The Gifts Reserved for Age

I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger. — “Ooh La La,” 1973 song by the English rock band Faces

Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then. —“Against the Wind,” 1980 song by Bob Seger

Earl Fowler

A friend sent me a link to a video in which stand-up comedian Andy Huggins, then 74, jokingly referred to his arthritis as early-onset rigor mortis.

I laughed. But if you stood that observation on its head, would that mean zombies view rigor mortis as a form of pre-owned arthritis?  (You know how it goes in these never-ending existential debates. We say tomato. They say Make America Great Again.)

Anyway, all this abstruse hypothesizing got me thinking about other more fanciful ways of describing what well-known party goy T.S. Eliot, in his poem Little Gidding (the final of his Four Quartets), portentously referred to as “the gifts reserved for age.”

As Old Possum (Ezra Pound’s apt nickname for the stodgy Eliot) saw them, old age delivers three grim gifts, and we’re not talking gold, frankincense or myrrh.

Rather, our longevity awards unspool over time with such unwonted gaiety as: a) “the cold friction of expiring sense,” leaving only the “shallow fruit” or “bitter tastelessness” of life; b) “the conscious impotence of rage,” by which Eliot meant the frustration older people feel at helplessly witnessing human folly repeated time and time again, coupled with painful laughter at things that no longer amuse us; and c) “the rending pain of re-enactment,” that is, those haunting memories of sins, errors and pain inflicted on others even when one was trying to do the right thing.

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but with a sphincter. By 1942, when Eliot published this sobering take on aging, the persnickety Anglo-Catholic had morphed from a leading figure of innovative Modernist poetry into a 54-year-old pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas. The singing mermaids had packed it in and the peach was left unmunched.

But we’ll leave the psychological trauma of aging in the palms of the poet’s soiled hands, his soul stretched tight across the sky, against which the evening is spread out like a patient etherized upon a table. Instead, let’s follow Huggins’s more playful, insouciant insight into the joys and challenges of aging. I spit coffee all over my keyboard when he said: “I had a colonoscopy, and when it was over they said: ‘We’ll see you in 10 years.’ And I thought: ‘The fuck you will.’ ”

In that spirit, here are some re-imagined ways of describing life’s more corporeal, somatic and particularly palpable presents for those among us who have sprung a leak, as it were, in the temporal timeframe.

I wanna get physical, physical. Let me hear your body crack:

1. Osteoporosis – Bone Jenga (aka Skeleton on Airplane Mode)

2. Arthritis – Joint Custody

3. Tinnitus – The Body’s End Credits in Surround Sound

4. Cataracts – Vaseline Blur-glary Filter

5. Sciatica – Pain in the Assets

6. Memory Loss – Recall-lectile Dysfunction

7. High Cholesterol – Plaque to the Future

8. Balance Issues – Trip Advisor

9. GERD / Acid Reflux – Lava Lamp Esophagus

10. Insomnia – A Restless Development

And like that. But to get to the point — and I don’t really have one — one could make a case that the psychological and physical downsides of fading, waning, fermenting, slumping and crumbling are more than compensated for by the keener sense of irony one develops before lapsing into senescence, decrepitude, infirmity and imbecility.

Some more black humour by another comic I dig, Maria Bamford: My mom has always been weight-focused and she did express satisfaction about reaching goal weight in the year before she died. I DID tell her that even if a coffin is tight around the hips, eventually it fits. She told me not to use that joke in my act. But the joke’s on me: She got herself cremated and now she’s just a POUND! She can wear ANYTHING!

OK, so maybe the downside of getting old is not really offset by whatever upside there is. But still. What choice do we have? As Alanis Morissette liked to remind us in that song about a 98-year-old man who won a lottery and died the next day: “And isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think?”

Yes, I do. And the ironies of aging, it seems to me, fall into two broad categories: Hallmarkesque and Kierkegaardian.

The former are usually along the lines of “youth is wasted on the young,” a bromide often attributed to either George Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde, though it appears in neither of their published works. What Shaw actually said came to the same thing but was more elegantly stated: “Youth is the most beautiful thing in this world — and what a pity that it has to be wasted on children!”

Meaning, of course, that you need the wisdom and experience that comes with aging to fully appreciate the energy, health and freedom you once took for granted but no longer have. I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger.

Kierkegaardian ironies are existential punches to the gut, more along the lines of: “You spent years damaging yourself for free. Now you pay good money to undo it and still feel betrayed. You idiot.”

Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then. Some observations from the Jagged Little Pill School of Irony about going to seed:

1. You realize life has no clear meaning … around the same time your back develops very strong opinions.
   

2. You finally understand yourself, which is tragic, because the version of you that needed this information no longer exists.
   

3. You stop chasing immortality and start chasing comfort, which somehow feels simultaneously like character development and surrender.
   

4. Memories become clearer than plans. The future is vague, the past is vivid and the present needs reading glasses.
   

5. You don’t feel older like you thought you would — instead, you feel like the same person watching a stranger slowly replace your body, piece by piece.
   

And the biggest irony of all: You spend your youth trying to become someone, only to spend the rest of your life learning how to let that someone go. You outgrow the person you worked so hard to become, the way a snake outgrows its skin — confused, a little itchy, relieved when it’s over. Possibly venomous.

The absurd comfort at the centre of it all:

You are temporary, but you are not a mistake. You are a brief, strange sentence the universe tried out — and liked well enough to let you finish.

No less than the trees and the stars, we’re rising into the realm of the fustian and sliding into Desiderata territory here, which always made me roll my eyes whenever the Les Crane spoken-word version would come on the radio or I’d see a poster of Max Ehrmann’s 1927 prose poem on somebody’s dorm wall in the sixties or seventies.

But as Bamford likes to ask: “Why else be alive except to make fun of the things that are important to you?”

The really ironic thing is that we were so much older then. We’re younger than that now.