Now that I’m deep in my 80s, I’d like to stay here forever, and I’ll certainly try. I enjoy being here. The decade is the October of aging. And October is a lovely month, don’t you think?
To be sure, there are setbacks, such as the other day, when all at once I found myself on the floor. As I rose to leave the living room chair, it slid out from under me, leaving me astonished, my head banging against the piano keyboard nearby. So weak is my twice operated-upon back, so immobile my muscle-less legs, all I could do was sit there looking plaintively at my wife, Ginny, hoping for leverage, and recalling an ad on TV some years ago. A woman about my age now is on the floor, calling out, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” — her cry as noble as Beowulf’s or any tragic hero.
For my part, I felt more foolish than tragic. The fall was a reminder of the liabilities of the 80s. Yet these are more than counterbalanced by the gifts this decade brings. I have a great deal of free time these days, which I’ve chosen to fill in several satisfying if idiosyncratic ways.
I recite lots of poetry, sometimes to Ginny, often to the window. Poetry that has hibernated in my head since my 20s when I used to teach English and American literature at a university. I memorized great swaths of poetry then because it allowed me to talk directly to the students, eye to eye, as if the poetry existed not in a book, but in the air. Right now, if you turned me upside down and shook me (it really isn’t necessary), I could give you several Shakespeare sonnets, a Dylan Thomas villanelle, “The Mind is an Enchanting Thing” by Marianne Moore, the last lines of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” and all of the introductory stanza to Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” That may sound like bragging about my memory, but I share it because I think it says something about the lasting power of poetry. Also to brag.
These days, I play more of the piano on which I knocked my head. Playing by ear, too lazy to learn to read music as a kid, my range used to be very limited, especially the chords. With time on my hands I’m getting a little better. You would never mistake me for Bill Evans, or Nat King Cole before his singing days, but my touch is pretty good, and I can do a fair job with “My Romance,” “My Funny Valentine,” “What’ll I Do” and nearly everything by the Gershwin brothers, Fats Waller and Cole Porter. At my age it’s a triumph to get better at anything.
Things I can’t do any more: Run. Play basketball or tennis. I also can’t worry myself to death, or I choose not to. Before my October years, there seemed to be nothing, however inconsequential, that I could not stew over until it grew as big and menacing as Godzilla at night. Nothing was too trivial for my troubled mind. No small rejection. Not the slightest slight. I once came up with a rule, “Nobody’s thinking about you — they are thinking about themselves, just like you.” I wrote it but I didn’t believe it. Now I hardly care if anyone is thinking about me, or not. Hardly.
My love of nature has grown much deeper in this decade. I had always felt an affinity with the natural world, but it was general, casual and fleeting. These days you can catch me at the window, gazing in wonder at the East River (estuary technically), and mesmerized by the shapes in the blue-gray water, the welts and eddies, the tides, the invading armies of the waves, the clouds reflected, looking like submerged sheep.
It’s not what you do in this decade that’s so unusual, or what you think, but rather how you think. The air changes in October. I find myself thinking far less selfishly, giving much more of myself to my friends and family.
In the poem “October,” the sublime Louise Glück found that these years presented one’s life with a cold clarity, as “an allegory of waste.” Me? I see only harvest. I seem to have been partly responsible for creating a crop of six extraordinary grandchildren (add your own excessive compliments here). Before my October years, I would write the same breezy daily note to each of them: “Love you.” Now I have the time and freedom to putter around in their lives, asking this or that, making private jokes. The kids seem to take my attention gladly, or are too polite to tell me they don’t. Either way I have a flourishing garden of young people with whom I can banter to my heart’s content. So I do.
The general improvement is this: In my younger years I was always looking ahead for whatever would befall me. Now I look at what I have. And as those in their 80s appreciate, what one has is considerable. I don’t fear winter, and I don’t regret spring.
The other night Ginny and I watched the film “They Might Be Giants,” with George C. Scott, who thinks he is Sherlock Holmes, and his psychiatrist, played by Joanne Woodward, who actually is a Dr. Watson. I finally realized what it’s about. The film’s title refers to Don Quixote, for whom the windmills at which he tilted might have been giants, though they were not. But the fact that Don Quixote thought they might be giants meant that his capacity for dreams was greater than his fears.
I still have those. Dreams. Dreams for my country and for the world. And love. I have love intact. Ginny, for instance, the remarkable old woman who helped me to my feet when I parted ways with the chair. My view of Ginny is one thing that October has not changed. I see her as a rescuer now, as I saw her when we married 62 years ago. Bright colors, cool winds, perfect weather.
Roger Rosenblatt is the author of “Making Toast,” “Kayak Morning,” “Cold Moon” and the satirical novel “Lapham Rising.”
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