The Old Man I Want to Be
One of my earliest glimpses of the old man I want to be was not really of an old man; it’s just that I was young enough for his gray hair to make him seem like one. I was at the time a graduate student at UVM, where Dr. Littleton “Tiny” Long (now deceased) was a senior professor of English. Both of us happened to be attending a visiting scholar’s lecture in the former chapel of Old Mill.
These affairs can have all the civility of a bearbaiting, and I do recall some restiveness among the faculty’s friskier dogs, but when I glanced across the room I was instantly struck by the contrasting sight of him, broad-shouldered in his tweed jacket, gray head bowed, and a look of such sublime attention on his face that even today I have trouble finding the right words to describe it. The best I can do is to say that he put me in mind of a man watching his lover undress, glancing down for one brief, grateful moment that he might better appreciate the vision that awaited him when he raised his eyes. This, I remember thinking, is an educated man, someone who takes palpable pleasure in the display of another person’s intelligence. This is the old man I want to be.
I’ve had other glimpses since then. They’ve come with greater frequency the older I’ve gotten, and with more poignancy now that many of my favorite old men are starting to die. I think of my late friend Freeman Keith, the only man I ever knew who carried both a pool stick and a Psalter in his hybrid car, equally prepared for a game of eight-ball or an occasion of praise (such as clearing half the table before some hapless opponent even had the chance to chalk up his cue). Among the various epithets given at his funeral, Harvard grad (Classics), World War II vet, master pressman, Freeman had the distinction of being Lancaster, New Hampshire’s “Recycler of the Year.” That was Freeman: Virgil on his lips, box board in his hands. If souls, too, can get recycled, it’s a lucky kid who’ll get his.
But it’s my own merry old soul I’m thinking about these days, with the colonoscopy on the calendar and an AARP card in my mailbox like somebody’s idea of a practical joke (practical because you get that senior discount). There’s no longer much of a divide between the old man of my aspirations and the old man—like him or not—who will soon have my face. What do I want him to be?
At the risk of sounding much crankier than Long, Keith & Co. ever did, I know what I don’t want him to be. For example, I don’t want him to be one of those old men who count on their immunity from a punch in the nose. I mean one of those self-consciously spry old coots for whom every day is a VJ celebration, every woman a pretty dame waiting for a sailor’s big squeeze. Better a curmudgeon, I think, than a man bursting with geriatric joie de vivre. You might as well walk around with your shirt tails zipped up in your fly.
Which brings me to another item on my “no” list: I don’t want to be a grubby old man. I want to be one of those fellows who sit in the park in wool overcoats and fedoras, their scarves wound neatly under their chins. This will involve a few adjustments, since I’m rarely out of jeans and a work shirt and shave on average about three times a week. But I like the sight of a well-dressed old man or woman in a public place. For one thing, they look public; they know they’re “out.” They’re also making a formal declaration of their right to be out. They refuse to be kept in. And by dressing up in a certain way, they refuse to bow to fashion or fashionable informality.
A dignified old age has a lot to do with that kind of refusal. The alternative is a life of abject surrender to everybody’s impertinent determination of what you lack. Pop needs a hobby, a Palm Pilot, a date for Friday night. I have always admired old men, and old women too, who can say “no thank you” with just a hint of equivocation about the thank-you and nothing of the kind about the no. Press them at your peril.
I also admire an old man who can let his wife tell a story—or anybody else tell a story—without cutting her off, beating her to the punch, or playing the tough D.A. with all her statements of fact. People talk about their fear of Alzheimer’s—“anything but that,” they’ll mutter—and I’m scared to death of it too. But I’d rather wind up believing that my bed is a motorboat than acting like the sixty-year partner of my bed is a TV, something you have on to keep you company and talk over whenever you feel the urge to talk.
In general, I’ll take as few mental and physical ailments as I can get, nothing remarkable there, though I happen to be fond of old people who show a healthy interest in their declining health. Some say that an elderly person shouldn’t talk about these matters, but that strikes me as unfair. We report from the country we travel in, and if most of the sights we see are medical, then they will naturally figure in our reports. But there’s a difference between honest reportage and tabloid journalism, between an old man interested in his disease and an old man who thinks he’s interesting because he has one. The first tells you how radiation seeds work—“the most fascinating little things”—the second drops his drawers and shows you his scar. The first speaks of his doctor as an intriguing character study, on the order of Gatsby, say, or Baby Suggs; the second speaks of his doctor as the straight-man in his own comedy routine. “So, the doctor sez to me…” It’s hard to hold a smile through so many witty rejoinders. For one thing, it gives you wrinkles.
As much as anything, I want to be an old man who has gotten out from under his grievances. (How am I doing so far?) I want to have some of the forbearance and liberality I found in Tiny Long and Freeman Keith, qualities that probably enabled them to get a bigger kick out of me. I’m fairly certain that I enabled them to get a bigger kick out of life. Of one thing I’m sure: the older you get, the more important it is to have younger friends. Who can afford to brood too much on past wrongs or future contingencies in the presence of the young? They may not have thought much about the old men or the old women they want to be, but they will at least have formed some idea of the old men and women they want to be around. I want to be high on that list.
Because I spent a number of years as a schoolteacher, I’ve had more opportunities than some of my middle-aged peers to make young friends. And because we don’t generally get to choose our students, my young friends tend to be a more diverse lot than their older counterparts. They include philologists and felons, Cambridge web-designers and Nashville divas, dairy farmers with high Masonic degrees, and anarchists who throw pies at city hall. All of them throw some joy into my life. I like the sweet reversal of having former students teach me about the world, an office also performed by my twenty-something daughter, who increasingly counts as one of my friends. I like getting a mixed CD of “classic” rock songs that I somehow missed in my postgraduate years. I like the look of bemused patience when I ask how you burn a CD. And what does this group mean by calling itself “Death Cab for Cutie?”
Most of all, I like rejoicing in my younger friends’ achievements. “I love the young dogs of this age,” said Dr. Johnson, who rightly complimented himself by saying, “There is nothing of the old man in my conversation.” Both statements could have come from the mouths of Freeman and Tiny, who never seemed so happy as when a young dog met with success. The old man I want to be isn’t an egotist, somebody who needs to be center stage all the time, making the biggest splash, getting the biggest guffaw. Instead, he knows that every dog must have its day.
I tend to think of that awareness in terms of prayer. There may be a more secular way to think of it, but this is my old age I’m talking about, and I’m glad to be old enough to say so. If you don’t like it, read something else. Go away. You’re scaring my pigeons. Prayer is what I do when the world is just too much to requite, too beautiful or painful to express otherwise. The byproducts of prayer are reticence, attentiveness, humility, those traits I glimpsed so long ago in Dr. Long, though I can almost certainly vouch that he wasn’t praying at the time.
So I want to be an old man who says his prayers, not obsessively or ostentatiously, but in a way that is as handy as a pool stick and just as down to earth. I want to be a prayer. I want to be like one of those buck-apiece votive candles racked up in a city church, which I sometimes light for men like Freeman and Tiny and which remind me of them too, the way they were happy to shine in the company of other flames and ready, at the end, to flicker out so others could shine in their place.
Garret Keizer, who earned a UVM master’s degree in English in 1978, is the author of five books and is a contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine. With the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is at work on a book about noise.
(for UVM staff)