Special Issue: Women Aging

In The Quality of Life Report (reviewed in this issue by Amanda Nash), comic novelist Meghan Daum asks, “Is 37 the new 26?” Or, as I’ve heard friends of mine, somewhat older than Daum, hopefully put it, “Is 60 the new 50?” Several of the authors in our special issue on Women Aging question the entire concept of age, at least as it has been constructed in the contemporary US. Alix Kates Shulman, now 70, says she’s never felt older than she did at 34, “a disillusioned wife with a wandering husband, no savings, no prospects, no future.” Then, she encountered the women’s movement.

Which, as Florence Howe points out, is really not so old itself—35 years or so, depending on how you’re counting. The bonds formed as women now in their 50s, 60s, and 70s shared (and struggled over) experiences, ideas, values, and political work sustained many of them for decades. The importance of female friends and especially of mentors seems only to increase with age, as reflected here in writings by Howe, Gayle Pemberton, and Veronica Chambers.

My father, now 80, seems to talk more and more often of the influence on him of his own father, who died 30 years ago. Similarly, writers like Suzanne Ruta and Vivian Gornick often think of their mothers, living or dead. Says Alicia Ostriker, “Many times I have said to myself, ‘Well, that’s the last poem I am going to write about my mother.’ It hasn’t happened yet.” (Curiously, in this admittedly arbitrary collection, none is obsessed in the same way with a relationship with a daughter. The primal influence is mother, I suppose, whereas we meet our daughters later in life.)

Debunking assumptions about aging, though, does not enable anyone to escape its physical, psychological, and spiritual challenges. These are “part of the adventure of old age,” gamely comments Carolyn Heilbrun, at 77 probably the oldest contributor to this issue, “like frostbite for explorers in the arctic.” Recovery from injury or illness can be slow and incomplete, as Kerryn Higgs recounts. Insomnia, says Gayle Greene, can sap strength and energy. Thinking about living to 95, Jane O’Reilly realizes, “I truly, no kidding, might not.” Nor “earn a living in Provence, or get a pilot’s license... or figure out how to work my cell phone.”

Life necessarily continues to be full of changes—in ambitions, interests, and priorities, among other things. Many of the writers in Women Aging have experienced not the end of learning or activity but rather shifts in their focus and timeline. Adjusting is not easy. But then, says Gayle Pemberton, quoting movie star Bette Davis, “Old age ain’t no place for sissies.”

—Amy Hoffman
Editor in Chief

 

This special issue is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Thoughts at 70
A woman with a past? Or one with a future? What is old anyway?

By Alix Kates Shulman

Alix Kates Shulman Photo by Daniel Milner

IS 70 OLD? I used to think so, but now I'm not sure. Age is so confusing. Despairingly I described myself at 25 as "a quarter-century old," while the gravity of turning 50 compelled me to reinvigorate my life, then write a book about it. Except chronologically, "old," whether in the negative sense of obsolescent or the positive sense of experienced, is an ever-moving target.

Emma Goldman died at 70 and claimed to have had her most fulfilling love affair at 65. When I was in my 30s writing a biography of her, I thought that 70 was not too young to die and 65 was rather old to have great sex. Now I think neither. At 70, with my health still good, partner holding up, work in progress, political action urgent, 70 doesn't feel particularly old to me. But it depends on who's asking.

A new friend, a poet not yet 50, with whom I've been drinking mango margaritas in an East Village bar, greets my announcement of my age with stunned disbelief, surprised to learn that she has been trading secrets with a 70-year-old. It's obvious that to her 70 is ancient. I could be her mother.

"Am I old?" I ask another friend, in her 60s. She directs her surprise at my very question. "You're not old in any bad sense," she says indignantly. She adds that if I think I am I've been bamboozled, because our ideas about age are socially constructed.

I know she's right. Otherwise the respect and stature we sometimes accord to age would graph consistently, and not, as now, slope up for some cultures, professions, people, slope down for others, and look like a dizzying roller coaster for still others.

Compared to the heavy burden of age I felt in my early 30s--panicked over my impending loss of youth--70 feels positively young. Remember the 1960s slogan, "Don't trust anyone over 30"? Remember the 30-year-old admission age to Older Women's Liberation (OWL)? Never have I felt older or more irrelevant than before feminism's second wave, when 30 was considered over the hill (for women) and the last safe age to begin a family, and your life was supposed to be fulfilled by having babies. Still a 1950s middle-class midwestern girl, though living in New York, I retired from fulltime work to become a mother. By the time my youngest started school I was a disillusioned wife with a wandering husband, no savings, no prospects, no future. A has-been at 34!

Then women's liberation hit New York and quickly restored my youthful ardor. Suddenly, I had a compelling purpose and important work. Far from being a has-been, I knew life had not, and would not pass me by. Fired by movement passion, in quick succession I defied my husband, began organizing women's groups, gave my first speech, wrote my first essay and before long my first novel. Though that early movement euphoria couldn't last, I never again felt as impotent or "old" as I had before it touched me. In an instant I switched from a woman with a past ("old") to one with a future ("young").

It's possible that everything could just as suddenly change again. A critical fall, a devastating death, dementia, the bomb, or an economic crash could conceivably age me as rapidly as the women's movement made me young. But hair has been known to whiten overnight at 20; disaster can strike at any age; and some disasters feel like opportunities. It's not age that could flatten me but despair.

