“The shaman called me ‘old white man,’” he said before slipping into an exhausted sleep.
Saint Martin-in-the-Fields was beginning to look good.
Coming of Age in Elderhostel
You folks must be here for the Elderhostel program,” said the gentleman behind the reception desk. He said this without the slightest hint of doubt, as if we looked our age, as if we belonged here with these old people, milling about the Atheneum Hotel at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. Was there something wrong with his eyesight?
Elderhostel programs, read the catalog, are for people aged fifty-five and up. Up to what, they do not say. Larry and I are sixty-four and sixty-five respectively, so I suppose it might be said that we qualify.
As much as I do not like getting older, I especially do not like being seen as a member of a designated age group, especially the final one. I do not want to be part of a cohort whose members are called senior citizens, as if they were overdecorated officers in a production of The Pirates of Penzance. Nor can I be anything but suspicious of an age group that has to offer its potential members discounts in order to get them to join. Am I being bribed, rewarded, or banished?
Larry, at least regarding the issue of aging, is the saner of us. He takes the discount and runs, for one thing. For another, he has fully absorbed the fact that he is getting old—I think he figured it out the first time he almost didn’t recognize his reflection in a shop window. Me? I like to think AARP is the sound a dog makes.
Larry also thinks that since aging is inevitable, it is therefore in one’s own best interests to accept it, even to embrace it, instead of clinging pathetically to the notion that one is always and forever the youngest person in the room. He’s been sneaking into the movies as a senior citizen for years. “Two seniors,” he says, and they let us both in.
The man in reception handed us each a key to the room, a name card on a chain saying who we were and where we came from, and a schedule of events. He asked us to turn in our car keys. Parking, he told us, was not allowed on the narrow streets of Chautauqua. Our car would be taken to an outlying lot. We could send for it whenever we wished.
So many people had signed up for the five-day lecture program, “American Diplomacy in the Twenty-first Century,” that we’d been divided into four groups, each with forty members. The groups were named after pastel colors. We were in the blue group.
One glance at the schedule told me that older people like to run themselves ragged on vacation. Breakfast was at 7:00 A.M. The bus left the hotel at 8:45 for the first lecture, which was at 9:00 A.M. That wasn’t going to give me enough time to eat breakfast, wait for the Celebrex to take effect, tie my Dyna-Bands onto the bedpost, do my rotator cuff exercises, and walk to the first lecture. (I wouldn’t have been caught dead taking the bus.) At 10:45 there was another lecture, followed by lunch at noon and a third lecture at 2:00 P.M. Dinner was at 5:30 P.M. and the musical entertainment started at 7:30 P.M. Then it was lights-out. For the next five days, we were going to be living on elder saving time.
The last time we had lived as members of a group on a schedule was in 1971 at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. There, Larry’s need to be the exception to the rule was oddly tested. Esalen, the source and font of the human-potential movement, was a place where you were supposed to do whatever you wanted. You were invited to get into tubs with other nude people. You were applauded for pounding a pillow while berating your mother. You were encouraged to tell people exactly what you thought about them, “openly and honestly,” in twice-daily encounter groups. Then you were supposed to close your eyes and fall backward into their waiting arms. It was a trust exercise.
Another favorite group activity at Esalen was the telling and interpretation of dreams. One person dreamed she was a storm trooper; another was a grain of brown rice. (This was California when macrobiotics were big.) Jungian dream interpretation was also in style. This meant that when you told your dream, you were not to say, “I dreamed I was a grain of brown rice,” because that distanced you from the experience. “I am a piece of brown rice” is how you were supposed to begin. Rebellion under such liberal circumstances is hard to come by, but when it got to be his turn, Larry found a way. “I am a Peruvian dwarf transvestite,” he began.
Larry does not like regimentation. He does not take well to incursions into his personal freedoms, like having to wear a name tag around his neck, keep to a schedule, be in a color group, or be asked to hand over his car keys. He doesn’t like authority and he doesn’t like rules. He’s a lawyer.
Orientation was at 4:00 P.M. sharp in the hotel parlor. We showed up a little late and sat in the back of the room, on the side, from which vantage point I quickly observed that elderhostelers, with a few exceptions, do not dye their hair or get their faces lifted, two antiaging options that had recently crossed my mind; nor do they wear blue jeans that hurt when they sit down. They wear pants with elastic waists.
“We look younger than these people, right?” I whispered in Larry’s ear.
My question was met with an ominous silence.
“No, really, Larry. I’m serious.”
“Don’t worry,” he says. “You’re the youngest woman in Elderhostel not on a walker.”
After a few welcoming remarks and a stern warning—“lectures start on time”—we were asked to introduce ourselves. Most of the people in the blue group were retired. There were lots of former schoolteachers, a handful of professors, a couple of MDs, an engineer, a priest, a retired lawyer, and a woman who claimed she was a retired astronaut. (Later the woman confessed to Larry that she’d only said that because she was annoyed by the dazzling display of high-minded, if retired, professional prowess on display around her. She won his instant admiration. Larry has a warm spot for the misbehaving elderly.)
Eating lunch and dinner with the aged gave us an opportunity to find out what retired people do. It turns out they work. The schoolteachers volunteer in the schools. The priest ministers to the sick and dying. The professors continue to write scholarly works, the doctors volunteer in clinics, and the engineers consult. In their spare time they build habitats for humanity and take piano lessons.
Older people are especially fond of outdoor adventures. They hike in Patagonia, trek in Nepal, and slog through the rain forests in Costa Rica, just like we did when we were younger. Rocking is out. So are float-and-bloat cruises. Warming your old bones in the sun won’t do. Nor will teeing off, playing doubles, or visiting your children. It’s got to be a “learning-adventure vacation.” The new elderly work at play.
