Snippets: “Old” from the outside, movies, and winter walks

I’ve been feeling a little like a whirling dervish the past few weeks, too busy to do all the things I want to do (does this sound familiar?). As I whirled, a whole flock of thoughts have landed along the wires of my mind, although you’d never know it from this blog. So, seeing no large chunks of free time ahead, I thought I’d pass along a few “Cliff Notes” on this mental aviary.

“Old” as a culture—the view from the outside

Last week, my partner and I went to Houston for the biannual National Multicultural Conference and Summit. This conference is put on every other year by several sub-groups of the American Psychological Association. It’s intended to offer a space to consider in some depth the issues that arise when psychologists put their collective mind to questions of diversity and multiculturalism. It’s always a thought-provoking few days, and it regularly pushes me to think on new levels about these things.

This time, I attended one session that framed aging as a culture in its own right. Now, I’m not personally persuaded that this is a worthwhile framing. We old people for sure create communities, and we might (emphasis on might) be able to identify some commonalities about us. But the “culture” label seems a stretch to me. Anyhow, I was prepared to consider this notion and to be stretched by the process. Unfortunately, I was not only disappointed but a bit irritated (cranky old woman that I am). Here’s what got me going:

Throughout this presentation, the speakers (three mid-life-ish women) kept referring to old people in the third person. “They” do this or that. “They” need something or other. “They” have one or another characteristic. I can’t quite express how odd it felt to be sitting in the room, being talked about as if I weren’t there (and I wasn’t the only older person in the audience). I’ve had this experience as a lesbian before, many times. In that case, at least there’s the excuse that my sexual orientation is (rather) invisible to those who don’t know me. But my age is not—nor was the age of the other old folks in the room. Still, the speakers completely invisibilized us. In the language of diversity educators, they “othered” us. They made us “others” who didn’t belong to the group with the power—the power, in this case, to describe us and our lives. It was really creepy.

Now, I knew that these people were undoubtedly well intentioned. They were trying to present old people in a positive light and themselves as appreciative of old people. But in the process, they were doing this thing we so easily do when we really want to do the right thing by a group: we create an idealized image of them, we dress that image up in all the best stereotypes about the group, and we smile at our creation. In the process, we objectify and dehumanize the individuals that make up that group. 

For instance, the lead presenter kept saying how much she “just loved” old people. “They're the most amazing people!”, she said. The problem is that we're not. Some of us are extremely cool; some of us are jerks; most of us are somewhere in between. Most of us are cool sometimes and jerks at other times. We're complicated human being with good and bad moments. Given her idealization of old people ("exoticizing," diversity folks call it), you have to wonder whether she'd care about us at all if/when we aren't amazing. Like when we're crabby or when we complain or when we're frail instead of matching her view of vibrant retirees who dance and jog and adventure their way through life. Does she “just love” old people, or does she love her idealized, imagined version of old people? 

As I reflected on all this afterward, I had yet another troubling realization: none of the presenters was herself an old person. Think about this: It would be totally unacceptable to present a session about virtually any other group and not give that group a chance to speak on their own behalf. I can’t anyone planning a panel about, for instance, people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, or religious diversity if the group in question was not included in some significant way. Yet, these presenters apparently thought it was completely appropriate to speak on our behalf. Creepy.

So, did I say anything about this at the tinme? No. I can argue that the session ended without time for questions—which is true (and all too common). But I could have spoken to the presenters afterward. I didn’t. Why? I was sort of dumbfounded. I’m basically shy. I hadn’t quite articulated to myself what felt so uncomfortable. All true … but I realize that those answers simply permit their approach to go unchallenged and prevent them from realizing something that may not have crossed their minds.

Dang! All right, I get it. I’ll send a thoughtful, reasoned (vs. flat-out cranky) letter to the lead panelist. Thanks for the nudge.

Movies

“Cliff Notes” about some of the movies we squeezed in over the holidays and the long (MLK Day) weekend:

Skyfall: The latest James Bond flick, different (I think) from others in this series. Less violence (although some), fewer gimmicks and contrivances (also, some), more actual drama, great scenery. I liked it partly because it was sort of an ode to age and change: the old guard is moving on (dying, even), and the youngsters with new ideas and new techniques are moving in. I mean that in a good way.

Les Miserables: A familiar story from the stage version. Great acting, good music, thin plot line … but hey, it’s a musical!