STILL, SOME SOBERING CHANGES I've experienced lately do derive from my age--not least, my steady awareness that my end is in sight. Other, derivative changes have an opposite effect, less sobering than elating. At 70, many pressures I used to suffer are falling away. No more (anyway, far less) driving ambition, relentlessly prospective thinking, unrealistic expectations, utopian delusions--those anxieties of youth and middle age that keep people strained and guilty. At 50, to ease those concerns and free myself from others' judgments, I took myself off to an island where, living in complete solitude, I could do whatever I liked instead of what was expected of me. At 70, knowing what I know, such anxieties seem so pointless that I am able to enjoy some of the freedoms I discovered on that island smack in the middle of New York City. On impulse, last weekend I spent an entire day strolling through the zoo without a hint of guilt. This extra measure of freedom makes me feel, paradoxically, "young"--if young means, as cliché would have it, carefree.

Not that I'm immune to the weight of mere chronology. I admit I've often considered "old" those of my friends who are older than I by a decade or more, no matter how like-minded or free-spirited. But now I laugh at myself to remember that when I was 40 and met my closest friend, then 53, I marveled that a woman of her age and generation could feel exactly as I did about so many things. (She also knew a lot I didn't.) When she turned 65 (then 70, 80, now 83), my celebratory wonder remained--as constant as the difference between our ages. Even now, with her bones and memory getting thin, her savvy continues to amaze me. In contrast, I'm less aware of my age difference with my younger friends (except for one, whose deference drives it home). To me we're all just, well, friends--though they may secretly feel otherwise.

Alix Kates Shulman, center, in black Photo by Linda Trichter Metcalf

One's age sense is inextricable from the shared culture and experience of one's generation, time, and place. Veterans of movements or wars, of shared traumas or triumphs, often feel an ineffable, exclusive affinity. It's the rare imagination that can permanently switch generations. Last night, seeing two movies from the 1940s on cable TV, I was unexpectedly reminded of how long I've been around, how much I've lived. The matchless movie stars of my childhood--Hedy Lamarr, Rita Hayworth, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Mae West--who once defined for me beauty, glamor, and style, can't have the same meaning for later generations. In the backroom of my consciousness they remain the ideal. Subsequent stars have never seemed the real thing; I never pored over their pictures in magazines. Instead, I grew up. After I had children I got so caught up in movement politics and motherhood that I was way too busy to go to the movies. When, after missing two decades' worth of films, I finally gazed up at the screen again, I didn't recognize the stars. Who were those newcomers and upstarts? Accomplished actors they might be--but not stars, as my cohort conceived them.

I left high school in 1950. My music is pre-rock. My defining war was World War II. My battle for justice began with civil rights. My children have reached midlife. My parents are dead. My partner naps in the afternoon. Suddenly seeing the old stars vamp across the light years back into my life, I realize with a certain pleasure and even pride that, given the human lifespan, 70 may indeed be getting old.

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Praying for the end of anger
"A woman is her mother," poet Anne Sexton once wrote. But is that fate inevitable?

By Alicia Ostriker

 

Hunger

I

It was 1913 and there was no money.
She was born a runt who vomited everything,
So much poverty, such thin milk,
The doctor told her mother to let her go in the dark
And have another child when there was money for food
But her mother persisted, insisted,
For months feeding and feeding
The skin on bones until she lived and grew,

But still remembers hunger, even now
Shaking her soft white hair,
She remembers hunger and vomiting,
Remembers seeing her mother approach with the bottle,
Her furious need to suck and be filled
And at the same time the grip of despair. And the force of will. II

She remembers also the dresses her mother sewed her,
Woolen, tucked, pleated, exceptional,
In dead European styles that made her ashamed
When she went to school, which insulted her mother,

But anyway, her mother never loved her
After that hard beginning. Fix your hair,
My grandma was still scolding in the wheelchair
Whenever my poor mother visited

The Workman's Circle Home for the Aged.
Fix your hair, she would say, grimacing,
And reach to fix it, and my mom got rashes,
My mom got asthma before each visit.

III

They fired my father because he was a Commie,
It was still the Depression when I was born,
She remembers how she tied my arms and legs to the highchair
So that I wouldnt flail and she could get the spoon in
Though she and my father were hungry.
She told that one to my school counselor,
Boasting, and my counselor told me
To separate from my mother,
That she was crazy.

I wanted to be the best mother in the world,
She says in a voice like hoarded string.
That was what I wanted, but I failed.
Here I freeze as always, and swallow my own spit.
I failed, but I did my best.

As a girl she was a wild one, a vilde chaia,
She says into the little microphone
I hold for her as the cassette whirs on.
She beat up a boy on her block who cheated at cards,
She refused to be tidy, she ran away from home.

We stand to go to the dining room, where because
The meal is free she will stuff herself as if
She were still that infant, she'll eat her own ice cream
And mine, she'll tell her neighbor that I
Am her sun and moon and stars,
And before I leave she will hug me
As if we were lovers.

IV

And I too had my dreams of improvement and perfection.
I too hungered to give abundant life to my children.

 

Alicia Ostriker Photo by J. P. Ostriker

What is it about mothers and daughters? For years, decades even, I prayed that I would arrive at a place where I didn't gnash my teeth and clench my fists whenever I spoke to her. I prayed that the anger I wore as armor would dissolve and that the liquid core of love I felt inside would work its way to the surface. I wanted to feel love flowing between us.

