Vanity, thy name is oldster

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Ian Brown is a feature writer with The Globe and Mail. His latest book is Seventy, Definitely the Beginning of the End: A Diary of My Seventy-First Year, from which the following essay has been adapted.

Winter

Today (Feb. 4, 2024) is my 70th birthday. Fishing around in my phone for some vanished thought – at 70, if I don’t write them down they’re gone like children whose hand you momentarily unclasp in a crowd only to discover that they’ve disappeared – I stumbled across the photographs from last December’s Christmas lunch of my high-school graduating class. We graduated in 1972.

I have been afraid to look at the pictures. They’re pretty shattering: close-ups of a dozen guys, pomegranate faces and rolling-hill jowls, sagging skin. There’s one that shows me cupping my ear, to hear better, even with my hearing aids, which makes me look like an inmate in one of Hogarth’s madhouse drawings, yearning toward the undecipherable sounds of my now dying world.

I have been convinced for a couple of years that something happens to the male face after 70 that makes it impossible to smile naturally in a photograph. In one’s late thirties, the musculature and elastin of the face begins to weaken, so there’s that: The battle is over much sooner than anyone realizes. The subcutaneous fat of the face begins to migrate from under the eyes south to the now flapping jowls, leaving caverns behind. As I hit 70, in every picture anyone takes of me, I’m caught looking either a) insanely over-enthusiastic or b) as if I am recovering from an invasive procedure at the proctologist. Those are the only alternatives.

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But why wouldn’t I look agonized? Seventy is a graver age than 60, edgier, more existential. I can no longer avoid noticing how quickly the time I have left is rushing by – it’s a steady onshore breeze – and how much there is to lose.

Seventy is serious. The seriousness often engulfs me like an atmosphere. And it isn’t just me that creates the fog, though I do my neurotic part; it’s the sad, cautious bureaucracy of aging, the array of orthodoxies pushed onto men and women as they get older— as if we’re all suddenly the same, with the same incapabilities and the same non-longings. Oh, you’re 65? You’re a senior, you must do what seniors do and retire. What, you’re 70? You shouldn’t be taking any risks, so for God’s sake stop travelling/skiing/running/driving/screwing/opening your eyes in the morning: You could hurt yourself. Two months ago, learning that I still ski in the backcountry, someone shouted: “Ian, that’s insane!”

But aging’s lousy reputation can’t be blamed entirely on ageism. The vanity of the elderly is another culprit – a force that drives the complicated truth about getting older underground, away from the light of candour. If we could overcome, or at least be open to, our fear of life (because it ends up being about fragility and death), this wouldn’t be such a problem. Much of the difficulty of getting older comes down to vanity. It’s pretty much the last thing to go.

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I’m now permanently old-fashioned, clothing-wise: sports jackets, grey flannels, brown lace-up shoes or (when I’m feeling snappy) sneakers with cushioned soles the thickness of hovercraft. I aspire to timeless Anglo-American classicism. My actual look is that of a guy who was gardening and forgot to change his clothes before heading out to do his errands with his fly down. (Which, I have read, can be a sign of oncoming dementia.)

“I would settle,” I said to Johanna, my wife, as we walked to a cocktail party in the neighbourhood, “for a look like the old guys we used to see in Little Italy, guys in their unfancy Sunday suits and a plaid shirt done up to the neck, on their way to the café to watch the soccer.” I’m referring to a look from 50 years ago. “Kind of like my dad, without the tie and blazer. He meant it as a sign of respect but it just looked old-fashioned.”

It alarms me that I am beginning to experience some of what I watched my father experience as an old man. I can’t possibly be as old as my father was when I understood him to be elderly.

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“Well,” Johanna said, “your dad was very dapper.” She was using her explanatory tone of voice, more common of late.

Johanna is eight years younger than I am. She sometimes suggests more fashionable looks for me. This is a flattering but doomed intention. If I never again see a 70-year-old in Tod’s shoes and a cotton flat cap it will be too soon. The only thing worse than being seen to be old? Being seen trying to look younger than you are. At 70, vanity gets you both ways.

Spring

Haircut at Studio 67 on Portland Street, in the heart of Toronto. My gay friends call this neighbourhood “the straight village.” I get my hair cut here because Chanel, the owner – mid-30s, utterly charming, much in demand as a stylist to the famous and noteworthy, as well as to yobs like me –understands my hair.

The hair I have left at 70 (a horseshoe of silver surrounding a continuously widening frontal runway of hairlessness) is thinner than it was a decade ago, but I desperately need a haircut. The main challenge is the marooned isle on my mid-foreground cranial acreage, a mini-plantation of wisps marooned from any other patch of hair on my head. I keep wondering if I should shave it.

Chanel solves the uneven real estate problem of my hair by keeping the bits on the top of my head somehow invisibly longer. I can then comb them straight back without anyone thinking I am attempting a comb-over. Lots of people of my vintage sweep their hairs straight back: Martin Amis did it, Ralph Fiennes and even Jeff Bridges do it. So I do it.