Django Unchained: Terrible, over-the-top violence and gore bring awful realism to the horrors of slavery. This one has received really intense commentaries—pro for dealing directly with slavery and the completely understandable Black anger it aroused; con for its historical and psychosocial inaccuracy, it's disempowerment of slave women, and its gratuitous violence.

Lincoln: Excellent acting really brought Lincoln to life for me. I learned a lot about the Civil War era and the end of slavery—like about the questionable legality of the Emancipation Proclamation (BTW: you can now get an Emancipation Proclamation commemorative stamp at the post office). Don’t miss this one. Really.

Silver Linings Playbook: Getting good press, but some psychologists I know are conflicted: They’re glad to see mental health issues addressed as (potentially) manageable. But they’re bothered by the the overly-simple message: one still-troubled person rescues another still-troubled person and they live (apparently) happily ever after.

Zero Dark Thirty: The story behind the killing of Osama bin Laden. How could it not draw big? But I hated the not-at-all subtle message that torture is OK and that good information was gleaned through torture. The research is really clear that people who are tortured can be made to say things. Some of it is true, and much of it is false (either because they really don’t know and make stuff up or because they lie). Also, good interrogators can get as much, equally good information without torture. This stuff was dramatic (and sometimes graphic) but unnecessary. Maybe they used it to keep the audience engaged because otherwise, it’s sort of sloooow until the final moments.

The Impossible: The story of a (wealthy, Spanish) family of 5 who were vacationing in Thailand when the Dec. 26, 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami struck. I found myself scrunched down in my seat, practically sucking my thumb (an understandable if not especially functional response to terror) as I watched. The movie pulled me right into the vastness and power of the waves and the relative insignificance and powerlessness of the people in their path. And then, after the water receded, it pulled me into the pained struggles and heroic resourcefulness of the survivors. The intensity never let up (although there were isolated happy moments), and the film stayed with me for a day or so. Some have criticized the focus on this rich foreign family when millions of local people all across the region suffered equally, and hundreds of thousands died. A legitimate critique. Still, the intensity of the movie changed forever how I understand the impact of natural disasters. I'd say see it for sure. Take your blankie.

Still to be seen: Life of Pi, The Hobbitt, and Amour (if we can find it). And any others you all suggest. Time permitting.

And finally ... Winter walks

Among the (many) blessings of the place I live is the weather—although climate change may make me eat my words. Colorado is graced by lovely sunny days, even in the midst of winter. Add to this the fact that the Boulder area is woven together by bike and walking paths, including many along creeks and beside wetlands. That combination makes for scenes like these on winter walks:

                    

          

What a gift to live here.

Cultured

OK, I am now totally cultured. It took two days, two museums, the Hard Rock Café, a bookstore, a piano/flute concert, a slide show about the Civil Rights movement, and a stop at the hat shop … but the result is undeniable. I am cultured.

It’s rare for my partner and me to take a full day off from our various regular pursuits to play. But on Friday, that’s just what we did. She hadn’t seen the da Vinci exhibit, and although I had seen it twice before (the first time alone, chronicled here, and again with a friend who read my rave review here), I was totally game to go again. So after breakfast (our first trip to Snooze. Try it!), we spent Friday morning with Leonardo. This time, I got to see the whole movie, along with some short videos designed for our co-visitors, middle schoolers with ADHD. Their reactions were entertaining—especially their serious discomfort with full-screen shots of da Vinci’s famous “Vitruvian man” (Slip into your 11-year-old sensitivity and take a look). The movie was great. It added layers of historical information that gave an additional dimension to da Vinci’s inventions and his art. We wondered (leave it to two psychologists) whether his extraordinary perspective, his ability to draw physical renditions of ideas that others hadn't envisioned, had to do with some distinctive neurological characteristic. Guess we’ll never know, but it’s interesting to speculate.

Leonardo’s show was less than a block from the Hard Rock Café, so, given my partner’s enthusiasm about all things musical (remember the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?), lunch just had to be there. In addition to the ceiling-to-floor rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia, the café had a continuous video of various rock performances. As good fortune would have it, the loop during our lunch included Bruce Springsteen singing my partner’s currently favorite-in-the-world song, “We Are Alive” from the Boss’s latest album. If you’re into message music, give a listen. (Think symbolically when you get to the part about worms and such.)