Anger about what? Does it matter? Some women complain that their mothers reject them, criticize them, are cold to them. Some complain that their mothers smother them, demand too much, need too much. Adrienne Rich, in Of Woman Born, writes of the mother-daughter relationship that we are angry at our mothers not because they are so much stronger than we, but because we do not want to be trapped by their weakness. We see them as women with metaphorically bound feet, hobbling through life, and fear they will bind our feet, our lives, as theirs were bound. Reading Rich, I realized that my own rejection of my mother was not personal but generic: My entire culture and society mandated this rejection, and it was wrong and unjust, just one more facet of the brainwashing we all experience in a male-dominated culture. But then, Anne Sexton writes in the poem "Housewife," "A woman is her mother. That's the main thing." When we fear growing old, isn't it partly that we fear becoming our mothers?

I have written about my mother all my life. Sometimes I disguise her in a poem as a witch. Sometimes as a bag lady. I guess that means I am afraid of becoming these things. Sometimes I write about her as a destitute Aphrodite. Or about how her talents were wasted, and how I am racked by survivor guilt. I began using my maiden name as a middle name on my books, in the middle of my life, as a tribute to the fact that I would never have become a poet if my mother had not herself written poetry and read Tennyson and Browning to me when I was a child. Nor would I hold the positions I do about social justice if it were not for her implacable idealism. Many times I have said to myself, "Well, that's the last poem I am going to write about my mother." It hasn't happened yet.

The mellowing I prayed for did take place. Very slowly. Not completely. But enough so that by the time she died, on her 89th birthday, in the middle of my 64th year, love was flowing between us. No longer was I grinding my teeth, clenching my fists, swallowing my spit. I had been taping her life story off and on for years. This is how I learned the story of her birth, the story of the dresses, and much else. In one of our last conversations before she died, she asked me who I would choose to be my mother, if I could. In tears, I said that I would choose her.

"Hunger" began as a two-generational poem. The first two sections sat in my computer for two or three years, feeling unfinished. The closure was too abrupt, the tone too distant. Something else was needed, but what? This spring, alongside working on poems about a long marriage and the birth and approaching adolescence of a granddaughter, I wrote the third section. What I wanted, here, was to capture the way the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship transmit themselves to the next generation. I wanted to get at the force of it, the pain, the deep attachment, the simultaneous love and horror, the simultaneous failure and success of it, all knotted inextricably together. Hunger is a leitmotif in a literal sense, because both my grandparents' and my parents' generation experienced literal poverty, literal hunger. Metaphorically the poem is about the hunger to survive, and even more, it is about the never-to-be-satisfied hunger for love, and ultimately about a hunger we seldom speak of: the hunger not merely to get love from the world but to give love to it. In the words of an old Marge Piercy poem, we want "to be of use"-as feminists, as mothers (literal or figurative), as human beings. The brief final section of the poem spilled over from what preceded it, as my life and my children's lives spilled over from the lives of our ancestors. That terrible and beautiful need, to give abundance to our young when we lacked it for ourselves-the poem now closes with the poignant awareness that we can never know how much we have succeeded and how much we have failed.

What does this have to do with aging? The poem includes two obvious mini-portraits of aging women who despite physical weakness continue to carry their younger selves, with all their ferocious hungers intact, inside them. It is also, I believe, a portrait of myself as another aging woman, hoping by these words to honor the past from which I have my existence. Perhaps as we age we grow to accept the limitations of our human condition. Perhaps we remain hungry. The poem is not sure, and I am not sure either.

--Alicia Ostriker
May 2003

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Catching Zzzs
Women lie awake and wonder: Why is most sleep research conducted on men?

By Gayle Greene

INSOMNIA AFFECTS TWICE AS MANY women as men. Yet 75 percent of sleep research (according to a 2003 report for the National Institutes of Health) has been conducted on men. The standard textbook for sleep studies, Principles and Practices of Sleep Medicine, edited by Meir Kryger, Thomas Roth, and William Dement, has no chapter on women and sleep. In this 1,300-page tome, there are only six index references to "gender" and two to "menopause," even though it's at menopause that women's sleep problems begin in earnest.

Studies of women's sleep across the reproductive cycle have been few and far between, and not much is known about how sleep is affected by menstruation, PMS, pregnancy, postpartum, birth control pills, or menopause. "Is this because the researchers are mainly male?" I asked a speaker at the American Professional Sleep Societies meetings this June in Chicago, a five-day, 4,500-attendee conference of researchers and healthcare professionals. "Oh, I have a lot to say about that…" she replied, rolling her eyes.

It's a familiar story, a story encountered again and again in relation to women's health: a problem that affects more women than men but is being researched primarily by men, on men; a problem that's not well researched and not well understood. And because it's so little understood--and because it affects women more than men--it is readily attributed to depression, psychoneurosis, or some form of psychopathology. Blame the sufferer, stigmatize the sufferer, then medicate the sufferer. And the medications are (in my experience) at best temporarily effective and only mildly impairing, and at worst, dangerous.

