On the pleasures of age

two women actors show me how it's done

Here’s the thing about aging. Despite my many complaints, it definitely has its pleasures. Memories, for one.

“You want these curtains open?” says my spouse Janyce, standing at the end of the bed. She’s putting on a sweatshirt, her motions weirdly timed to the coffee pot gurgling through it’s final brew in the kitchen. It must be before 6:00 am on Saturday morning judging from how the receding night is rendered aglow in technicolor blue. I’m motionless under blankets to my chin, studying the waning moon that seems to be tangled up in thin black branches.

“I think I saw four fisher cats making their way across the front yard in a row, following the migratory path,” says Janyce. “It was dark, but I watched them cross the street and follow the neighbors’ rock wall all the way into the woods.”

“What’s your plan for the day?” I say.

“Workout, some work, Costco shopping for my parents,” she says. “Same routine.”

On a particularly zoom-weary workday this past week, I dragged myself into the living room at the end of the day to meet Janyce at the couch for dinner and a movie. She suggested a 2014 vampire movie starring one of our favorite actors, Tilda Swinton. I recognized myself in Tilda’s character, drained and wan, 4,000-yrs-old, and slowly moving through one day after another, living only for beauty, for art, and for the perfect cocktail. Tilda’s cocktail was blood, of course, served in an exquisitely-etched cordial glass. Mine was Janyce’s perfect manhattan made with Mad River Bourbon and a luxardo cherry, slightly stirred and poured into the chilled 19th-century antique coup glasses I got her for Christmas last year.

Critics of Jim Jarmusch’s film Only Lovers Left Alive harp on its conservatism, its countless literary jokes and insider-only references to the classics. It’s a tired trope, maybe— the malaise of the moody artist, the disdain for any new technology in favor of warped vinyl, spinning around and around on a turntable— but I liked it a lot. To me, reaching the end of this closed-up first year of pandemic life makes me nostalgic for everything that enthralled me in my youth: Shakespeare, Shelley, Middle Eastern music, melancholy everything. In the 1980s, my art school friends and I would meet in the daytime in a Cambridge coffee shop called Algiers, with its few rustic wooden tables and straight-backed schoolroom chairs tucked in dark corners. Shafts of sunlight through street-level windows would cast elongated shadows onto the damp basement walls. We’d drink pots of earl grey tea and listen to medieval stringed instruments piped through a sound system, lingering for hours over a sketchbook and philosophical conversation.

Here’s the thing about aging, despite my many complaints, it definitely has its pleasures. Memories, for one. More often lately, they seemingly come out of nowhere, spurred on by the smell of that new box of tea I just opened, or a particularly witty line from a movie that makes me chuckle in that same knowing way that someone belonging to an exclusive, “members only” club might do. I am transported back to the year, the day, the exact moment, and with brilliant clarity. I dread the passing of time less often these days, and instead I can now detect a feeling more like…well, pride maybe, at the richness of a life already half lived.

I’m also old enough now to have cultivated a true appreciation for the nuances of an expensive vermouth mixed with just the right version of bitters, sipped slowly and purposefully with a singular intent: to linger over the play of firelight on the amber liquid in the glass and not think a single thought about anything else.

We watched another film recently that referenced aging, too. But where Jarmusch’s film was tongue-in-cheek and fanciful, Nomadland was brutal, stark, and bleakly depressing. Except when it wasn’t. In the film, Frances McDormand, another favorite woman actor, stoically portrays the stinging realities of an older woman on her own, having now lived through countless losses both emotional and financial, but also having gained a certain tenacity for life on her own terms. The film is full of stunning vistas and poignant moments between older adults, who have each seen their fair share of both the best and the worst the world has to offer, and they spend their last quarter of life grappling with how they will choose to define its meaning.

Spring is on its way. It is. And this pandemic is coming to some kind of a close after a year, making way for something else. It’s still unsettling to me that I can’t see any farther out into the future and know what is on the horizon. But here’s another thing about aging, it was only ever youth that made me think that I knew what was next anyway. I’m too old to believe in that fantasy anymore. And I want to get on with the myriad pleasures of living right now. I’ll drink to that.