Eight-year-old children and eighty-year-old children

 

I subscribe to a Frederick Buechner daily email quotation. The son-in-law of the late author manages the site, posting daily excerpts from Buechner’s many books. Buechner is one of my favorite writers. His insights can be both profound and funny at the same time, always well-written. I look forward to my daily connection with him. Today as I sat down to decide on the topic for my next weekly blog posting, I decided to read the Buechner quote-of-the-day first. The posting is entitled simply, “Old Age.” “How appropriate,” I said to myself. More of a short essay than a single quotation, Buechner writes of the similarities between eight-year-old children and 80-year-old children. It was originally published in the book Whistling in the Dark. I couldn’t have said any of this better than he did, so I decided to share the essay with you. “OLD AGE” by Frederick Buechner

“OLD AGE IS NOT, as the saying goes, for sissies. There are some lucky ones who little by little slow down to be sure, but otherwise go on to the end pretty much as usual. For the majority, however, it's like living in a house that's in increasing need of repairs. The plumbing doesn't work right anymore. There are bats in the attic. Cracked and dusty, the windows are hard to see through, and there's a lot of creaking and groaning in bad weather. The exterior could use a coat of paint. And so on. The odd thing is that the person living in the house may feel, humanly speaking, much as always. The eighty-year-old body can be in precarious shape, yet the spirit within as full of beans as ever. If that leads senior citizens to think of all the things they'd still love to do but can't anymore, it only makes things worse. But it needn't work that way. “Second childhood commonly means something to steer clear of, but it can also mean something else. It can mean that if your spirit is still more or less intact, one of the benefits of being an old crock is that you can enjoy again something of what it's like being a young squirt.  “Eight-year-olds, like eighty-year-olds, have lots of things they'd love to do but can't because they know they aren't up to them, so they learn to play instead. Eighty-year-olds might do well to take notice. They can play at being eighty-year-olds, for instance. Stiff knees and hearing aids, memory loss and poor eyesight are no fun, but there are those who marvelously survive them by somehow managing to see them as, among other things and in spite of all, a little funny.  “Another thing is that, if part of the pleasure of being a child the first time round is that you don't have to prove yourself yet, part of the pleasure of being a child the second time round is that you don't have to prove yourself any longer. You can be who you are and say what you feel, and let the chips fall where they may.  “Very young children and very old children also have in common the advantage of being able to sit on the sideline of things. While everybody else is in there jockeying for position and sweating it out, they can lean back, put their feet up, and like the octogenarian King Lear ‘pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies.’"  “Very young children and very old children also seem to be in touch with something that the rest of the pack has lost track of. There is something bright and still about them at their best, like the sun before breakfast. Both the old and the young get scared sometimes about what lies ahead of them, and with good reason, but you can't help feeling that whatever inner goldenness and peace they're in touch with will see them through in the end.”

My old face

 It was a small interaction with a small child, and it happened several years ago, but it seems even more relevant today.

One afternoon as Hal was taking our bicycles out of the garage, a woman pushing a stroller stopped and asked for directions to the nearest park. Two other kids ran around the stroller, while the baby eyed Hal suspiciously. The woman was new in town, and the kids obviously needed somewhere to express their energy. Inspired, Hal told her that he and I were just about to go bike riding, and why didn’t we all go together to the park. 

I came out, met our new neighbors, and off we went.  It turns out that the woman had just moved in with her boyfriend, and that the kids were his grandchildren.  I expressed surprise; she hardly looked old enough to be their mother’s age.

I was glad we accompanied them, as one part of the route had us walking a narrow sidewalk down a busy avenue, and the kids were glad to be out doors and on the loose. We made it safely to the park and spent the rest of the afternoon together. Hal and I bonded with the two older kids as we rode bikes together and played on the swings. The baby, however, never stopped scowling at us.

Near the end of the afternoon, four-year-old Anabel, looked at me sweetly, head cocked to one side, and asked, “Why is your face so old?”

I wasn’t prepared for that. I don’t remember how I responded. I probably just laughed. But the question circled in my mind for weeks afterward. Actually, it made me chuckle. But it also forced me to examine my values, especially in light of a strong cultural pressure to look as good and as young as possible.

I’ve been feeling that pressure ever since I was 13 years old, although for a while I wanted to look older than my age. As I grew up, married, and raised my children, my experience for many years was that of my new neighbor. I’ve taken pride in all the times people have said things like, “That’s impossible! You look too young to have kids that old!” Or, “You? A grandmother? You certainly don’t look it.”

As I entered my 60s and qualified for the senior discount at the grocery store, I was delighted when the clerk would ask to see my identity. That hasn’t happened in a long time. Now I’m sort of disappointed when a clerk doesn’t ask to see my driver’s license. For some reason being taken for younger than I am affirms my value as a person.

Looks still matter, even in the autumn years. Do they matter too much to me? On some days, not so much. Some days I can relax and enjoy the people I’m with without fussing about my clothes or my old face. But other days, I worry about whether my wardrobe is adequate to hide my tummy. I won’t wear sleeveless shirts because my arms jiggle. I avoid the mirror. A black cloud of discouragement descends.

Is this silly? Am I really so immature? Probably yes to both. But there’s hope.

I remember when I was younger how at different points in my life God sent an older woman to befriend and mentor me. There were three of them, each coming alongside me in a different decade of my life. Bess, Catherine, and Inez. We shared our secrets, talked about marriage, child-raising, living in another culture, writing, and following Jesus. I loved listening to their stories and they encouraged me to talk about my struggles and joys. I learned through who they were as well as what they had to say.

They all probably had old faces and jiggly arms, but I didn’t notice. I saw each one of them as beautiful because they were. I began to pray that, in the right time, God would make me into a beautiful old lady, too.

That kind of beauty has nothing to do with the lack of facial wrinkles, loose flesh, or clothes that don’t disguise your flaws.

I need to remind myself of this because it’s easy to let the values of this youth culture make me dissatisfied with my looks. Stop, it, Nancy! Sometimes I listen to myself. Sometimes I don’t. But I look around me in this community and see a good number of beautiful old ladies. They encourage me to realign my values and see the Reality behind the realities.

To see the beauty in old faces.

(Note: Did you notice the face in the old tree photo? Actually he's an ent who lives in Hess Creek Canyon and a good friend of mine.)