Your aging thread
May 22, 2010 by
libjpn
A bit late to this, but there was a call for a thread about getting old. Well, here you go, old timers.
As a jumping off point, here is what hairshirtdontist said
My joke is that I have the mind of a 20 year old but the back and knees of a 60 year old, which I started using when I turned 40 (the joke, not the back and knees). I'm 49 now, but I still use the same numbers, which testifies either to mathematical illiteracy or (more likely) a willingness to laugh at jokes that no longer make sense in order to keep the foreigner smiling.
But I do believe I have it rougher than my parents in terms of maturity. (I write about myself, but I suspect it can be extended to others) One of the reasons I feel like a kid is that the world of my parents has given way to a much less hierarchical place. Staying in the same job or with the same company for an entire career was unremarkable. Couples didn't wait until they were in their late 30's or even early 40's to have kids. Knowing someone's age doesn't really give you a lot of information about them, other than what cultural touchstones they may have.
This may be exacerbated by the fact that I am living in a foreign culture, where the precise rules of hierarchical relations are opaque. A colleague was shocked to find out I was 49 because he assumed that having a 10 year old and a 5 year old meant I was mid 30's.
It is probably inflamed by the fact that I do lots of things that people my age probably don't do. I'm or doing aikido 2 or 3 times a week, teaching iaido twice a week. I'm with college age students all the time and I've got a few other hobbies that put me with lots of young people.
Of course, it might be because I can't accept that my parents could ever be as immature as I am, as unorganized as I am, as clueless as I seem to find myself being. However, I think back to when I started judo as a kid, and adding it up and I realize that my dad, who did judo as a kid, was out on the mat with me in his 40's. So he was taking breakfalls on the mat at the same time I was. Maybe he thought the same things I'm thinking. But I also have a memory of being in the back seat after a long drive to see my cousins, and being half asleep, and my father would pick me up and carry me to bed, even though I was probably awake enough to get up and walk, and feeling like he was picking me up with no effort, maybe when I was 8 or 9 or even 10. Yet when I do the same for my 5 year old, I struggle and barely make it up the stairs. Unfortunately, my dad isn't talkative, especially on the subject of his feelings. So this, from a book titled Dueling with O-Sensei, by Ellis Amdur, strikes a chord.
When I was 19 years old, my father became very ill with pancreatic cancer, a horribly painful, wasting disease. I hadn't seen him in some months and when he met me at the airport, the shock of his emaciated face and body made my knees buckle. He was mostly bedridden, but man that he was, he insisted on meeting me on his own two feet. Perhaps a week later, he fell out of bed, and his body, limp and helpless, was so heavy that I couldn't lift him. My mother and I finally managed to help him back into the bed, but the bitter shame that I could not return to my father what he offered me as a child burned through me. That this lovely man, who had carried me through nights of croup as I gasped for air was now nearly helpless, and I, a young man,could not carry him to his rest, scalded me deeply. One of the primary reasons for my drive to master what I could in martial arts was to ensure that I would never again have to experience such shame in the face of the needs of those I love.
Have at it.
Comments
May 24, 2010, 03:10:11 JanieM wrote:
lj, thanks for this. I hadn't been over here for a while because it was so quiet, and my regular computer was in the repair shop (so to speak), and after I got it back I had to do a lot of reinstalling, hair-pulling-out, cursing, etc.
And -- I'm occupied this afternoon, but I'll be back.
Does Catsy ever come over here?
May 24, 2010, 07:42:49 libjpn wrote:
I have a memory of Catsy making some comments, but with the memory going as well...
May 24, 2010, 12:30:57 JanieM wrote:
I asked about Catsy because he (?I think he rather than she) had a long and interesting comment about this topic.
I think you're right on target about the idea that things were more hierarchical a generation or so ago. People married and had kids younger (is this statistically true in the US? I think it is in my family anyhow). They didn't expect to stay in the semi-non-adult phase of college in the way that people do now. Etc. But they also had different balances amongst the generations than we do now. (This is my interpretation of "hierarchical.")
So paradoxically, people were adults sooner, but also maybe kept a certain respect for the older adult generation that was shot to hell by my generation...?? Or after WWII? I'm not sure.
This brings up thoughts of my trip to China. I spent the day of "New Year's Eve" with the extended family of one of my son's colleagues. There were 3 generations of the family. The elders were in their late sixties -- not quite a decade older than I am, but you would probably guess them as much older if you saw them in the US. (Older people are [i]weathered[/i] in China, to put it mildly.) The youngest was 16 months old. She cried when she saw Jamie and me (we were strangers, and probably to her way of thinking pretty odd-looking). But later she made friends with us, at which point she -- barely just learning to say words -- referred to me with the honorific for "Granny" -- at least that's how the Chinese folks explained it to me.
