Essays - Winter 2009

A Country for Old Men

Having reached the shores of seniority himself, the author finds a surprising contentment in the eyes of his fellow retirees

By Edward Hoagland

Doing what comes naturally should prevent your children from feeling estranged even if at some point you did get divorced; and keep you from beaching broke on the shoals of old age, unless you never shed a dice-or-drink addiction; and dissolve some of your midlife mortgage anxiety. Paying out mostly balances out, and the kids who ought to land in college eventually make it there. I believed in theory that character is fate but have been surprised a bit, firsthand. Not to find that hustlers beat nice guys, but that it doesn’t matter; they come a cropper, as you can read like newsprint in their faces; the length of life unstrings them. I can go to an Ivy League alumni reunion and meet posh fund managers who either wish they had pursued a degree in ornithology instead of finance or are fretting about a tax shelter gone gravely awry, not to mention a painful mismarriage. An auditor disqualified the shelter and a judge is divvying up their assets as if to provide for their stepchildren as well as the wife: is that fair? Although grads at the Ivy gathering got a head start over nine-tenths of the folks at the senior-center lunch, long before their seventh decade the effects of early privilege had petered out, at least according to the emanations of contentment versus discontent at each location. George Orwell’s last notebook jotting observed that “at 50, everyone has the face he deserves.” (Sadly, he didn’t make it to that age.) And I tend to agree, especially if you advance the criterion to the white-hair phase, when a thousand accumulating decisions at first defined and then achieved our goals. If subliminally we wanted to be couch potatoes, we are—or exercised a real green thumb, cooked delicious pasta, and mastered the organ in the corner church. Perhaps there was a mountain in the Adirondacks whose profile stirred us to drive the Alaska Highway, and later we threw lire into the Trevi Fountain, raised Belgian shepherds, adopted a three-month-old child to enlarge our family, worked in wholesale. Whatever the destination, it turned out not to be Phil Rizzuto’s or Phil Donahue’s or whoever we idealized originally. Life’s gauge was broader than we anticipated. Not in the sense that we batted in Yankee Stadium or chatted up celebs like Montgomery Clift; but our aims multiplied and vicarious satisfactions punctuated our days. A snatch of Scott Joplin on the radio (we don’t need to have composed to exult); a daughter on a winning basketball team; a seagull, surplice-white but primeval in posture, that lands on the lawn to grab food left for the dog.

A certain self-selection of course takes place in who shows up for the monthly Men’s Breakfast at the senior center, for instance—I sat with an ex-harbormaster and ferryman and a crane operator—or college reunions. Welfare clients aren’t as likely as pensioners to come, and loners stay away, or the more deeply discouraged and unmoored. Among the Ivies, high-flying alumni who can talk about which prep school their children got into and about financial derivatives sit together, not with their classmates bemoaning the inequities of health and luck. Veterans who 50 years ago decided not to use the GI Bill to earn a college degree wound up with solid businesses and nest eggs, too, if they wished for that and followed through. But following through does not determine contentment if they also wanted beer chums or love liaisons that might derail their concentration yet engrave those smile lines people wear when reclining on their final gurney. Sly pleasures will do it, as well as the daily straight and narrow and a life of kids dashing around on summer evenings.

Integrity is rarer and doesn’t tell on the face as clearly because, unlike pleasure, integrity involves cost-consciousness, even for the honest soul whose ultimate choice will never be in doubt. Stubborn sacrifice is demanded, which can mark their expressions somewhat in the way attention-seeking eccentricity might. People possessing less will brand it as a quirk. Contentment at the end of life isn’t a kind of be-all, however. Orwell’s criterion didn’t specify what we should deserve. Discontent may be as admirable—although not self-contempt. What has surprised me is the widespread repose I’ve sensed in rubbing shoulders recently with old people, as one of them. In my ’50s college generation, existential pessimism, counterposed to postwar prosperity, was all the rage. Yet I was a dissenter, skeptical of the skeptics because, believing in an immanent divinity, I thought life could be radiant, especially if you got outdoors. Most people aren’t pantheists, though, and, accepting the cranky clichés about geezerdom, I expected they would be unhappier in old age than they’ve turned out. Settling for less than some of their dreams hasn’t seemed such a compromise because the satisfactions from unpredicted quarters have ripened so fully, whether familial—the prodigal grandma—or just waking up each morning with no tasks to trek to.

I’d realized World War II had validated Kafka and Camus as my classmates’ heartthrobs, but was instead a Whitman fan during the 1950s and ever after, loving every metropolis I encountered as well as the thunderous surf, the rolling landscape. Children are born with bursting buoyancy. Give them a few yards and they will start to play. But I didn’t guess that, 70 years on, that artesian buoyancy in subdued form would remain a force. Call it cosmic gaiety, planetary photosynthesis, the Big Bang, or the green thrust. Life is thrust.

Edward Hoagland is a contributing editor of the Scholar. He published his first book in 1956, and his most recent is Sex and the River Styx. Forthcoming this spring is his 22nd book, Alaskan Travels.