Go Like 60!

"Tell me one thing that's good about being 60." I'm at my dentist's office, and his assistant has just discovered that we are very nearly the same age. She takes great delight in knowing that I am a few months older than she.

But her question stumps me. She notices my pause, my unusual lack of a quick answer. Any snappy retort I might have spoken has already snapped like the buttons of those who don't eat at Subway. But even the ricochet strikes nothing worth repeating.

"See!" she says, triumphantly. "There's nothing good about being 60!"

Especially for women, I'm thinking, remembering a conversation I'd had recently with a female friend who wanted to set me up with a friend of a friend. "But she's over 60," my would-be yenta lamented. And we went on to talk about how women "change" when they get to 60, how they feel their age in certain sad, fleshly ways. We concurred with the old cliche that men get distinguished, women just get old, and the time for that turning seems to be about the age of 60.

I don't know the truth of any of this, but I'm guessing that my dentist's assistant was thinking something along these lines about herself, and feeling a kind of loss of attractiveness or desirability. I'm guessing that this varies, and I'm sure it is more or less an internal sort of thing. I mean, my dentist's assistant was attractive enough to me that I might have flirted with her if she weren't married. But then, I've been told I flirt a lot, even indiscriminately.

The saying goes that "there's no fool like an old fool," and I'm just now finding out what that means. One of my discoveries on reaching 60 is that, while I've been a fool many, many times before, now I'm having the experience of being an old fool! It's having a curbing effect on my flirting, as if at this ripe age I might finally be learning to be a little more discriminating.

Unfortunately, it just feels like I'm too old to have as much fun as I used to! Now THAT is a sad thought!

Being 60 has led to another kind of vulnerability besides the relational one, and that's the vocational one, the one that connects the significance of one's life to one's accomplishments. Much more than the way my age influences my attractiveness in terms of how other people see me, my age influences my sense of my life's meaningfulness.

(Of course how I am perceived by others is no small thing: just try to get a real job or even health insurance when one is 60 or older! I was told by a health insurance salesman the other day that "60 is the age when everyone starts 'breaking down'." I told him we aren't used cars... But he didn't seem to get the point. Besides, he's got a ways to go before he's 60!)

Anyway, I'm watching this movie the other night, a foreign film that, on the eve of the Oscar's, is being re-released into selected theaters, as foreign films seem to be. I read a wonderful review of it in the paper, and then, lo and behold, discovered it on my cable's pay-per-view! This is the closest thing to an Act of God (at least, a positive one) to happen to me for some time.

The name of the movie is, "The Secret of the Grain." It is French, with English subtitles, and it is about a Tunisian man and his family, so even the French is not what we learned in school, because it is spiced with Arabic like en Provence with turmeric. Point is, the man is 61, and he's just been laid off from a ship yard where he's worked for 35 years.

He's at a certain point in his life that resembles mine in the uncomfortable way that art and life can imitate each other. There was one line in the movie that especially resonated with me, a line that revealed his innermost thoughts. He says, "All this time, and what do I have to leave my children? What do I have to show for my life?" At least, that's a reasonable facsimile of what the line is, and I can't remember whether he actually says, "nothing," or just distinctly implies it.

Either way, what he expresses is what it means to be 60 and male. There truly is this turning in us, from the so-called "power years" of the 50's to the "dis-empowered" ones that begin in the 60's. We go from feeling we are useful to fearing that we are utterly useless to anyone.

Realizing that this turning is occurring can lead to some rather comic/tragic decision making. In the movie, the man decides to invest his severance in transforming a scrapped fishing boat into a restaurant. I decided to invest my retirement in writing. In the movie, the man's decision has some tragic consequences-- but as I was watching it, I kept hoping they were going to turn out comically! I have the same experience in watching my own life: I keep hoping it is going to turn out comically.

In either case, I am learning first hand more about what it means that "there is no fool like an old fool!"

And when I come up with an answer to what is "good" about being 60, I'll let you, and my dentist's assistant, know.