And yet this strategy means that within three weeks those longer hanks grow longer still and I start to resemble an aging mash-up of Hulk Hogan and Voldemort. It’s not a good look. Sooner than I want or can really afford, I need to head back to Chanel for another haircut, $95, which includes a 30-per-cent tip because there is no way I am tipping less than that to the person who controls how I look. Not that anyone’s looking any more, but vanity’s a lifelong vice.

On the plus side, at Studio 67 I get my hair washed by Rhianna. It’s a fantastically intimate experience. Casual physical intimacy is noticeably rare at 70. Even hugging becomes a phenomenological thrill: You never know which hug might be your last.

When my parents were in their early nineties, I helped them do their shopping at Longo’s, my exacting mother’s preferred grocery store. My father liked to stop at the TD Canada Trust bank in the mall near the grocery store. I tried again and again to teach him how to use the ATM, but it never took. “I prefer the comfort of a teller,” he said. The comfort of another human being, even a teller. This is what Rhianna touching my head is now: a human being reminding me that I am still a human being. In these age- and human-disdaining times, it is a very easy thing to forget.

I am trying to be less self-conscious about my older and older body. I feel I owe it to my senior ilk as an act of crumbling solidarity to be physically forthright now that my days are undeniably numbered. I must enjoy what I can enjoy now, while I can still enjoy it. Now that a nine-mile hike is beginning to feel like a 13-mile one, now that all my aparati are of two or even three unpredictable minds. What did Ed Greenspon, the former editor of The Globe and Mail, say the other night at pickleball – where else? – when I told him I was keeping a diary of the year I am 70? “I liked the previous diary about turning 60.” Pause. “You had li-bye-doh back then.” That was how he pronounced it: li-bye-doh. Implying that I have less interesting stuff to write about now. Which gave me a quiet pang.

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Old nakedness is at least forensically interesting. I perform my 70-year-old routine every morning: shower, shave, eye drops (anti-glaucoma), sunscreen (PFA 12,000), mouthwash, hair gel (those wisps), followed by the standard once-over. The chest, once broad and widest at the top, is now widest about a third of the way down. The thighs are more ham-like. My knees, a warren of knobs and protrusions, resemble the business end of a caveman’s club. And let’s not even mention the words papery, wrinkly or crepey. “Ash hair, toad hands, prune face” was Philip Larkin’s description in his devastating poem The Old Fools. Sometimes I imagine seeing me, as I am now, through my 20-year-old eyes. Who is this sagging hydrant I’ve become? He’s almost but not quite unrecognizable: He is who I became, and I am who he became. We are all of us doing this together, all the time, waiting to see what genetics and chance have in store for us. Which makes us equally fragile and the same. And comrades in the march. On certain mornings, that feels almost miraculous. Screw Larkin and screw his contempt.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that I don’t miss my younger body. There is nothing quite like one’s younger body. Remembering how it felt as it performed its miracles is like watching all the most exciting sports on television at the same time. Whereas my aging body is like an old pal I sometimes need to lend a hand.

If only we could be less ashamed of ourselves as we grow older. I’m not interested in victory anymore. I’m interested in what happens while the game is still, to everyone’s astonishment, being played. The suspense is surprisingly gripping.

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Summer

On my way into the Queen Mother, a downtown Toronto restaurant, the maître d’ stops me and asks if he can help. I say I am meeting a friend on the covered patio at the rear of the restaurant.

“Ah,” he says, glancing at my white hair. “How are you with stairs?” That is, am I capable of descending one set of stairs and then ascending another short flight to reach my destination? Do I look like I have emphysema? Am I carrying a cane? He is asking if I am too old to get to the patio. What if I say I am? What’s he going to do? Crane me in? Piggyback me? The poor guy is being a decent human being and a thoughtful maitre d’, so why am I offended? Because of my bottomless vanity, my unwillingness to admit that I am indeed changing with age.

“Oh, sure,” I say as blithely as I can, as if I might actually break into song, so thrilled to be alive am I, “I’m good with stairs!” I make a point of leaping down and dashing up the stairs. I take two at a time and nearly tear my inguinal canal.

Risk is everywhere! My commute to work by bike this morning was the usual steady glide interrupted by intermittent pangs of mortal terror. I now quietly remind myself every time I set off to make sure this isn’t my last ride – the moment where I brake too suddenly for some doddering imbecile who has let his microscopic fluffball dog venture unexpectedly into the bike lane on its retractable leash only to have me sail over the handlebars to quadriplegia. We all hang by a thread, and its thinness terrifies us. Statistical probability doesn’t play favourites. But even a minor accident is more consequential at 70, hence my stately, parade-speed pace. Getting out of the house with my wallet, glasses, hearing aids, phone and keys – the Big Five – isn’t guaranteed either. At 70, one must be prepared. The question is: For what? This constant wariness is exhausting, which is one reason everyone over 70 likes a nap.

I have noticed these tremors of fear everywhere. In the car (“There’s a truck!”); getting into cold water (“I could have a heart attack”); much less drinking, and barely any cannabis; the 9:30 p.m. itch at a dinner party to go home to bed (“I used to sneak out of the house to go to parties,” Johanna said the other day, “whereas now I sneak out of parties to go home”); and, last but not least, complete avoidance of any talk of sex or lust, when 15 years ago it was a staple of every conversation.