Sleep loss has not until recently been taken seriously, but research is showing that it is serious indeed. It wreaks havoc on the endocrine system, the system that regulates metabolism, weight, muscle mass, skeletal mass, and physical well being. It raises levels of blood glucose, which can lead to weight gain. It raises levels of the stress hormone cortisol, the "fight or flight" hormone that enables us to mobilize energy but is harmful in excess, when it wrecks sleep and leads to bone loss. Chronic sleep loss hastens the onset of age-related ailments such as osteoporosis, hypertension, cardiovascular problems, and memory loss, and it increases their severity. It puts us at greater risk for infectious disease, diabetes, obesity, and cancer. "Sleep," says William Dement, pioneer sleep researcher and long-time director of the Stanford Sleep Research Center, "is the most important predictor of how long you will live, perhaps more important than smoking, exercise, or high blood pressure."

Men have sleep disorders, too, of course, though their problems tend more to apnea, or obstruction of breathing, than insomnia. Apnea happens to be the problem that is getting most research: In fact it's receiving attention that's way out of proportion to its incidence. Between 1994 and 1999, there were almost twice as many publications about apnea as there were about insomnia, though insomnia is at least ten times more common than apnea. This disproportion is, to be fair, probably less because of gender bias than it is because apnea is easier to study and easier to treat. "Everyone wants to work on apnea," one researcher told me; "you can get results with apnea. Unlike insomnia."

Men's sleep, like women's, gets worse with age, which is why elderly people, though only 15 percent of the population, account for 45 percent of sleeping pill prescriptions. But in men, the significant complaints don't begin until around age 65, whereas with women, they start at menopause. A 1987 survey of 100 women attending a menopause clinic found that 77 percent complained of insomnia. Another survey found that complaints of insomnia doubled between premenopausal and menopausal women. Hot flashes are the most obvious reason; weight gain is a further problem, in that it may bring on apnea. But the explanation most experts give--and the majority opinion I sensed at the sleep meeting I just attended in Chicago--is the "altered mood of midlife women," the "psychic distress" of women as they age, as children move away, parents die, marriages come apart.

I doubt that midlife stresses and strains are the whole story of what happens to women's sleep at menopause. There are plenty of middle-aged women who feel fine about their lives, except that they can't sleep--and it may be that it's the disrupted sleep of menopause that accounts for women's worsened mood, and not the other way around. Though psychosocial explanations may be part of the story, menopause is a biological as well as a psychosocial event, a time when women's bodies are adjusting to plummeting levels of estrogen and progesterone. I think that midlife insomnia--and other insomnia as well--gets attributed to mood because so little is understood about how hormones and hormonal fluctuations affect sleep.

SPEAKING FROM MY OWN experience, I'd say that sleep has a great deal to do with hormones, not just at menopause but throughout the whole of a woman's life--though I could never get a physician to take this seriously. I'd try to explain that just before my period, I'd get insomnia that a pill wouldn't touch--wired, jittery, amazing energy, mood swings. Then when my period came, I'd fall into a deep, blissful sleep--for about a night. When I was pregnant, I slept wonderfully, though I had no reason to be sleeping at all--I had not intended to be pregnant, was in no position to carry the pregnancy through to term. It was extraordinary that during this anguished period, I was sleeping better than I have before or since. Since then I've never quite believed that my insomnia has all that much to do with my state of mind.

Yet every one of the half-dozen or so physicians and psychotherapists I've been to in the last few decades has focused on the psychological as an explanation for my insomnia, and prescribed antidepressants. Early morning awakening? "That's depression." Light sleep, fragmented sleep? "You worry too much." "You have too much job stress." "You have maladaptive attitudes and practices." No doctor I've seen ever showed the slightest interest in the fact that I have no thyroid, or in the cocktail of hormones I ingest daily (thyroid, estrogen, progesterone), though the endocrine system is so deeply involved in sleep that every hormone influences it or is influenced by it--not only estrogen, progesterone, and thyroid, but cortisol, growth hormone, prolactin, and melatonin. No doctor ever bothered to inquire about my cortisol levels, though it's an obvious question, and there's a simple saliva test to find out. There are so many questions that might be asked to tease out physiological components of a sleep problem that the failure to do so seems perverse.

Medical science has a long history of invoking psychological explanations to account for problems that are not well understood. People were once told their ulcers were due to stress and neuroses; then someone found a bacterium. Mothers got blamed for everything from their children's autism to their schizophrenia; then new techniques of imaging the brain came along and showed that these conditions have neurobiological bases. The symptoms of mitral valve prolapse, a form of heart murmur that affects mainly women--racing heart, shortness of breath, and panic attacks--were dismissed as neurotic when physicians had only their stethoscopes to go by; then a new technology came along that took pictures of the heart and detected a valve defect. Migraines, PMS, hot flashes, obsessive compulsive disorder, and a whole host of disorders now known to have neurobiological bases were similarly written off as psychopathology.

During the past decade, women researchers have begun to focus on women's sleep. The sense that's emerging from their work is that sleep is not normally affected by the menstrual cycle, but that some subsets of women, such as women with PMS, have sleep complaints, and not just in the days prior to menstruation, but throughout the cycle.

HOWEVER, SOMETHING ELSE IS EMERGING that's not so easily explained: Women report poorer sleep, but according to so-called objective measures, they sleep better than men. Margaret Moline, of the Sleep-Wake Disorders Center, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Cornell, describes a considerable "disparity between frequent subjective reports of sleep difficulties in… [women with PMS] and objective findings predominantly derived from laboratory settings." (Laboratory studies are based on the polysomnogram, or PSG, which includes the electroencephalogram, or EEG, a record of brain waves, and a record of muscle tensions.) This discrepancy between subjective report and objective findings exists in relation to menopausal sleep complaints, as well: "Women report more sleep difficulties than men but women often exhibit better PSG sleep patterns, especially with aging," says Joan Shaver, Department of Physiological Nursing, University of Illinois, Chicago. Studies of women's PSGs--the few that have been done--indicate that is men whose sleep processes age more quickly and whose sleep displays more age-related changes, and that women retain more and better sleep even past menopause.

