Geezer in Paradise
Aging is like going through a funnel. You start out with so much room, spinning so fast, wondering just how far you can go, but in the end you wind up going through the hole.
Albert Brooks
There is no set date for it, but geezerdom seems to start around the time when the odometer rolls down towards 70. It’s very different from being a fresh, young “senior citizen” who has just turned 55, and signed up for AARP, excited that you can get discounts at the movies. Geezerdom comes later, when your body starts to fall apart in a major way, your face starts to looks like a cadaver, and you become invisible to the world.
I thought that by moving to Hawaii, I could add on a few more years of looking like a young, healthy “senior.” I could at least have a tan, wear my hair in a pony-tail, and look like an eccentric hippie. But not so. The young, hip clerks in grocery stores either look right through me, as if I don’t exist, or they make an effort to be real polite, “Do you need some help with your bags today, sir?” No, of course I don’t need help with my goddamned bags! Perhaps if I lived in Florida, and not Hawaii, it would be different. Both the clerks and the baggers would be older than I am.
Well, at least there is one fellow geezer here on the island who hasn’t faded into the woodwork. His name, of course, is Ram Dass, the grand elder statesman who inspired a whole pack of baby boomers through the sixties, seventies, and eighties. He wrote the cult classic Be Here Now way over 35 years ago. His marvelous book Still Here shows boomers how they can age gracefully. Since his stroke ten years ago, after which he was confined to a wheelchair, Ram Dass doesn’t get around much anymore. But he still shows up just about everywhere on Maui to lend his shining presence to events.
When he holds his monthly get-togethers, there are always a lot of young people—island hippies, a young mother with a baby at her breast, bronzed young men with sun-bleached hair in a ponytail. Now, unlike me, they don’t see Ram Dass as an old fart. What’s the difference? One difference is that they admire him for all the drugs he has taken (this is Maui, remember?). Another is that he laughs at himself a lot—and at the world. And most of all, he sees no difference between himself and anyone out there. For Ram Dass, there is just life going on around him. He doesn’t judge people their looks, what they’re wearing, or by how young or old they are.
And most people don’t judge him; they love him.
So the next time I feel invisible or feel judged for being old, it is an opportunity for me to see what is beyond age, beyond looks, and beyond the body. Let’s face it, we scare the hell out of these guys. They’re terrified they will become like us—and they will!
If we can find it in ourselves to love them—even if they appear not to see us, or speak slowly and in a loud voice, believing we’re deaf and stupid—love will melt away all the differences. Because love is all there is, and it is who we are.