The O Word

I've just finished Nora Ephron's I Remember Nothing, a collection of the author's musings on various mundane, but otherwise quite relevant, subjects of modern life, and as always, I found her wry and honest reflections very readable and charming.  If you remember, Ephron is the witty and prolific writer who gave us When Harry Met Sally, Silkwood, and Sleepless in Seattle, who also directs (most recently Julie & Julia).  Among the short essays in her book, I liked best My Life as an Heiress, in which Ephron recounted how she almost inherited wealth and, in the process, came close to abandoning her then-unfinished script of When Harry Met Sally thinking she might not have to work again.  I also cherished The D Word, from which the following passages were excerpted:

"The most important thing about me, for quite a long chunk of my life, was that I was divorced. Even after I was no longer divorced but remarried, this was true.  I have now been married to my third husband for more than twenty years.  But when you've had children with someone you're divorced from, divorce defines everything; it's the lurking fact, a slice of anger in the pie of your brain.

...

People always say that once it goes away, you forget the pain.  It's a cliché of childbirth:  you forget the pain.  I don't happen to agree.  I remember the pain.  What you really forget is love.

Divorce seems as if it will last forever, and then suddenly, one day, your children grow up, move out, and make lives for themselves, and except for an occasional flare, you have no contact at all with your ex-husband.  The divorce has lasted way longer than the marriage, but finally it's over.

Enough about that.

The point is that for a long time, the fact that I was divorced was the most important thing about me.

And now it's not.

Now the most important thing about me is that I'm old."

The book

The author

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What I remembered thinking was, "My feelings exactly!"

You know how every time you see celebrities being interviewed about their most recent plastic surgeries, they always seem to give the same stock answer as to why they've decided to have more work done on their facies and bodies, "I'm tired of looking older than I feel."  Well, guess what?  I have the opposite problem.  I feel older than I look.  I always have.  And yes, it IS a problem when you're not quite 50 and have felt older than the moon most of your adult life.  On a good day I feel like I might be a thousand years old.

Hearing those celebrities brag about their natural vitality make me want to come up to them and try to shake the truth out of them and their sound bites, "Is it true that's how you feel or is it just a way to justify even more plastic surgery, and if so do you mind sharing the secret of how to feel younger than you look (not the other way around, thank you very much!)?  It suddenly dawned on me that if I were to go under the knife in order to match my outward appearance to my psychological age, it would be a pioneering sort of surgery – one that would turn the clock forward, not back!  That's certainly a depressing thought.

Anyhow, almost unconsciously my mind's started keeping a log of the things I've noticed about me that confirmed my ever-growing and pesky awareness that age is indeed advancing on me, and they are:

– Not being able to enjoy food or be wildly indiscriminate about it.  In college I used to wolf down 10 candy bars a night while cramming for exams and this unhealthy binging hardly affected me, either physically or psychologically.  But my stomach has evolved to become much more sensitive with age now that a case of bad Chinese food at lunch could make me feel out of sorts the rest of the day.

My standards have gotten lower over the years for everything except food.  I remembered loving junk food and relishing every bite when I was a hungry teen.  It would make my day if I got to enjoy a good piece of Kentucky Fried Chicken on a picnic or a frothy Orange Julius at the mall, but nothing tastes the same anymore now that I've gotten old and I can't will myself to feel suitably impressed even when dining at a solidly consistent, well-reviewed restaurant.  This has nothing to do with snobbishness, but an unfortunate diminished appreciation of life in general.

– I get cold!  I used to be a little famous around my college campus for the stupid fact that I refused to wear a coat in the soggy Seattle winter, but now I find myself turning on the heat in a much milder California climate.  I haven't deteriorated to the point of having to put on a coat every time I go to the supermarket like my mom, but I might be quickly approaching that.

– Dry skin.  Never thought it would happen to me since I was one of those people who's always had to blot the shine off my T-zone in my youth.

– Age spots, resulting in my not being able to let myself out in public without slathering on foundation for cover.

– Sleeplessness.  I miss the days when I was able to slip away to slumber within 5 minutes of lying down in bed, or even on any hard surface like a wooden sofa.

– Waking up during the night, at first in order to go to the bathroom, then because of the numbness in various parts of my body, then it degraded to my waking up in the middle of the night for no apparent reason and not being able to coax myself back to sleep!

– Acquired dyslexia.  Words that used to effortlessly roll off my tongue now frequently get stuck somewhere between there and my brain.  When I try to think of the word for "not being able to sleep", which, of course, is "insomnia", "amnesia" invariably comes up, rather fittingly.  Numbers more often than not become transposed by the times they get to my fingers on the keyboard.  I can't remember the cell phone numbers of my own precious children, let alone friends'.

– Depressed intelligence.  The truly sad thing about aging is that you don't feel any wiser, just less capable mentally!

– Reduced excitement for life in general.  Have I already expressed a similar sentiment a few paragraphs ago?  Well, no matter... I need to reiterate it.  For a short while in my twenties, I might've felt excited about the end of my workday because I finally got to spend time doing what I like.  Now I just want the day to end so I could go to bed.

Someone I know once shared with me, when complaining about his young wife's lethargic habits, that her favorite part of the day was 9 o'clock, because then she got to go to sleep.  I would laugh about it, feeling a little superior that I was more energetic than someone a whole decade younger, but I have felt my mind reliably shutting down just around 9 o'clock for the longest while now.

For a seemingly interminably long time, the D word was the most pernicious description of me; now it's the O word.

I'm feeling especially OLD right now after writing this essay!

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131161208

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/books/review/Kuczynski-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2010/11/07/nora_ephron_i_remember_nothing

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/11/AR2010111107073.html?wprss=rss_print/bookworld