When subjective accounts diverge so widely from objective measures, you have to wonder about the technology. In fact, the EEG is a very crude measurement of an enormously complex phenomenon, of processes involving multiple areas of the brain and an elaborate dance of neurotransmitters. Sleep is a phenomenon that is barely understood: How we sleep, even why we sleep, are questions that are still unanswered. Most researchers acknowledge that the EEG doesn't measure everything there is to measure about sleep, and that there is a great deal that is not known. Yet most researchers assert with confidence that insomnia "most often reflects psychological disturbances."

It may be that women are socialized to talk about health problems more than men do, to complain when something's wrong, and this is why we have more subjective sense of disturbance even when laboratory measurements do not indicate that we're sleeping all that badly. But it may also be that women respond more sensitively to sleep loss than men do. In fact, people respond very differently to sleep loss--"by an order of magnitude," according to David Dinges, chief of the Division of Sleep and Chronobiology, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Dinges has not looked at these differences in terms of gender, but I did find one study that suggested that elderly women responded to sleep deprivation with greater "mood disturbance" than men. Women have other susceptibilities that men don't have: We're more sensitive to light deprivation, which makes us more vulnerable to Seasonal Affective Disorder; and our sleep is more easily disturbed by noise, which is said to be related to the female role of tending the young. We respond differently to drugs; we may even have different pain thresholds. Most importantly, we respond differently to stress.

Stress is a tricky concept. The word usually refers to being upset, as in "stressed out" or "distressed." But stress can also refer to the body's stress system, the mechanisms required not just for emergency but for exertion of any sort, whether it's reading an article or moving about. The hypothalamus, deep in the brain, alerts the adrenal glands, which answer by pouring out the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol. These step up the heart rate and convert stored carbohydrates into glucose. Cortisol also signals when the process has gone on long enough, exerting a checks-and-balances effect that turns off its secretion.

Researchers are finding that there may be something intrinsically different about the female stress system, that early hormonal influences--the different hormonal milieus females and males are exposed to in utero because of the X or Y chromosomes--affect brain development in ways that give women and men different vulnerabilities. According to Ellen Leibenluft of the National Institute of Mental Health, estrogen "primes the body's stress response," increasing the secretion of cortisol and promoting a stress response "that is not only more pronounced but also longer-lasting in women than in men." Women have also been found to have longer lasting cortisol responses during the phases of the menstrual cycle when estrogen and progesterone levels are high.

BESIDES THESE HORMONAL INFLUENCES, there are situations that allow neither fight nor flight, over which the individual has no control. It's known that early life stress and prolonged exposure to stressors can hyperactivate the body's stress responses: If a stressful situation goes on too long, the mechanism may get thrown off kilter, stuck in the "on" position, resulting in long-term and possibly permanent hyperactivity of the system and impairment of the feedback loop that shuts the cortisol secretion off. This affects responses to subsequent stressors, making the individual more reactive. Studies of women (and men) who've experienced childhood sexual abuse show this kind of persistently hyperresponsive stress response system and increased vulnerability to depression.

Since women are generally less empowered than men, they're more likely to find themselves in situations where neither fight nor flight is possible. Add to this the priming of the stress system by female hormones, and you can understand why several conditions linked to stress--depression, autoimmune diseases, and anxiety disorders such as panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder--are more common in women. Insomnia may be one of these stress-related disorders, not in the sense that insomniacs lie awake at night worrying about things, but in the sense that we're neurochemically predisposed to an exaggerated stress response: We have different physiological responses to stress. Sleep loss itself then becomes a further stressor, raising cortisol and blood glucose levels and perpetuating the vicious cycle. Women respond to it, as to other stressors, more extremely than men do because their stress system has been hyperactivated.

Insomniacs often have a condition researchers call hyperarousal: higher body temperatures, faster heart rate and metabolic rate. Most of the studies I've read account for this condition in psychological terms, attributing it to anxiety, depression, worry, tension, rumination, "maladaptive attitudes and practices." In view of what's known about the stress system, hyperarousal seems as likely to be a stress response that's been primed by one's hormones and life experiences as it is to be caused by the worry and anxiety usually invoked to explain it: It's as likely to be physiological as psychological. It's a condition that may exist independent of our thoughts or external stressors: We lie there awake, not necessarily upset or anxious, not even thinking--just awake.

The elevated body temperature that's a part of hyperarousal may itself be hormonally based. Normally, temperature drops off with sleep onset, reaching a nadir sometime around the midpoint of sleep, then rising again. But it turns out that women with PMS have higher body temperatures throughout the night, and that even without hot flashes, post-menopausal women have temperature fluctuations more extreme than men's, more volatile changes from highs to lows throughout the night. And so it goes: You wake up hot, throw off the bedclothes, then get cold and squirrel around reassembling the bedclothes (insomniacs aren't the best of bed partners.)

