After what seemed a fairly short, swift journey, I had arrived at a strange place. I could feel the mist of Culture Shock swirling as I became aware of everything around me. Many things were familiar, yet apparently seen from an unaccustomed angle. I spoke the language, but not as well as I would have liked, or felt I should. I was somewhat taken aback by this feeling of strangeness; unfamiliarity. I had never been there before but had read up extensively on the place, yet obviously had not got the vision quite right. I had maps, which I had expected to be at least adequate, but now they seemed to bear little resemblance to the lay of the land.
Old Age is a strange place; don’t fool yourself, as you approach, that you know all about it. You don’t. Culture Shock awaits.
I had expected to reach old age at a steady pace, closing in on it year by year, but in fact it wasn’t like that at all. My psychological flight arrived in this strange land and suddenly here I am. Old.
I know that these days seventy is just the youth of old age, but it is old age nevertheless, albeit the early stages. And out of the blue it hit me one day not so long ago. I am old.
I arrived in this place partly via the aches and pains of arthritis, the unaccustomed urge for afternoon naps, and the disappearance of nouns from my vocabulary. I haven’t quite accepted that I actually am this person. Who is this Oldie masquerading as me? She walks a mile and starts chuntering on about how her knee will hurt tomorrow. She falls asleep in front of the TV, in spite of that newly discovered joy, afternoon naps. She can never find her car keys no matter how absolutely sure she is of where she left them, and she blanks out on her neighbor’s name.
It’s all part of that business of familiar things not feeling exactly as they should.
Then of course there’s the visual. Some days I look in the mirror and see my father; sometimes my mother. I see a recent photo and am shocked by the wrinkled neck and baggy eyes, and again I see my mother or father, rather than me. I seem to be disappearing into some ancestral version of myself.
And it’s not just how I feel and what I see, but what I hear. I almost speak the lingo, I possess a reasonable vocabulary, but much of it doesn’t resonate with me, rather like speaking the basics of a foreign language but missing the nuances, the subtleties. It’s all about 24/7 and sexting and texting, RAMs and blogs and twitters and tweets. Nouns have morphed into verbs. It’s about the “F” word, and many other words rarely heard in my youth, scattered liberally and without purpose throughout even the most erudite of conversations.
It’s also about what I use, as well as what I feel, see, and hear.. We who suffer this Culture Shock have dealt with endless technological innovations throughout our lives. We have struggled from no phones to wind-up phones to heavy bakelite with rotary dials to push-button to cordless to cell phones. And now we have smart phones. In my opinion they should be called outsmart phones because they outsmart a lot of old folks. Or maybe, just maybe, we’re the smart ones. We know enough to know we don’t need them.
Any time I have to unplug the various attachments from my TV – cable box, DVD player, roku box – I have to photograph how it’s all hooked up, first, to protect myself from hours of frustration later; which I do, of course, with my digital camera. Yes, some unfamiliar familiar things, I must confess, are wonderful. I still have my mother’s 1930s folding camera, but you don’t have to go back much more than twenty years to remember the slow, cumbersome, expensive processes accompanying the old film cameras
Indeed, Culture Shock is not necessarily a bad thing. It challenges us, focuses our brains, and stimulates adrenaline.
But Old Age is a worrisome place. We worry not only about our own futures, but also those of our offspring, our country, and indeed the world. With the threat of climate change hanging over us, we worry about the very survival of the human race. I think all “wrinklies”, throughout human history, have had the same worries for the future. Growing up, I heard my grandparents and parents, and many others of their generations, say things like, “Even though I lived through two World Wars I’m so glad I lived when I did. I dread to think what the future holds…”
I suppose they worried over the propensity of atom and hydrogen bombs and the Cold War; the rapidly increasing numbers of unmarried mothers and divorces, the exponential increases in crimes of all kinds but especially violent crimes, and the unheralded rush of people to the ever-expanding sinful cities. But we survived everything they worried about, and more. We dealt with it, so why don’t we have faith in our grandchildren that they will handle a changing challenging world just as we did, and all will be well? This future-fear just seems to go with the territory. I bet there were oldies sitting round campfires shaking their heads over the invention of the wheel, and surely Adam and Eve knew that the Garden was going to need environmental protection from the ravening hordes of the younger generations.
We can’t see the future and so we fear no good will come of it. We prefer, more and more the longer we live in Old Age, the past. And probably we remember it through ever more rosily tinted glasses. The journey to Old Age seems shorter, more condensed, as I age. My sense of time past is a little skewed. Not long ago I chanced to refer, to some young thing, to the fact that we all remember where we were when Kennedy was shot. The look I got caused me to pause for calculation. Of course, not only was this teenager not yet born on that dark November day in 1963: neither were his parents.
But there is one wonderful, wonderful, thing about life in Old Age. I am finally, completely, at peace with who I am, relaxed comfortably in my skin, and I believe many other oldies are too. And I am not just talking about GLBT people; I think it’s true for many of any persuasion. After what for some has been almost an entire lifetime’s struggle, we can relax. We know who we are, we are who we are, and we are all done apologizing for it, even, or perhaps especially, to ourselves. It’s something of a paradox, as I have just said that I sometimes can scarcely recognize this oldie me. But I am more than simply the sum of all I feel, see, hear, and do.
Deep inside my spirit is untouched by Culture Shock. I am at peace.
© 23 November 2012
About the Author
I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.