This was in the context of the fact that she was also being taught to call her 8-year-old cousin "elder sister," not her name.
I was bemused by being called "Granny," to say the least. As I said in the first place, I don't feel much like a grown up in a lot of ways, despite the fact that I am 10-15 years older than my grandmas were when they became grandmas. In the US, though there are some contexts where age matters (or to put it another way, age matters in a lot of contexts where people tend to congregate by age; but not in other contexts, like the workplace, or at last mine)......
Let me try to start that thought train over again.
In the US, we don't have honorifics, except where we use Mr., Ms., etc. We have a much fuzzier set of boundaries between the generations, not only than we used to, but than they currently do in China.
Another anecdote about that -- one of Jamie's colleagues, Miss Ji, spent some time in the US as an exchange teacher, and one of her hosts was a woman who manages a few nursing homes. Miss Ji posed the question to me of whether I thought the US system or the Chinese system was better. (I kept getting these questions, and I [i]hated[/i] them, for any number of reasons. But that's a different story.)
The comparison she made was that in China, the folks in the eldest generation decide which offspring they're going to live with when they can't or don't want to live on their own any more.
The interesting thing about this to me (besides the clearer hierarchy than ours) is the way the decision-making was presented: the eldest decide. The younger ones, the grown children into whose houses the elders are proposing to move, have no say in the matter.
Another thing that happened a lot in China was that Jamie would tell people I was his mom, and they would express surprise at how young I looked. Now, they could have just been flattering a guest in their country, but as I said, Chinese people my age and older (insofar as I knew anyone's age) looked a lot more weatherbeaten than most Americans my age. They have had harder lives, surely. The revolution, the Cultural Revolution, economic hard times, political upheavals...and in Yulin, where Jamie lives, just the climate (near-desert sun, very little rain or snow)....
Enough of a ramble for now.
May 24, 2010, 23:26:19 Slartibartfast wrote:
libjpn, I am you. I turn 49 in 2 weeks, and have kids aged 9 and 13. Also doing martial arts (TKD) a few times a week, but unlike you have the knees and back for running.
I do have to be careful with the knees, though, as they aren't as good as they used to be. Still, not as bad as they used to be, either (I have chondromalatia in both knees, which competetive swimming aggravated nearly to the point of requiring surgery).
I still have my father, thank goodness, but without many of the poignant memories. And I am not an expat. But: lots in common.
I think we are slowly getting used to being more active in our later years. One guy who regularly cleans my clock in sparring is a former Army guy who was in a helicopter crash in Iraq. He has a couple of steel rods in his back, and he's still doing TKD (black belt) and has some other martial arts training to his credit as well (Okinawan karate, plus some jeet kune do). He can't grapple or do some of the more elaborate twisting kicks, but he has adapted very well to his limitations. It helps, too, that he has an insanely long reach with both arms and legs.
Plus, he (every single day) does weights. The guy can, at age 50, still top out a pyramid set of bench presses with a single lift of 280 or so. Maybe more. Free weights, not weight machine. I never, ever try to out-punch him, and he returns the favor.
So, adapt, and continue as best you can is the word, I think.
May 25, 2010, 01:43:27 nous wrote:
I am currently 42 and feel either 30 or 17 depending on the day. Having no kids helps, as does teaching (and being surrounded by) 20 year olds. They also determine the periodicity of my pendulum swing between those perceived ages. I feel 17 most of the time, but whenever I hear one of my students talking about the stupid emotional roller coaster he or she is going through I'm reminded of how much I do not miss being that age and settle into the role of being (marginally) wiser.
My age mostly shows in the 10lb emergency beer stockpile I keep around my middle to maintain my Viking Metal cred.
My back and knees are actually in decent shape -- it's my hands wrists and shoulders that show the mileage and the mousing. Escrima is slowly kicking that into shape. I'm doing it now twice a week and have taken up a heavy bag workout and yoga three times a week to supplement. It's not enough to destroy the emergency beer supply, but enough to keep me from getting too knackered on a 3 mile run. I was running or rowing before that to keep decrepitude at bay.
I think about my parents in their thirties when I was a kid and I can't remember them doing anything like this. Mom kept the house and gardened. Dad worked and gardened. Neither one of them did much in the way of supplemental exercise. Dad hated sports and mom had grown up in a time when women played half-court basketball because regular basketball was considered too strenuous.
It's like we come from completely different worlds.
May 25, 2010, 08:16:07 JanieM wrote:
I don't do martial arts. ;)
The hierarchy of generations thing reminds me of another thing: power relationships.
