So. I’m a year older. Again!
Don’t wish me happy birthday. It’s been several weeks ago by now—this rag keeps me busy!—and anyway I am soliciting neither well wishing nor intensified examination of my wrinkles, chin hair and back fat for evidence of, or speculation on, my burgeoning senescence. No. I simply wanted to regale you with the usual yearly truckload of timeless wisdom I’ve accumulated since the last “Birthday Bob” column.
This year my epiphanies started when I read an editorial-page piece in the Freep about the “infantilism” of American culture. As grownups, said the writer (quoting the Bible sententiously), we should put away childish things and begin acting like adults; but how are we supposed to do that in an environment where batteries are advertised by pink cartoon rabbits?
And on and on. The writer was not just agin’ the Energizer Bunny but the Aflac Duck, the Geico Gecko and in fact animated cartoons of any kind for adult consumption. The whole essay sounded like the crap you have to write in college when you major in English. You pick a claim, any claim—fish imagery in Hemingway symbolizes the narrator’s deep existential angst—and then you support it with text examples until you turn blue. By the time you’re up to your 10 pages or whatever you’re admitting to yourself: So. Maybe it’s not existential angst. Maybe it really is just a [bleep]ing marlin. But you’ve gotten this far and you have to turn the damn thing in anyway.
What I think writing is for is sort of the opposite, not to defend some stupid theory but to dig out the real truth and tell it. There’s something about the process of putting things into writing that makes it yoga-pants evident when something’s wrong with your reasoning, which might be why I always got back to the fish on page 10, and didn’t go to grad school.
Anyway I like the Energizer Bunny.
I like cartoons in general, infantile or not; but my husband, the animation artist, pointed out when he read the op-ed (he didn’t think much of it, either) that cartoons were not invented for children, that during their golden age they were shown along with newsreels before the feature film in movie houses for adult audiences, who ate ‘em up.
My husband knows a lot about cartoons not just because he draws them but because he sort of is one. Just like jockeys get bow-legged and beauticians have nicely-styled hair, my spouse always seems to be crouching outside mouse holes with a sledgehammer or ordering TNT from Acme. He says things like YEOW and YIKES, uses wax on his mustachios, and at one place he worked had a framed portrait of a fish over his drawing board with the motto OUR FLOUNDER. He’s loads of fun, a lot more than adulthood would have been, I imagine. Though what would I know?
Which brings me to the gist of my yearly message, which is that getting older cures you of all those childish misconceptions about growing up. Really, I don’t know if there’s any such thing!
For one thing, serious oldness is identical to babyhood in certain key respects, such as what you can eat, how you eat it and what happens to it then. My own parents both died before they got there, but I know people who’ve had to spoon-feed theirs, change them and wipe them down so they don’t get diaper rash.
My father once told me a story about visiting someone in an old folks’ home. He was in his 70s then and seemed old to me, but the people in the home were older than that, their 90s and beyond. My father said they were waiting in line for their lunch but there was some delay in the kitchen and the doors to the cafeteria didn’t open. People began to shift and shuffle and finally one old man commenced to keen.
My old man found that funny in a horrified kind of way, grateful that he personally hadn’t (yet) regressed to wailing for his food like a baby; but thinking about it now I don’t know I’ve ever progressed much further. When I’m hungry I don’t (yet) keen, it’s true, but I keep saying it aloud—“I’m hungry!”—in an insistent, aggressive tone, whether I’m alone or in a crowd of strangers who eye me nervously, wondering if I am fixin’ to eat them.
I’m hungry! is more a gripe than a whine but I can do a whine nicely, too, under the right circumstances. I was helping my crazy gardening friend Eloise in Jenkins Park last week when I found myself at it. Eloise plants her park gardens in holly, roses and barberry, prickly plants that teach children who try running through them the same lesson Hansel and Gretel learned about eating gingerbread cottages (“NO!”). Which I always found hilarious: Everybody thinks little gardening ladies are so sweet. (I imagine there used to be the same misconception about the ones who lived in gingerbread.)
Now Eloise had me deadheading and weeding those gardens and it wasn’t so funny when the one getting ripped to shreds was me. I kept a stiff upper lip at first but after an hour or so it was: Eloweeeez! It huuuuuuurts! It’s hahhhhhhht! Ah’m bleeeeeed-in’! until I got sick of hearing it, put my whiny self in the car and drove off to comfort it with lemonade and a chocolate chip cookie.
It’s not just me. My theory is that all of us remain infantile about basic physical comforts. A woman who used to be the executive director of a local volunteer organization was telling me recently how she got the board members to show up for meetings: “When they get off work they’re starving and can’t wait to get home for a snack,” she said. So she started making them sandwiches and other little treaties to reward them for coming to the meeting instead. “They’re just like children,” she said. In fact, I remembered that my favorite part of the Girl Scouts was Refreshments.