While it's true that mind and body are in some sense inseparable, and it's not easy to sort out the psychological from the physiological, it's the tendency of researchers, physicians, and psychotherapists to assume that insomnia is primarily, or etiologically, a psychological problem that I find problematic: After all, there's a body here, too. Troubled sleep can, of course, be caused by troubled minds and troubled lives, and insomnia may be a result of depression, anxiety, or psychoneurosis--though who's to say what is cause here, and what's effect? Does the psychopathology cause the insomnia, or does the insomnia cause the psychopathology? Chronic sleep loss can unhinge anyone.

In the past few decades, the women's health movement has succeeded in gaining research and attention for problems that were once seen as shameful secrets, such as breast cancer and endometriosis. Yet insomnia remains neglected. It's a miserable affliction, insomnia. It's confusing, too: There are no outward and visible signs; it's more likely to incur irritation than compassion. Besides, it's been so stigmatized that to identify ourselves as insomniac is to brand ourselves neurotic. This may be why, though there are highly visible and successful support networks for apnea, restless leg syndrome, and narcolepsy, there are none for insomnia.

When literary characters like Macbeth and his Lady have trouble sleeping, it's because they've done something really bad. But I think physicians, psychotherapists, and researchers have their own ways of moralizing insomnia, suggesting that it's something we bring on ourselves because we have bad habits and bad attitudes, that it's something we ought to be capable of dealing with simply by changing our practices, our point of view; and if we can't, we probably don't need that much sleep anyhow. And in our heart of hearts we probably agree, or partly agree (I know it's in me, this voice)--if I were only more sane or more normal, I'd sleep the sleep of the just; the best pillow's a clean conscience; there's no rest for the wicked, as the sayings go. When blame is encoded in myth, proverb, and medical lore, it's hard not to internalize it. I think such assumptions have left us so alienated from our own experience that we're not even aware that it's our sleep that's the problem.

Women's health advocacy groups became strong when women had the conviction to say, I live in this body, I know this is wrong, what I'm living with, what I'm being told. It's time that women who are suffering from insomnia stand behind our own experience and demand more and better research for this debilitating condition.

I welcome any responses and stories. Gaylegreene@earthlink.net

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Caring for the caretakers
No Place Like Home? Feminist Ethics and Home Health Care by Jennifer A. Parks. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003, 184 pp., $29.95 hardcover.

By Eileen Boris

TWO YEARS AGO, barely settled in California, I responded to a call from the United Domestic Workers of America to testify before the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors. In 2000, the state legislature had mandated that all counties become, for collective bargaining purposes, the employer of record for In-Home Supportive Service (IHSS) workers by 2003. I was to use my position as a university professor to argue for the creation of a public authority to set standards and provide training for some 1,500 personal attendants and other home aides who assist the county's low-income, frail elderly and disabled. It wasn't my explanation of how the care we applaud as a labor of love deserves living wages and benefits when undertaken as a job that convinced the supervisors. I'd like to think that it was the testimony of the givers and receivers of care, and their daily struggles for dignity, that convinced the elected officials that carework is worthy of compensation. It should not be regarded as unskilled labor that anyone can do because mothers, wives, and daughters perform it without pay, and people of color and immigrants take it on for a wage. But probably the supervisors figured that because homecare is cheaper than institutionalization, they'd rather cut a deal with the union than lose out on state funding.

For Jennifer Parks, a politicized feminist ethic of care begins with the needs of minimum-waged caretakers, like those who spoke that day. Parks is a philosopher who knows what she's talking about. Parks supported herself through graduate school by laboring as a home health aide. She's kept a frightened elder company even after her shift was over, turned over the bedridden, lifted the immobile, fought off bites from a demented woman, and suffered groping from an impaired man. She's lain awake worrying about a patient's condition, anguished about whether to accept a gift from a grateful client, and put up with her supervisor's calls in the middle of the night. She's balanced her clients' desire to remain at home with the possible harm that could result from their neglectful acts, like leaving a stove on. "My clients' stories became my stories," Parks confesses in this closely reasoned and refreshingly critical re-visioning of homecare. "My work self was not separable from my scholarly/educated self, as the issues I witnessed in my work life directly impacted the focus of my professional work."

Having experienced homecare as an arena of reciprocity, Parks focuses on all the stakeholders: the elderly women who predominate among receivers of care as well as the women who also predominate among providers. Parks addresses a range of ethical issues, including attitudes toward the aged that deny their agency, problems of physical and emotional isolation, and overuse of medical technology. She recognizes the inequalities in the care relationship, not the least of which stem from the prevalence of racial "others" as providers and the diminished physical and mental capacities of receivers--issues that make both liable to exploitation. Parks' emphasis on reciprocity shapes her most sensitive exploration: whether to acquiesce to the racist preferences of clients. Instead of assuming that black or Latino caretakers experience psychic as well as economic harm from disrespectful treatment, she argues that the workers themselves must lead in formulating responses to racism. Anything else would be presumptuous.

Caretaking involves not merely ministering to bodies, but also engaging the whole person. "Reducing the work to physical labor violates the dignity and self-respect of both caretaker and care recipient, since it is akin to viewing care for dependents as caring for 'things,'" she warns, "and it robs homecare aides of their own intuition that they may be skilled caretakers who have a special talent for working with others." Of course, some consumers of care regard their attendants as just another device or apparatus, and they and their families misrecognize the homecare worker as a "cleaning lady." Another side of the issue is county welfare departments that persist in treating caretakers who are relatives as non-workers. These misunderstandings arise because paid or unpaid, these workers are women.