They vacation with a vengeance. It is not good enough to visit a Navajo pueblo, watch a Native American rain dance, have a nice southwestern dinner, and call it a day. Only the slothful elderly would visit an ancient Anasazi ruin without getting down on their hands and knee replacements for a week or two and sifting for ancient pottery shards. For vacationers too feeble to dig, run rapids, visit every state in the continental U.S.A. in a trailer, or sign up for Elder-Everest, there’s always a fifteen-mile-per-day bike trip.
They seem not to want to stay at home in their own time zone, tend to their recalcitrant bodily functions, have insomnia in their own beds, watch travel documentaries on TV, and otherwise enjoy the rest that is their due after a lifetime of vigorous vacationing. They will not rent a house in Florence or Provence for a month and just hang out. They will not take it easy. Even at play, the new old are pursued by the puritan ethic. Some of them are on nearly perpetual vacation, returning to their condos or retirement villages only to do the wash, buy a new pair of Nikes, and repack. They have traded their birthright—leisure—for a mess of activity.
When it comes to intellectual pursuits, elder vacation behavior seems equally counterintuitive. Elderhostelers, we noticed, are eager students. In their second childhood, they go to the head of the class. They fill up the front rows first. They pay attention. They take notes as if there were going to be a test. They wave their hands to be called on.
They ask interesting and informed questions. They keep the lecturer pinned to his podium after class.
When I went to grammar school, people who did that were called brownnosers. I know. I was one. When the teacher asked, “Why must I always see the same hands?” she meant me.
But would I like to go to school instead of on vacation? Do I want to attend three classes a day and learn for the sake of learning, when it’s getting harder and harder to concentrate and I’m probably not going to remember anything by the next day anyway?
The year before, submitting to elderpressure at home, I had joined a reading group. (The other alternatives available to my age group—the perpetually late middle-aged—were joining an investment club or learning to play bridge.) The group took a vote and decided that we should avoid reading Oprahratic contemporary works and instead focus on the classics, books we’d either missed entirely when we were at school or had always meant to read but never did, and, as it turned out, for good reason.
Last summer’s reading assignment was Don Quixote, 936 pages of tiny, closely leaded type. After 250 pages, and with renewed enthusiasm for The Man of La Mancha, I quit. Maybe I don’t want to fight the implacable foe. (Remembrance of Things Past was also no piece of cake.)
By day three at Elderhostel, after faithfully attending lectures on American diplomacy in Japan, South America, and the Middle East, rushing around, eating on time, and earnestly pursuing intellectual enlightenment, we busted out.
Larry said he had a shaggy fingernail, so he had to go to the nearest town to get an emery board right away. I volunteered to keep him company.
“Turn right!” I said as soon as we hit the open road.
“Now turn left,” I cried.
It’s a game we play when we travel. The passenger gets to call the turn, according to his or her whim. The driver must obey. We first played “turn right, turn left” on our honeymoon. That’s how, while on the road from Florence to Rome, we discovered the ancient wall paintings in Tarquinia.
This time we ended up in Jamestown, New York, famous for being the birthplace of Lucille Ball. There’s a museum and a gift shop devoted to her memory.
“These older people are very admirable,” I allowed as I wandered through the shop, trying to decide between the Vitameatavegamin refrigerator magnet and the T-shirt.
“Intellectually lively,” said Larry.
“And curious,” I added.
“Physically very energetic too.”
“They don’t even carry pictures of their grandchildren.”
“They don’t think about being old.”
“They don’t ever talk about their aches and pains.”
“Or their doctors or their pills. They have a healthy outlook,” said Larry.
“They’re in complete denial,” I said. “I want to be just like them when I grow up.”
Epilogue
We have finally done it. We have rented a house in Provence for next September. For the entire month our home address will be L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. We made up our minds last spring when we re-revisited the town that had charmed us when we first saw it on market day in the fall of 1998. There we’d be again, walking arm in arm through the streets where we stood four years earlier and listened to the accordion player entertain. There was the bridge we’d crossed over the river—the very bench on which we’d sat and watched the huge paddles of an ancient wooden waterwheel, draped with vegetation, churn at the river.
One would have thought, given our record for fatal rental fantasies, that neither of us would have dared to say, “Wouldn’t it be great to live here for a while?” But one of us did. I think it was me.
This time, though, it will be different. This fantasy is different because it has some reality built in. We’re going to study French in France. It’s pretty obvious by now that we’re never going to take a Berlitz course when we get home. Besides, as everybody knows, the best way to learn a language is to live in the country where it’s spoken. And it’s definitely the way to break through the tourist barrier and make oneself feel at home.
Every morning we’ll wake up and ride our bikes to the café where we’re regulars and they like us even though we’re Americans. Larry will smoke. Then, from 9:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M. we’ll be studying conversational French with Madame Desroziers, according to her “totale immersion” method. We probably won’t get to be fluent in a month, but atleast we are not going to be spending the rest of what’s left of our lives circumlocuting the French language, groping for nouns and idioms until les vaches come home.
After school, we’ll gather together our authentic Provençal dinners from various local merchants. Larry will ask them about the best local cheeses and wines.
We won’t need a lot of stuff. The house comes furnished with linens and all the other essentials. We’re each going to pack at most a couple of pairs of jeans and some T-shirts, and maybe something slightly dressy, in case we want to treat ourselves to a restaurant meal now and then. We want to slow down the pace of our lives. Mostly we’re just going to hang around the house and take it easy. The place we’ve rented has two bedrooms and two baths, so if you think you’d like to visit Provence next summer, why don’t you plan to spend at least a few days with us? No, really.
Traveling while Married Page 9
