I am weary, just imagining all they do.
I have become a coward. I only drive within a 15-mile radius of my home. So many places, so many experiences now on my Unbucket List: Kenya, Kyoto, Rome, the Camino de Santiago, Napa County as viewed from a basket under a hot air balloon. I walk tentatively, with a cane when I’m outside, an eye on the bulges in the pavement, always conscious of tales I’ve heard of friends who have fallen and broken hips, wrists, ankles. I think of T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock — aging, anxious, diffident — daring nothing, mourning everything. “ I grow old . . . I grow old . . . / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”* Perhaps Prufrock, like me, is growing shorter. “I’m not going to be a little old lady,” I used to say. “I’m going to be a tall old lady.” But my body had other ideas. It — like the rest of my world — is shrinking.
Granted, I do more than watch life through the curtains. Through a bewildering array of unpredictable illnesses, sometimes from a hospital room, I manage our household. I keep Ben and me fed and clean-clothed, get us to our medical appointments and a few social activities. We applaud local theater; we participate in book and film groups. Mornings are hardest, but I get to church when I can. I still conduct phone interviews with new ward members and get out the ward newsletter. Some afternoons I wander in gardens and parks. And I write and read. Writing saves me. I’m not sure from what.
I have been an advocate of journal writing all my life long. I look back at earlier journals and am astonished at all I did, all I could do. I motor scootered through western Europe on a sluggish Lambretta, cars and motorcycles grazing my left arm while I rehearsed saying “spark plug” in seven different languages. I drove an ancient VW bug from Palo Alto through San Francisco’s hilly city streets to Marin County — teaching myself to use a stick shift on the way. I set out alone for countries unknown, with just enough purse and scrip to get there, and the expectation that I’d be able to eat, work, survive — and, one day, return. I eagerly anticipated new experiences, new relationships.
How brave I was! I didn’t fear that my balance or my bowels or my bone marrow would fail me. But here lies the most dangerous comparison of all — the 84-year-old me with the 48-year-old me or the 24-year-old me or even the 76-year-old me — the me who could not only, in the words of William Faulkner, endure, but who could prevail. Life was often hard those years, too. Life is never easy. But it might be a little less hard when one’s mechanical parts are in working order.
I tell myself that I can still deal with the challenges all those other me’s faced. I don’t merit a MacArthur Fellowship or a Wikipedia page, but my struggles are heroic. I will try to prepare for my current tests as I prepared for all those past tests. I acknowledge there are many things I can no longer do. I can’t pull out invasive plants on the bay trails. I can’t drive with confidence on freeways. I can only birdwatch with binoculars if I can lean on something stable. But I understand a few things about life’s struggles that make me more empathetic — if less physically useful — to others undergoing similar trials.
And I can still write essays. There’s no grading on the curve, I remind myself. And I’m the one doing the grading. o
NOTES:
* T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” from Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T.S. Eliot.
Karen Rosenbaum (she/her) is a retired (and tired!) college English teacher living in the Bay Area. Book Rec: The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka
Photo by Catherine Kerr on Unsplash
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