THE INTERDISCIPLINARY LITERATURE on care has explained its association with women in terms of occupational segmentation (the sexual division of labor); psychodynamics (giving care is like mothering); and social status (men don't want to do it). It has asked how we as a society should organize care--who should care and who should pay for care? Should care remain in or move outside of families? Is it an individual, family, community, state, or national obligation? To this discussion, Parks brings outrage, passion, and vision. An ethic of care is not enough, she declares. "A system that takes advantage of women's free and low-cost caretaking is unjust. A system that exploits women's caretaking at the cost of their lives is completely immoral." Caring about the cared-for requires social justice for home aides as well as for family members.

What most impedes just treatment, she insists, is the development of homecare as "a subsidy provided by women to the state." Although her book lacks the detail that a history of homecare might offer, Parks gets the trajectory right: The rise of managed care since the 1970s has encouraged deinstitutionalization so as to maximize services and minimize costs. Changes in federal Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements and standardization of hospital stays and diagnostic assessments expanded the number of homecare agencies but also limited services to patients whose needs qualified them for reimbursement. Doctors became gatekeepers; patients who could not "meet the 'skilled needs' requirement" had "to struggle on their own or with the assistance of unpaid family caretakers." Limiting costs limited the amount of care, while lack of both private insurance and societal support forced women, particularly black women, to leave employment to tend to family members. Hidden in the so-called private sphere, naturalized as female obligation, this invisible "free labor," Parks perceptively observes, "is a social service that results in savings for the state."

Parks' analysis of homecare and gender perceptively draws upon the insights of disability studies. Homecare of the chronically ill and dying challenges the medical model of control and cure of the body. She explains that acute medical care

lines up nicely with our broader masculinist cultural ideals, since the acute care model is also ends-oriented, focusing on the production of a normal, functioning body that is capable of returning to productive activity. The "nonproductive" work involved in chronic care--work which is, by our paradigm, futile, since no good is produced in the end--falls upon women, since they are still considered largely nonproductive. (p. 25)

Homecare could encourage independent living and self-sufficiency. But these values are elusive when industry profitability is the highest priority, and current standards actually impede autonomy because they reward shoddy and rushed care. Applying Foucault, Parks suggests that "in the daily carrying-out of their work, aides are complicit in the very norms that serve to marginalize and oppress them." Their poor working conditions and lack of training for many tasks, like inserting catheters or handling dementia, creates burnout, and low pay leads to various forms of client neglect, like taking on simultaneous multiple shifts or stealing. Abuse of caretakers generates abuse of the cared-for. Living wages and improved training could facilitate better care.

Last December, Santa Barbara's public authority was fully operative, and its IHSS workers voted to unionize. Parks applauds unionization for bringing justice to workers and enhancing the quality of care. Paying family members for caretaking adequately would also help recognize care as valuable work. But Parks goes farther and imagines a more radical response: restructuring the delivery of medicine and removing care from the market altogether. Facilitating "the kinds of human flourishing, function, and capabilities that are an important part of our common public life," care no longer would be mired in the private or linked with women. Produced through democratic exchange between providers and receivers, it would turn into a public good. Though she offers no blueprint for how to move from our current for-profit health system that excludes thousands from necessary care, the coalition of unions, consumers, and government in California suggests a modest beginning: Upgrade the occupation of home aide through better pay, training, and respect; and take the concerns of consumers seriously. For the present, unions, cooperatives, and paid family members must provide the building blocks for a new democratic regime of care.

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Friends for life
How female friendship evolves from youthful crushes to the deeper relationships of years

Veronica Chambers Photo by Anna Williams

By Veronica Chambers

SINCE I AM A WRITER, my earliest memories of friendship are memories of books. Certainly, growing up as a black girl in the 1970's and early 1980's, the books that changed my life were powerful meditations on women and friendship: The Color Purple, The Women of Brewster Place, Sula. These books taught me that women create women in every sense that matters. We give birth to each other in the literal sense, but also in the spiritual sense. We are role models and mirrors: We encourage each other and cut each other down. I have never met a woman who says she modeled herself on a man's opinions, thoughts, instructions--though I'm sure such women exist.

Literature taught me that a woman can save another woman's life and that conversely, a woman can kill another woman without laying a finger on her. These literary renderings bore out my own experience. I am seven, I am nine, I am eleven and there is a girl--always one girl who is the ringleader, although she may have minions. But there is a girl who rules my world. Sometimes she has red hair and an impossible smattering of freckles that make her seem more like someone I've seen on television than a girl walking down an ordinary Brooklyn street. Sometimes she is taller than anyone in our grade. Sometimes she is as dark as Cicely Tyson; sometimes she has the cinnamon-toned skin of Nelson Mandela. She is always beautiful, she is always powerful, and even now, if I close my eyes and think of her, I can feel her breath on my neck as she whispers a secret or a command in my ear.

When I was younger, I valued the women in my life to the detriment of my romantic relationships with men. It was as if the friend in the word boyfriend was as silent as the e at the end of certain words in French. I can remember nights when my mind was wild with confusion, and I felt disconnected from the man sitting across the dinner table from me. My eyes shifting to the clock above his head, I wondered what excuse I could make up to run to the store, meaning to the payphone, to call a sister-friend and speak until our words brought me to a place of peace. To fall in love with my husband I needed to build a foundation of intimacy I had never before attempted with a man. When I felt the impulse to call a girlfriend, I called him instead and I tried, however awkward it felt, to speak freely. He has become my friend in the deepest sense of the word and I consider this a badge of maturity. Finally, I trust a man to be my friend in a way that I had trusted only women before.