Then we were off to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science for the Pompeii exhibit. I had been keeping an eye on this, thinking I’d go for some Wednesday outing. But I’d failed to notice that it was about to close—like, it’s now gone (sorry). My partner was interested, too, so we braved the sinking temperatures and promise of snow to see the last days of Pompeii. The exhibit was really well done, drawing visitors into the daily lives of these folks before that morning in 79 A.D. when Vesuvius came alive and buried Pompeii (and several other towns) in ash and stones. Arguably the most powerful part of the exhibit was the casts of people and animals frozen in the positions they held when the ash and fumes overcame them. I’d seen pictures of these before, but being close the their life-sized reality was another experience entirely.

I was also stuck by some uncomfortable indications of the Roman class system on display in Pompeii. For example, I learned that wealthy folks sent their clothing to the “dry cleaner’s” to get it cleaned and bleached. The bleaching part was done by slaves, who walked on the clothing in pools of urine (collected from passersby and from animals), which served as a natural bleaching agent. And then there was the cast of one person who didn’t escape from the city (only about 1,000 of 20,000 citizens didn’t escape). You could tell he was a slave or a prisoner because the shackles were still on  his ankles. On the other hand, there was the apparent consciousness conveyed by a mosaic that hung in someone’s dining room. It represented death, portrayed as a skull, as the great equalizer that cancels out differences based on wealth and class. The mosaic depicts a level with a plumb line hanging from it; the weight is a skull. Hanging from the two arms of the level, balanced by death, are symbols of wealth and of poverty. I guess it is true that death comes to us all regardless of wealth. But it’s also true that the man with the shackles had no chance to escape, while most of Pompeii did. Well, for the time being. I guess they're all equally dead now.

Death as the great equalizer. Mosaic from a Pompeii home.

 After we left Pompeii, at once fascinated and stunned by the exhibit, we slopped through the falling snow to a coffee/reading break at the Tattered Cover, still Denver’s premier independent bookstore. That stop warmed and settled us enough to move on to our evening engagement: a piano / flute concert. Long ago, I wrote about a lovely evening spent with two women who have used their retirement to pursue their true callings: painting for one and music for the other. The music woman was the pianist at this concert, and she was joined by a flautist who also plays for the joy of it (neither of them was paid for this free concert). Their music was wonderful, and it seemed like it rounded out the day nicely, smoothing the ragged edges from Pompeii and taking me back (musically) to the time of Leonardo, where we started the day. Well, not all of the music was from that era, but the parallel is too good to pass up.

Finally, for a very different sort of cultural experience, on Saturday, we went to a presentation/discussion about a 1965 Civil Rights march in Birmingham. This march followed the famous “Bloody Sunday” confrontation when marchers first tried to walk from Selma to Montgomery and met with violence instead. The march we were there to hear about moved from the African-American section of Birmingham to the state capitol building in that city. A number of folks from Denver and Boulder joined the march, and this event featured their snapshots, turned into slides, and a narration preserved by the Carnegie Library in Boulder. Several folks who had walked that day were at this event, and they added their own recollections and reactions.

Seeing the pictures and hearing the participants’ commentary—in person and in archived form—gave an immediacy to the whole event that I think would have been missing if it had been just a lecture. Imagine marching through falling rain out of the muddy, unpaved streets and meager homes of the African-American section of town into the paved streets and well-heeled business district near the capitol. Imagine being “protected” by Alabama National Guardsmen with confederate flags on their uniforms. Imagine being unsure how (or whether) you could get from the end of the march back to the airport safely. Imagine your relief as you returned to Colorado just 24 hours later—aware, as one of the white marchers said, that your own fear ended when the plane you got home, whereas Birmingham’s Black residents lived with that fear all day, every day.

What more could you ask of a two-day experience of cultural immersion? Let’s see: painting, sketching, and invention wrapped in historical context; rock ‘n’ roll music, complete with nostalgic memorabilia; Roman elegance and death as the great equalizer; leisurely reading with good coffee; classical music performed in a soaring cathedral; and a trip back to a historical moment within my own lifetime.

Oh, yeah. I almost forgot the hat story. My partner has been craving a type of hat that I recently learned is called a “Donegal” hat. She found it between the Hard Rock Café and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

Just to cap off the day.