My parents were both anxious, risk-averse people (my mother still is; my dad has been gone since 1993). Like most women of her generation, my mother never did anything remotely resembling sports in her life. Like many or most American men of his generation, my dad played baseball as a young man, but in later years he too did nothing like sports. Basically he did nothing "fun" at all in later years. He worked almost two full-time jobs, but one of them was often outdoor work so I suppose that was exercise of a sort.
When I was 33 years old and living in Milwaukee, one of my housemates challenged me to get in shape and join him in a century bike ride. I had six weeks to prepare. My friend loaned me his old bike (I didn't have one of my own and I hadn't ridden a bike since college). I fell in love with biking, completed the century (slept 15 hours out of the next 24 and ate the entire time I was awake), and the next summer took biking very seriously indeed.
But a short while before the century I was having my weekly phone conversation with my parents. I was very excited and pleased with myself and told them about it (they had never heard of such a thing), and in particular told then that you could sign up for a 25, 50, or 100 mile route.
One of them went on at me for a while about how I ought to sign up for the 25, because 50 or 100 was just too hard.
The other went on at me for an equally maddening length of time about how I should make sure to wear a helmet. (I always did.)
This was my parents to a T. (Maybe more on that in relation to sports later.) But despite my patented exasperation with them, that phone conversation, and my pleasure in completing the bike ride a couple of weeks later, made me realize that the power relationships between us had changed, and I was just waking up and noticing.
They had shaped and constrained my childhood with their fear of risk, their obsession with good behavior, etc., and I had bought into almost all of it. And then I had rebelled, but for a long time they had still had the power to make me second-guess myself.
That was over.
Not coincidentally, I suppose, this was right around the time when my dad had retired from being a firefighter, and it was just gradually becoming clear that he was not well. He was diagnosed with Alzeimer's and had a long sad decline until my mother couldn't care for him any more. He died in a nursing home, a feeding tube keeping him alive long after he should have been let go (because Ohio law required the feeding tube in the absence of any prior instructions form him).
So my sense of the power relationships changing right at that time was complex, and (compared to some people I suppose) late.
It's interesting how often in this thread we come upon something that comes under nous's heading of "It's like we come from completely different worlds." My parents never heard of a living will or advance directive. Girls didn't play sports. Etc.
May 25, 2010, 08:18:10 JanieM wrote:
P.S. my dad did not have Alzheimer's. An autopsy revealed that he had late-onset MS with dementia, possibly exacerbated (or even caused?) by undiagnosed TIA's. Learning that he hadn't had Alzheimer's was one of the more bizarre mental adjustments of my life. Even though a correct diagnosis early on wouldn't have made any difference (his MS wouldn't have been any more treatable), it was an effort to reframe the prior 10-12 years under the new label.
Jun 04, 2010, 02:23:57 someotherdude wrote:
I just turned 40 (April 28)….I was an undergraduate in my early 30s, at a private university (Loyola-Marymount) which had no graduate school, thus making the student body relatively young and female.
I attended a party on campus, my first year there, …I felt middle-age. I work out regularly, but it makes me look like a fit, middle age man. In grad school there are a few more folks, around my age…but not much. I started having kids in my late 30s…two girls 9 and 3, one boy 7. Most of the parents in my kid’s school are in their mid 20s.
I have grey hair sprinkle lightly on my head and in my goatee.
My parents started our family when they turned 20, had my brother and I in their early 20s. And a mortgage. I didn’t get mine until my early 30s. I spent my 20s, partying hard. My dad had always been a basketball player in the public parks and hoop in the front of the house. My parents were the type of religious folks who didn’t smoke or drink. My mother is the youngest in her family, so she cares for her eldest sister, who has Alzheimers and many of my cousins. She seems to be a natural nurturer and father is a custodian at a public school.
I smoked 3 packs of Camels and/or Parliaments a day. I started working out in my late 20s, and that motivated me to stop smoking. But I’m very happy that marijuana is becoming decriminalized in California. I like running on a treadmill, for 45minutes-60 minutes 3 times a week…before the kids, it was every day except Sunday. Part of my exercising is to stay healthy, but also vanity….My wife and I still enjoy turning each other on. She also has a crippling case of social anxiety, which makes social networking a bit difficult. She wasn’t always that way. We are both children of immigrants.
I eat much less, than I used to. Committed to more fruits and vegetables in my diet.
A family night consists of watching RuPaul’s Drag Race or some Bravo reality competition.
My parents attend a theologically conservative Pentecostal church; with liberal-leftist politics…I attend a liberal Presbyterian Church, with moderate Republican politics. I used to attend a staunchly conservative Presbyterian church with staunchly conservative politics, but left more because of convenience than their politics. I thought their politics sucked, but the families were phenomenally warm and engaging and loving. I miss Sundays and Bible studies with them.