So if anyone reading this happens to be in charge of a volunteer organization and is having trouble making volunteers show up, that’s my advice to you: Refreshments. People will talk about their diets and having to cook supper for their family, but I bet if you make a tray of those little triangular sandwiches, folks will appear and the sandwiches will dis-; and that 90 percent of humanity when confronted with a warm cookie in which the chocolate chips are still partially liquid is incapable of doing anything but stuffing it in their mouth.
Other ways people remain infantile: They love praise—I was absurdly pleased when one of the jail trusties at the transfer station told me I had won a gold star for perfectly rinsed and sorted recyclables—cry secretly when you point out they’re fat, and find flatulence uproariously funny. In a Kurt Vonnegut novel I read, he described a distant future in which the human race had evolved into a super-intelligent aquatic species resembling dolphins, but “when someone farts everybody just laughs and laughs.”
I’ve always thought I’d have had a better shot at adulthood if I’d studied business or married a tax attorney, or really even remembered to procreate; but one big perk about growing older is you do finally start noticing no one is doing that much better than you are in that department. Recently I learned this word “sonder.” Sonder is defined as “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries.” The way I put it to myself, though, is: “Everybody I meet is at least as screwed up as I am.”
I used to have a deep sense of inferiority, a conviction that I was more backwards than other people. But the more I learn of people the more I realize I’m not that bad.
Like there were these English people we had to dinner one summer years ago, a man and a woman, both traveling alone in the States. Both had left their spouses at home, and both seemed surprised by my surprise at that. “I do think trust is important in a marriage,” they said in their English accents. I knew I, personally, would pout and fume if my husband took a foreign vacation without me. But that was because I was insecure and unsophisticated, I thought, not as good at marriage as they were.
Fast-forward two years: Both the English people had divorced ignominiously. The woman had met somebody she liked better in America and dumped her husband—trust indeed!—and the man now lived alone in a decaying Spanish farmhouse trolling for babes, having abandoned his wife back in England, and it turned out she’d been no. 3 or 4 anyway.) So who was bad at marriage, please?
One time I got my little heart broken when a false friend I’d trusted with all my secrets went around spilling them to my other friends and convincing them I was insane. It made me feel miserable and unpopular back then. But now I look back at that episode with wonder: I was worried my friends thought I was crazy?
I may twitch, mutter and make important decisions by flipping a nickel, but at least I don’t wash the dishes twice. I have no dishwasher but I don’t find it’s that much trouble to wash dishes by hand, compared to people who wash each one carefully before they put it into the dishwasher. When I pointed out to my friend, who does this, that it’s duplication of effort, she said very seriously, “Yes, but the dishwasher sterilizes them.” This from somebody who shares her glass with her cats?
It’s a mad, mad world! People say Christmas is about love, not material goods, then trample each other to death emptying out shopping malls. The darling of the Right to Lifers these days is a president who has probably paid for more abortions than I have boxes of movie house popcorn. And restaurant patrons spend serious money on sushi, for which I still have found no grain of evidence that it’s edible. I feel pretty sane by comparison.
Another epiphany: During the episode I described above, as well as other lonely times in my life, I envied “normal” people whom I perceived as surrounded by loving friends. Then, watching television dramas on Netflix during this last long, cold winter, I realized that practically all the series we enjoyed featured a group of cops or scientists or spies or space explorers whose adventures cemented them into friendships tighter than family. The plots were about the warm social circles as much as the adventures. I finally grasped then that the TV producers were not packaging that for people who had it but for ones who longed for it, too, because they didn’t have it, either.
Loneliness is the human condition! Big-whiny-babyism is universal! Why that cheers me up I can’t tell you but it’s been a huge confidence booster in my old age.
Like I don’t suffer from embarrassment and social angst the way I used to. Take snot running down your face. What I’ve finally figured out is that everybody has got snot, and if I’ve got some coming out of my nose I’m not the one who has to look at it. When politicians or businessmen call me a liar when they don’t like what I write in The Planet, I think, a politician or a businessman says I lie?
Anyway there comes a point when you stop worrying so much what other people think of you because you’ve finally sussed it out that they, like, don't. They’re thinking about themselves, that they’re hot or hungry or depressed or lonely or constipated or simply dying for a chocolate chip cookie, because they’re just as hot a mess as you are.
Well! That realization is about as far toward growing up as I’ve gotten, even at this advanced and stately age. Anyway, like a certain pink bunny I've been going on and on, and it's time to wind this up. It’s lunchtime, and I’ve been looking forward to taking my animal crackers and alphabet soup into the living room, so I can eat while I watch my cartoons.
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