Moojinorbit

I haven’t been writing about it, partly because of not having time, and because I realize it’s tedious, but I’ve continued to find myself on this existential rollercoaster about turning 40 in February. I’m up and down, flying around curves, losing my breath, excited and freaked out. I feel like my identity is morphing, like I’m becoming this other thing, this other…age.

It’s not so much the actual number, although that’s humbling. It probably boils down to two things: 1) not having brought a child of my own into my life yet (and the attendant wondering how/if that’s going to work), and 2) noticing physical signs of aging.

I think we go through phases, periods of months at a time, where the aging process appears to accelerate. When I was 33, I noticed one such phase: all of a sudden I had something resembling hips, where I hadn’t before. The area below my waist just kind of rounded out noticeably (to me, though I’m sure those of you who have real hips are laughing) and a softness appeared where I had historically maintained an adolescent sineweyness. In my late twenties (why me, Lord?) my grey hair, and my facial hair, started coming in like crazy, though I thought at the time it had something to do with the stress of grad school and problematic girlfriends. And at 39, as if on cue, all manner of parts seem to be drooping, dropping, swelling and wrinkling. I look at my face in the morning and barely recognize the grey-haired troll doll with the bags under her eyes. It’s strange to think there’s no reversing this. Other times I feel pretty damn good–wiser, more mature, and hot in that 40-ish hot babe way.

I know it’s all a matter of perspective, and I realize how young 39 actually is in the scope of things. I also feel lucky to have lived a healthy life thusfar. It’s not that I’m not grateful. But aging is not just something in the mind; it is physical change, and if we’re awake at all I think we can notice it. Roses bloom and fade; we can watch it happen. And let’s just say I am beginning to understand how people who have been thin all their lives start to kind of widen out as they get older. I look at my family line and I look in the mirror. The connection is obvious.

I also have probably made this whole thing a bit harder and weirder by letting my gray hair out at this particular time. It doesn’t help when strangers ask you if you are your 79 year-old father’s wife, which did in fact happen on that train ride with my dad.

Anyway, that prologue gets me to last night when I met my new heroine.

I was at my friend Julia’s father’s 77th birthday party in Boulder. Bob Cohen is a crazy beatnik radical filmmaker who has traveled places and done things in his documentarian/artist/intellectual life that you wouldn’t believe if he hadn’t recorded most of it in photos. As a result, his parties are peppered with interesting people of all ages.

So I’m sitting on the couch between Bob and Julia with a pile of other folks, when I notice this striking woman across the coffee table. Who wouldn’t notice her? She’s tiny, not more than 5 feet in heels, wearing a stretchy black string tank top and a fabulous cream colored skirt with a black design on it, sparkling here and there with silver sequins. Her hair is natural white, almost platinum, done in a flapper-era short wave, parted on the side. She is full of life; charming, talkative, funny, stylish. And she is, at least according to our acculturated signals for such things, “old.” There is not a bit of make up on her expressive face, and when she smiles the wrinkles pull back gracefully like curtains on a beautiful stage.

I’m taken by the joi de vivre in this woman, so I switch seats and introduce myself to Nona Pandil, who is even better up close. She has all her faculties, speaks clear as a bell. There is nothing about her energy that seems old in the slightest. She talks about how she loves to dance, how she’s having a huge dance party in November for her 79th birthday at this place in Denver called The Mercury Cafe, where folks come from all over to enjoy the big ballroom upstairs. There’s going to be swing, salsa, and merengue, and maybe some waltzing. She’s hired the famous Hot Tomatoes swing band for the gig. She’ll invite me! She gives me her email.

There’s something else about Nona, something harder to name as I try to describe it now. It has to do with the fact that she hasn’t marked herself as old in any way. Her language is totally contemporary, and when she talks about her birthday party, she’s not capitalizing on the age bit; she’s just psyched for her big dance birthday gig. She seems very comfortable in her skin, like a dancer. There’s nothing shrinking or apologetic about her, and yet she’s not a blow-hard, like how some old folks get, blathering on about their glorious past. She’s not in the past at all, in fact. Nor does she exude anything manufactured, nothing that says, “I’m an older woman trying to seem young.” She’s completely present.

And she’s sexy. The timeless, real kind of sexy that comes from confidence plus sensuality plus sparkle. The kind of sexy Ruth Gordon had in those scenes in Harold and Maude when she’s showing Harold her sensual sculptures and making him play with the musical instruments in her trailer. Nona’s sexuality is nowhere near gone; it’s timeless, organic. She is a complexly colored rose, weathered maybe, but still very much in bloom.

There are two other older ladies sitting nearby, and I notice that they have none of this, though they’re probably a good ten years younger than Nona. In fact, the word “ladies” is key here: they dress “their age,” they have tight hairdos, they can’t hear (or don’t listen?), and not to be mean but they seem and act like scenery. They have that shrunken, tightened in vibe that so many elders have, like silk flowers. At least, in comparison to Nona, who is a woman.

So I talk to Nona quite a bit during the evening. She still works, selling real estate in Denver. She has four grown kids, five grandkids, and–much to her astonishment, because she can’t be this old–two great grandkids. She tells me she’s been happier in her older years than when she was younger and living under the not very caring hand of an alcoholic husband. She doesn’t feel old, she says; she doesn’t feel different at all, really, whatever her years say. “Do you ‘feel’ 40?” she asks me. “You just feel like you, right? Well, it’s no different at 78, although I do realize that, you know, I do look old…Oh well.” She says that while she’s enjoyed being single for the last 30 years  (30 years!), she thinks she’d like to partner with someone again before she dies, and I don’t blame her. Any man would be lucky to have her. But I can’t imagine the man her age who would equal her. 

Then we sit and nod our heads to this four piece acoustic rock band Bob has hired out, and I realize the universe has sent me another role model, another angel. I am definitely hitting her dance party in November.

I want to age like Nona, fully in my skin, not stopping to apologize or try to fix or turn my energy backwards to something that is behind me, be it my past or my back fat. I want to be dancing toward my 79th birthday with bells on, fashionable and contemporary, bright, alive, and still sexy. Screw all this worrying about it.