My research has me attending 3 different Pentecostal churches now…ironic, since I hated church attendance as a child…now my life revolves around it.
I still ask myself…”What the hell am I doing?”
Jun 04, 2010, 07:59:19 libjpn wrote:
I've ordered a bunch of manga titles translated into English for our library as part of the Extensive Reading program I do with students and I ordered Jiro Taniguchi's A Distant Neighborhood. The story has a lot to do with aging, wonderfully told. It is a 2 volume manga, rather than a continuing story. Anyone who is thinking about how we grow old might want to take a look
http://www.ponentmon.com/ne...
Jun 04, 2010, 11:58:05 dr ngo wrote:
I'm not sure my comments belong here, since I seem to be a couple of decades senior to anyone else around, and the topic is "Aging," not "Actually Getting Old." (I have a lot to say about the latter topic, but little of it good, except the evergreen: "If you don't like getting old, consider the alternative.") I can remember turning 40 (and 50, and 60), but I'm not sure that my recollections are germane to the discussion.
One thing I was struck by, however, which clearly distinguishes your generation from my parents', with me stuck somewhere in the middle. Everyone seems to take it for granted that physical fitness, whether pursued through martial arts or jogging or whatever, is an appropriate, even mandatory, aspect of dealing with aging.
This was not always true. In my parents' generation - when I was growing up - nobody in middle age lifted weights except a few bizarre "bodybuilders" (cf. the documentary "Pumping Iron," featuring a young Arnold S!), nobody ran except very odd marathoners, and nobody did martial arts except Asian immigrants.
Ordinary people, of all classes, indulged in physical exercise only to the extent that they enjoyed it, either intrinsically or for social reasons. Golf. Tennis. Bowling. Swimming. Walking (not running!) in the countryside. I suspect that most people would have regarded as self-indulgent, if not actually narcissistic, any focus on personal "fitness" for its own sake.
This has all changed, and I am caught in the middle - not committed enough to actually keep fit, but just enough to feel guilty about not doing so. I am now grateful for "Wii," just discovered since Christmas (thank you, Anarch!).
Obviously there's a lot more to aging than this, and various people have made interesting comments about the psychology and sociology of no longer being among the Young.
But to a historian like myself, the curious development over recent generations is this rise of emphasis on *physical* aging, and how to slow or stop it. Is this a "Boomer" phenomenon, along with "Rock & Roll, Drugs, and F**cking in the Streets" (to quote the original manifesto of Michigan's White Panther Party)? Is it yet another manifestation of the faith that we can will our own destiny, rather than being swept along by larger forces such as time? Who knows?
I report - you decide.
Jun 04, 2010, 13:42:31 someotherdude wrote:
libjpn,
You know, I'm a comic book freak...but I am still totally ignorant of manga...I hope to compile a list of must read manga, for the summer.
dr ngo,
One of the reqired texts in my American Religions fields:
Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920 by Clifford Putney
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The jogging satisfies so many of my "addictions" I am a big believer in the jogger’s high…my brain is awash in endorphins…then there is the throbbing dance music that makes the “high” much more intense…most of my day is spent writing and reading to soundtracks, ambient, mellow trip-hop, solo piano, …so when I get to listen to listen to intense dance music…it just starts the day off, right.
Jun 05, 2010, 03:31:35 DonaldJ wrote:
I'm 50. The physical fitness thing with me is maybe 60 percent vanity and 40 percent maintaing health. On martial arts, I did Tai Chi for a few years but got bored. I was never advanced enough to be able to use it for self defense. I wish I remembered the "24" form--I'd do that daily if I remembered how, but I let it slip long enough so I only can do little bits and pieces.
So mostly I run (or do the elliptical machine) and lift weights and do Pilates or something similar, because otherwise my back will have problems.
It bugs me that I'm so much slower as a runner than I was 10 years ago, or even five years ago. I hope to see how much of my speed I can get back this summer (not that I was ever that fast to begin with). But my glory days as a runner (when I did a couple of marathons, both in the 3:40's) are way behind me.
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I'm 41 and, even though I can say that there are times and places where I "feel old" relative to those around me, I'm still waiting to feel like an adult. I don't know if that makes me an arrested adolescent or what, but I still semi-unconsciously see other people as being grown-ups and, as such, distinct from me in that aspect.
It's not like I can't do my job, raise my kids, be a reasonably good husband, keep up my home, handle my finances, take on other resposiblities or be relied upon. It's just that somehow, I still feel like a kid - not a 10-year-old, mind you, but somewhere in the 16 to 25 range (I guess). It's weird.