It’s unclear how much sex any of my friends are having after 70, if any: It is a sign of our deathless vanity that we never talk about it.

Sex at 70 is not as ready as it once was, although it can be as steady, once it decides to get out of bed or off the couch or on the trail. One must improvise. Unplanned arousal used to plague me by the hour, on the hour, as it does most human beings at one stage of their lives. At 70, it’s more like a special occasion. Oh, look who’s here! What a nice surprise. Why don’t you come in and have a drink? No? You have to go? So soon? Too bad.

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Fall

Saw my new ophthalmologist on Monday. My old, now-retired eye doctor, Robert Wagman, called me “Manny Klein” (the punchline of a joke I once told him) and always chatted for at least half an hour. The new practice maximizes every potential profit point in the eye-doctoring system. I am administered a vision test and a pressure test and a visual field test and undergo not one but two consultations every time I step across the threshold. My new eye doc (at least 30 years Dr. Wagman’s junior) is an excellent ophthalmologist. We talk for five minutes, max. Her staff process an endless stream of (aging) patients with the aplomb of hovering Black Hawk helicopters under heavy enemy fire.

Next week, it’s the respirologist. I’m part of a study of former smokers. I exhale vigorously into what looks like the nozzle of a hair dryer, as he urges me on – “Keep going, keep going, keep going, good!” – whereupon he dictates the result into the transcription machine of his computer. My lung capacity is well above average. I am a god. I like the good news, and so I adore my respirologist. After all, I am 70.

So yes, I see doctors more often than I used to. On the other hand (it occurred to me out of nowhere the other day) I’m no longer afraid of dying. Just like that, a lifelong fear evaporated. “Most things may never happen,” Mr. Larkin wrote. “This one will.” What I am is quietly but intermittently sad that I will one day (sooner now than later) have to say goodbye and not be here anymore – that all this pleasure and pain and caring and worry and curiosity and adventure, all of it, will be no more. The sadness is premourning, because I won’t notice it’s gone when I am. Late in his shortish life, as he was dying of pancreatic cancer, Tony Hoagland wrote a poem called Visitation, in which he compared himself to an angel, looking down over the topography of his life “with wonder and regret and affection.” Longing for the life you had, wished you’d had, didn’t have, isn’t only regret: it is life itself, the full range of up and down. No one gets out alive or blameless, and no one gets it completely right. I hope the imperfections will make it more plangent and sweeter and its loss easier to bear.

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Last week we trapped a raccoon. I suspect it was not his first time behind bars. The event was terribly exciting, because we are older now, and everything is exciting. Remember what Holden Caufield said about his ancient English teacher in Catcher in the Rye? “You take somebody old as hell, like old Spencer, and they can get a big bang out of buying a blanket.”

This week a crew arrived to put up the storm windows. (We still have storm windows.) The job takes three hours and was not sped along by the fact that I forgot to write the location of three storms on their frames. To keep the young crew from killing me (they certainly seem capable of it), I lug the windows down from the third floor and stack them on the front porch before the crew arrives. The storms are huge and heavy; the staircase has four landings to navigate. Were a 70-year-old to fall down the stairs carrying a wide, tall, 30-pound storm window, it would be potentially life-threatening. But my vanity declares otherwise.

This tension, between risking and not risking, between wanting and not wanting, between being afraid and not being afraid, between living in the present and way back in the past, is a defining feature of being 70. I am learning to live in multiple directions at once. I feel like I am at the beginning of the fourth quarter, but of a game that could still go either way, and maybe even to multiple overtime periods – and it is the championship game, the game for all the marbles, the game you can never forget.

A session with the trainer at Philosophy Fitness. The trainer is helping me prepare for my upcoming backcountry ski trip. I am already panicking about being out of shape, hence many squats. I do not like squats. I don’t even like the word squats.

But observing my squats in the endless mirrors that line the gym, I realize I no longer have a backside. My behind is gone; it is behind me, heh. I now understand why we 70-ish guys are constantly hiking our pants skyward and wear our belts like garrotes just below our nipples. That is the only way you can keep your pants from falling to the ground. Unless I start wearing suspenders, which will make me look even more old-fashioned.

Two weeks ago I stepped into the men’s room at a large downtown Toronto restaurant and inadvertently unhooked the waist while unzipping the fly of my trousers prior to using the urinal. I then rezipped my still-unfastened pants and was striding out of the men’s room when my trousers dropped to the floor, revealing the sunny Pucci-esque orange and blue and yellow Saxx thigh-length briefs I had on – not my usual undergarb, but the only underpants on sale at Winners at the time of purchase.

The 30-ish guy coming into the men’s room as I was leaving did a double take when my trousers fell and a triple take when he saw the colour of my underpants. They were followed by a qualitatively different quadruple take when he saw how old I am. I could see the thought forming across his brow: These seniors have their zesty secrets! He doesn’t know the half of it. Which is a shame.

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