Getting wound up about the fate that awaits us all
at ‘‘sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’’.
However, there are a number of rather more humdrum explanations for my quisling behaviour.
Firstly, age and ageing get a lot of bad press. Western culture celebrates (quite rightly) the energy and beauty of youth, but older people get short shrift. Unless, that is, they are being toadied to as potential purchasers of funeral insurance, mobility scooters, luxury cruises and retirement village apartments. In any other context and en masse, older people constitute a feared ‘‘grey tsunami’’ which will drown entire economies. Who wants to admit to belonging to such a destructive force?
Secondly, I find it hard to embrace any of the terms used to describe people over 65. I don’t feel elderly. I don’t feel like a superannuitant, a pensioner, or a retiree. These terms don’t recognise the differences between a 65-year-old and an 85-year-old. Neither do they take into account the significant differences in class, abilities, interests, health or life experience. Instead, the individuals who make up the ‘‘ageing population’’ are spoken about as they are one great undifferentiated lump of humanity.
In my experience, people don’t become more alike the moment they turn 65. Apart from an inexplicable surge of interest in golf, bridge and mahjong, older people seem to become more individuated when free of the constraints that come with holding down a job and being a parent.
Thirdly, and compounding the problem, older people are often talked about, and treated, as if they have no agency of their own, and are separate and unconnected to society in any meaningful way.
By the time I had finished my coffee and begun a tour of Motueka’s op shops, the shame for my perfidious behaviour had almost faded. Fate, however, wanted to keep the memory fresh: on the counter of the very first op shop I entered, I discovered a figurine of an elderly woman with a winding mechanism protruding from her side.
The little plastic woman had a shapeless body, a bent back, spindly legs, grey hair drawn back in a bun, and a face with the caved-in look of the toothless. On her feet she wore sensible shoes fastened with Velcro straps, and she leaned forward at a perilous angle, clutching the handles of a tiny Zimmer frame for support.
When I wound her up, she tottered a few jerky, unsteady paces along the counter top, pushing her Zimmer frame valiantly before her. Then she ground to a halt, head thrust forward like a turtle’s from its shell. If I hadn’t already understood why, in the cafe, I had so much wanted not to be identified as an ageing woman, this haunting, rickety little figure would have supplied the answer.
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