A Change is Gonna Come

New Schedule, with a glimpse of what's to come

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

My next post – next Monday – will be about the seductive half-truth, “Age is just a number.”  The pretense that old age is not different from middle age springs from a fear: that any real differences would be losses. Not true! Many are gifts. One is freedom from deadlines imposed by others.

Writing that sentence last week, I realized how many I had imposed on myself. And so I’m lifting some self-imposed deadlines and shifting others.

From now on, I will post every Monday, but only half the time will the posts be of the kind I’ve done up to now – researched opinion columns. Others (like this one) will be brief and casual. Often they’ll follow up on what I’ve posted before, or preview what’s coming next.

To set the stage for next week’s post, I share the thoughts of Kate Lindemann. Like me she is a retired philosophy professor; also my friend since grad school. Kate would never say that age is just a number. (Background: she was born in the mid 1930s and grew up in the Bronx.)

I have come to realize that have never really wanted to be or look young. Even as a child it seemed to me that the old (grandmothers, grandfathers, the oldest man at Broncado's grocery, even the woman down the block) as well as the old persons I would see when I went out or to Church etc. These were the people who had the social power . . . who younger persons respected. I never realized that this set me in a different place from many of my peers . . .  until I read [Facebook] posts from this group [Old Enough To Know]. I always wanted to be old .... never again to again hear "you are too young . . . or wait till you are older.” To have all those stories . . . to be spared from back breaking labor since the younger were expected to step up . . . to know just what might fix something -- from a broken step to some pain in the body. . . . Oh, the freedom of it all . . . no need to compete or . . .  And I always thought that the very young are much more at ease with the old that with teen through adult people. Maybe it's a different perspective but I really stand more with Cavafy than with those who try to cling to adulthood. . . .

“As you set out for Ithaka / hope your road is a long one .  . .” Cavafy