As Old As I Feel
It’s Mothers’ Day and it is hard not to remember that I am now at an age when my mother was well into her retirement from the UN and living in Las Vegas. When she was 68, I was 30 and had my own son. That seems like a very long time ago to me and while I’m sure my sister Barb, who lived near her all those years in Las Vegas, has memories of her as much from Las Vegas as from her earlier working life, I find myself thinking of those years as the downslope of her incredible life. In other words, I think of my mother’s life as mostly behind her at age 68. Since she lived to 100, the truth is that she lived much more of her adult life in Las Vegas in a retired state than she did as an international development professional roaming the world. In fact, if you think of her post-graduate work days as her truly professional life (when I give her a descriptor in a sentence, she is a UN Diplomat), she only spent twelve years in that life versus three times as many years in retirement. I find that an interesting take on my mother because who is to say she was more UN Diplomat than Las Vegas Grandmother?
When I sit and write in the mornings, as I am now doing, I rarely feel old. The oldest I feel every day is when I head off to bed. Usually, I have been sitting on my sofa/chaise, watching some TV and dipping in and out of my iPad doing something to while away the evening hours. Kim has usually toddled off to bed before me and when I turn off the TV, my first challenge is to overcome Newtonian inertia and get up from a relatively low sofa where there is no arm to brace a springy rise. When my son Thomas is here he always takes pride in helping his old man up with a manly grasp and tug. That strangely makes me feel young as I bounce up off the couch with his help. But when I am alone, I sit on the edge of the sofa (being careful not to wake Betty, who sleeps at my feet and is down for her nightly dozen hours) and concentrate on weight distribution, so that I can get up with a good wide stance, reducing the risk of toppling over from the effort and yet not endangering my knees from any over-exertion. Getting up is hardly a unique problem for this aging Boomer, and I do now understand why someone invented those chairs with the catapulting seats to help one get up. But it is not that tactical rise that makes me feel old, it actually makes me feel more wise than old.
When I do gain my footing at this last effort of the evening, I am facing a large wall mirror on the wall by the back hallway. It is a full-length mirror and I am its central object for the few moments I need to get all my muscles and joints working properly to carry me into the master bathroom for my nightly ablution. I am, momentarily, Frankenstein’s Monster, working diligently to put one foot in front of the other with great determination. Having been doubled up on the sofa for a while, my Dunlap waist tire is at its most relaxed and my belt buckle is drooping, making my stomach (admittedly far less bulbous than it has been most of my life) be most pronounced. No need for pants adjustment since I am off to bed, but it is an unavoidable moment of contemplation of the reality of who I am. The other reality beyond my bulk and my stiff-legged lifetime abuse of my body, is my face in the distant dim light. After years of disliking my baby-faced look, I am now quite comfortable with my facial looks in general, but I can’t really even see my face in that mirror. Against the white of my normal evening T-shirt, my face is one tanned and leathery piece of wood with a stubble of white beard at the bottom. Some nights (like last night), my face is so tanned that I cannot see any features at all except the white beard. That is the stumbling, shoulders-back, weathered-faced moment when I tell myself that I am all of my 68 years, and don’t you forget it.
But in the few steps I have until I reach the mirror and the hallway, I have moved on from the thought like Marcus Aurelius moving on from his chariot slave telling him he is just a man. I gain momentum in the hall as I reach back blindly to hit the living room light switch and insure that Betty is not right behind me and teed up for a face-full of closing door. As I round the turn into the bedroom I have regained my stride and my vigor (as it were) and barrel past Kim, be she asleep or Worddling herself to sleep into the master bath where the routine of light switches, electronics-recharging and clothes-shedding is well-rehearsed. My mind is on to the next day and what is in store, and one rarely feels old when thinking about the future in a pro-active way.
Yesterday we went to see the latest Liam Neeson movie, Memory. For some unremarkable reason, I learned last week that Liam Neeson turns 70 next month. I told Kim at that time that I was impressed by how young he seems and looks. In fact, I said that it made me feel old at 68 to see Liam Neeson at 70 looking so vital. Let’s face it, Liam Neeson has played some of the greatest roles of moviedom. Let me remind us he was the relentless father as Bryan Mills in Taken, Oskar Schindler, Dr, Martin Harris in Unknown, Henri Ducard in Batman Begins, Rob Roy, Michael Collins, the jailer Javert in Les Miserables, Qui-Gon Jinn in Star Wars, and countless nameless but memorable roles in everything from Love Actually to The Gangs of New York. While Neeson has played characters who have had vulnerable moments, he generally plays the down-to-earth solid citizen who is tough as nails and ever so relentless. His genre as an actor has become this avenging angel and he is damn good at it. I think it is fair to say that he is as type-cast as any actor I know at this point and only rarely gets to show a softer side.
Then I saw Memory. As the name implies, this movie has an element of aging out via dementia. We have seen great performances about Alzheimer’s Disease before, like Still Alice with Julianne Moore, The Notebook with Gena Rowland and James Garner, and the recent The Father with Anthony Hopkins, just to name a few. But when a type-cast tough guy like Liam Neeson gets Alzheimer’s and can’t remember who he is supposed to shoot or whether he has shot them already, it gets pretty crazy. We all came out of the movie, which was OK, but not his best, thinking that Liam Neeson’ s 100th film (joining the ranks of Susan Sarandon, Robert Duvall, Anthony Hopkins, Samuel L. Jackson, Danny Glover, Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland and Jackie Chan) may be his last action film. How does an action hero recover from severe and irreversible dementia and half a dozen bullets to the chest (spoiler alert)? I’m thinking that Liam is contemplating a genre change and that the avenging angel just died and shed his feathers like John Travolta in Michael.
The point here is that I no longer think Liam Neeson makes me feel or look so old. He looked VERY old in this movie (yes, I know there is such a thing as make-up). I will keep track of my aging every night in my living room mirror, but I prefer to think that I am as old as I feel and that means that at most times of the day, I still just a kid.