This is a love letter to all my old ladies. No, I’m not a swinger or a polygamist or in an age-appropriate polycule. Only one woman, Ginny, was kind and reckless enough to have me, 62 years ago, and she remains at the top of old ladies I’m crazy about. But there are others who have the grace and stature that only long years of hoping and striving — and living — can bestow.
Old ladies are wonders, winking lights in the universe, stars. Take my wife, who was the dark-haired class knockout when we first met in the ninth grade at the Friends Seminary school in Manhattan. At the age of 14 she had a girl’s good looks, which was like the first draft of a great work of art.
Today, at 85, she is lovelier than ever.
Her lustrous white hair is so stunning that people stop her on the street to remark on it. She has a beauty born of episodes of sorrow intermingled with joy. I have watched her transformation for decades. Her brown eyes are the picture of profound thought, an important idea given form. Her skin, still smooth. Only the lines on the neck betray her age, like delicate narrow paths cut into a desert.
I have seen women who have feared these changes and had lots of work done to their faces, whose expressions are frozen in a strange perpetual surprise. I always wondered where their wrinkles went. To a firmament of parts, where old beauty might have reigned but is now a house of discards?
Not Ginny. In her various stages she has been the romantic new wife and lover, the creative kindergarten teacher, the thrilled attentive mother of three, the advocate for children’s rights, the reliable friend to other old ladies and the reliable friend to me. And at every stage there has been a visible growth of character. It isn’t that she lacked character as a girl. But she has grown fully into an important person, experience assuming appearance.
Moxie, confidence, charisma — old ladies have those in spades. That is what makes them so attractive. I study my aging face in the mirror and see a creature shocked by the early transformative stages of the wolf man. Where went that boyish charm? In Ginny, I see a visual dismissal of the superficial.
The old ladies I know are almost always looking forward. They are doing. Ginny belongs to a group of old lady friends who call themselves the Morning Glories. They begin every day with texts about politics, world events, families, everything. All smart, all funny, all treating the end of their lives as if it were the beginning.
I look at them, and I see all the lovable old ladies I have known in a long life. I give you three, but there are dozens. All came into their own from the quietest beginnings. Katharine Graham, for whom I worked at The Washington Post, ran an empire. Yet she told me that she was so shy as a young reporter that she would hide under her desk in the newsroom. She was flung into a role of enormous power after the suicide of her husband, Phil Graham. She was thoroughly principled. At meetings of the editorial board, on which I served, she never indicated what her vote would be on an issue. The paper was to be inviolate.
My friend the sublime poet Rita Dove wrote lyrical poems as a young woman. They were innocent explorations of wonder. In her later poems she has become a sassy, punning old lady in the know. A recent book, “Playlist for the Apocalypse,” shows her in control of all she sees. I did a reading with her a couple of years ago. I was floored by her quiet self-assurance — like an orchestra conductor, in command of all the instruments in the world.
Arlene Alda is a family friend. She began her adult life playing clarinet in the Houston Symphony. Then she became a teacher and the mother of three girls. I saw a picture of her recently, hugging her husband, Alan, and smiling the full young adoring woman’s smile. She still smiles like that. At 93, she spends her time taking photographs, painting, writing children’s books. She also wrote “Just Kids From the Bronx,” an oral history of the borough. And she plays chess, gives money to the arts and practices classical music on the piano two hours a day.
What is the secret here? What do old ladies have that sets them apart? I think it’s fierce hope. They look at problems, all problems, and they say: I can handle this. They look at their families or at the country and ask: What can be made better? I have seen men grow sullen and depressed in old age. I have never known a woman who was sorry for herself.
“Ripeness is all,” says Edgar in “King Lear.” But look at Lear in his ripeness. A man so vain and gullible that he dismisses the one daughter who truly cares for him.
With old ladies, it’s the mind. And the mind is drawn upon the face. And the face is beautiful.
Behold them, will you, as they glow in the dark. The hair gone white. The careful step. The archipelago of age spots. The blue veins in the hands. The folds in the neck. The crack in the voice. Takes your breath away.
Roger Rosenblatt’s forthcoming book is “More Rules for Aging.”
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