Oops! I forgot I was old

“Never trust anyone over 30,” advised a famous 1960s quote. The line has been variously attributed to Jerry Rubin, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles. But apparently, the real source was Jack Weinberg, a leader of the Berkeley cohort of the 1960s student movement for peace, justice, an end to Vietnam War, and reliance on youth for the answers to questions that older folks didn’t even dare ask.

It doesn’t matter, really, who said it. The point is it expressed the mood of a generation, the angst and egocentrism of youth coming up in an era when the “generation gap” was an everyday, throwaway phrase. It was us (youth) vs. them (grown-ups, pigs, “the man,” “the establishment”), and I was among the “us,” if quietly so. At the time, people in their 30s did seem pretty old to me, and decidedly untrustworthy. People in their 40s or 50s (like my parents) seemed really old, and I couldn’t even imagine how feeble and totally out of touch 60 or 70 would be.

I mention this because I’ve had a few experiences lately that reminded me that I am, from that late-adolescent / early-adult perspective, very old. Late-60s old. Fast approaching 70, the age after which my younger self was certain that no worthwhile life remained. But now, living inside that age, I don’t feel at all like I expected to feel. I expected that the late 60s would feel fragile, isolated, and needy. Instead, with the notable exception of certain physical limitations, I feel pretty much like I felt back in the day when I thought 50 was beyond the pale. Sure, I wish I could still do all the things I used to do. And sure, I appreciate the perspective that several added decades of experience bring. But for the most part, my age is invisible to me and pretty irrelevant.

This is unexpected: from the inside, being old is not a major shift from not being old. In fact, I often actually forget that I’m old. I mean that very literally. I actually think (without reflecting on it) that I’m still that younger person and that other people see me as I do. I move through life thinking of myself as … well, myself … and then something reminds that from the outside, my physical appearance marks me as an old woman.

Sometimes, I’m reminded of my age by an encounter with ageism, by the realization that the idea of “old woman” comes heavily wrapped in assumptions, expectations, and stereotypes. On these uncomfortable occasions, all that wrapping unwinds and I realize that people are responding not to me, but to some imaginary creature, their particular concept of an “old woman”—probably not unlike the concept I used to hold.

The other evening, my partner and I were leaving a restaurant, and we stopped to hold doors open for a crowd of folks coming in as we went out. The last two people were a man and a woman who looked to be in their 40s or so. As they passed through the door, the woman said to me, “Thank you! We should be holding the door for you.” Before I even thought it through, I knew I had just smacked into ageism. Whether or not she consciously intended it, the message was clear. “I’m young; you’re old. I should be holding the door for you.” My age had been the farthest thing from my mind, but in that moment, I was reminded that I am old. And I was reminded that my age leads people to treat me not as who I am but as who they see, who they imagine when they encounter an old woman.

But then on other occasions, I’m reminded of my age in a far happier way. I can be sitting with a group of friends of varying ages, just talking, when suddenly one of my friends says something—a story, a life circumstance, a hope, a struggle—that reminds me that I am decades older than she is. I’m really taken aback when this happens because I had forgotten. I know, as I think about it, that when they look at me across the room or across the table, they see my aging physical self, the wrinkled face, graying temples, sagging physique. But their response to me doesn’t carry an ageist tone—nor does it carry patronizing “respect”—so I settle safely into the ease of forgetting.

I actually love the differences in age that inhabit my life. The fact that my friends and I are not all age mates adds lovely texture to our interactions. Events that shaped my coming of age are the stuff of history books for some of them, and their early years were dramatically different from anything I have known. Still today, their lives are filled with experiences that are hugely different from my own. We all have perspectives that have been shaped by those differences, and that makes for conversations that are rich and unexpected. There are a million things we can share, and none of them requires that we be the same age.

Overall, it’s an odd sort of out-of-body experience, this being startled by reminders of my age. I guess it makes sense that I forget. We regularly fail to notice things that seem familiar, and the flow of years through my life seems totally familiar. But if I had 20 to do over again, I think I’d be more inclined to trust this older version of myself. After all, I’m most definitely not the person I expected to be at this age.

Still, this hardly makes for a catchy quote:

“It’s safe to trust people over 30, provided they don’t feel like you think you’ll feel when you reach their advanced age.”

Somehow, I just can’t imagine that on a bumper sticker.