U and me

Roger Angell, Donald Hall... I've been enjoying my time with the Geriatric Literature genre this week, I'm wondering what to read next. Jimmy Carter's written some poetry, he's 97. But he writes like an engineer/politician. Angell and Hall have set the bar high. Hall in particular is brutally frank, and at the same time funny, about the challenges and indignities of growing old in America. But Roger made it happily (it seems) to 101, Donald more or less so to 89 in 2018... after a painful and prolonged period of depressed loneliness--not to be confused with the preferred state of creative solitude--when Jane died much too soon in 1995. 

I'm 65. Ray Liotta the actor died yesterday at 67, my friend in Huntsville texted to point out. We turned 21 on successive days in 1978 as undergraduates at Mizzou. Suddenly it seems, here we are in the country of old men. And Ray's returned to the cornfield.

The passing of people in my cohort is becoming more frequent. I recall it as commonplace, in my childhood, for family elders to die in their 60s. Nobody was surprised. Most actually seemed relieved. There wasn't a popular expectation or demand for happy Golden Years.

But that was before the U-curve was proposed and propagated, the idea that it's normal to be happy in childhood and then again post-middle age, with a dip in the middle. 

"Lately, however, the curve has invited skepticism. Apparently, its trajectory holds true mainly in countries where the median wage is high and people tend to live longer or, alternatively, where the poor feel resentment more keenly during middle age and don't mind saying so. But there may be a simpler explanation: perhaps the people who participate in such surveys are those whose lives tend to follow the curve, while people who feel miserable at seventy or eighty, whose ennui is offset only by brooding over unrealized expectations, don't even bother to open such questionnaires..."

No you don't, New Yorker, you're not going to take away my U-curve just when I need it most. I'm planning to continue my ascent up the right face of the U. It'll help if I can find some more good writing on the subject. Arthur Krystal won't cut it. But I do appreciate his appreciation of Oliver Sacks's approach to the last chapters. "We should all make peace with aging. And so my hat is off to Dr. Oliver Sacks, who chose to regard old age as 'a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.'"

There U go. Gotta look on the bright side of the aging process.