As a young woman from a difficult family background, I often sought mentors: I was hungry for attention, needy for guidance. I was lucky. Many amazing women responded. I did not know then that mentorship was not about signing powerful women up to a project called Me. I was selfish. I spent long lunch hours and meetings going on and on about myself. I tried to be appreciative: Thank God for the thank-you-note gene. But I was not always savvy enough, open enough, to reach out to the hands that reached out to me. I used to regret that.

Then, recently, I had an experience that made me feel more generous toward the girl I once was. A girl whom I mentor was visiting my home office. She walked over to my bookshelf and picked up a copy of Sarah Phillips, by Andrea Lee. "Have you read this book?" she asked. "I read it last summer, and it's my favorite book in the world." I reminded her that I had actually given her Sarah Phillips, because it had been one of my own favorite books. The look on her face showed a hundred emotions: kinship, embarrassment, happiness, fear, confusion, and acceptance. I knew then that my mentors, most of whom are still friends to this day, had seen the same layers of expression on my own young face. They had not judged me as I judged myself. Perhaps they knew that the kindness they had bestowed on me would eventually make its way to other young women. "Oh yeah, that's right," my young friend said, and we continued sewing the quilt of words and experience that have brought girls and women together for centuries.

I DON'T LIKE to let a friendship go, but sometimes I find that when the friendship has turned down a road too painful to continue on, life does the amputation against my wish. I am not the first person to say it, but that does not mean it's not worth saying: There is no manual for breaking up with a friend, the way that therapists, religious leaders, wise women, and elders guide us through the dissolution of romantic relationships and marriage. Without this guidance, at least in my own life, friendships break up in fits of pent-up fury and frustration. Every time it happens, it involves tears, therapy, an at-home film festival of sappy chick flicks, and an elementary school girl's conviction that if I were prettier, more popular, and less of a "super freak" my friend would not have let me go. For a long time, I saw this as my resistance to change. I have walked into parties muttering under my breath, "No new friends. I don't want any new friends." But I think that's only part of the picture.

I am older now and I value my friends as witnesses to the girl I once was and to the young woman I'll never be again. As my life becomes more settled, I want to look into another woman's eyes and see the girl who danced on top of bars, drove a convertible through the desert in Mexico, and unabashedly wore blue eye shadow on her chocolate brown skin. As I reach a certain level of success, I want friends who know how hard I worked to get here and who can stop me mid-sentence when my humility veers into self-deprecation or, as it often does, self-degradation.

I look around my house at the gifts my friends have given me: treasured books that represent shared passions, recipes scrawled in familiar handwriting, Depression-era glassware. I do not want the objects I own to outlast the friendships they sprang from. Which is why during a recent break-up with a friend, I decided No. This person cannot divorce me. Maybe we won't pal around twice a week, maybe we shouldn't e-mail every day, but I don't want to drive the long way around her house. I don't want to clench my teeth when a mutual acquaintance mentions her name. I want to know her and to keep getting to know her, even if it's only from the polite distance of a semi-annual cup of tea. So I called her, and I begged: "We are two yolks poured into a bowl," I said. "Please don't make me unbeat this egg."

All my life, I have had girlfriends with whom I imagined becoming old ladies together: two 80-year-old women at the community pool, swimming like fish in brightly colored suits. My girlfriends and I talk about what it will be like to have 50 or 60 years of friendship under our belts. Some friends I picture having elegant teas with; others are the more the types you meet for cocktails at noon. When I was younger, I thought it would be easy to have such old-time friendships. Now, I know that it takes the lungs of an opera singer to hold the notes of companionship for so long. The most memorable line in fiction, to me, is the last line of Toni Morrison's Sula: "Girl, girl, girl. We were girls together." I read that line for the first time when I was 17 years old. I had no idea that to be an older woman, to point to a friend such as Sula, is a mighty high note to hit. I know it now.

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Vivian Gornick Photo by Esther Hynemans

The House of Elder Artists
The challenge of making a daydream into reality

By Vivian Gornick

THE PROJECT IS CALLED THEA--The House of Elder Artists--and it is the creation of a group of New York artists and activists who have been working for some years to build a not-for-profit senior residence in Manhattan for women and men in the arts. At THEA, rather than "retire," the residents will live out the last part of their lives very much as they have lived out the previous ones: in the company of like-spirited people, and in productive interaction with the city whose cultural life their presence enriches.

The plan is to put up a building of a hundred apartments (to be rented on a sliding scale of affordability) plus a set of common living and dining rooms. There will also be meeting and exhibition spaces where the residents will give lectures and readings, mount gallery shows and film series, conduct seminars and master classes--all open to the public. That way, everyone benefits: the city by having continued access to valuable experience and talent, the residents by keeping working minds alive. To insure that this ambitious dream becomes a reality, THEA has formed a partnership with the Women's Housing and Economic Development Corporation (WHEDCO), a prize winning, not-for-profit developer that shares THEA's social vision and lends THEA its expertise in finance and construction.

When THEA is built, New York will have a unique residence and cultural facility and a fresh model for how to rescue old age from the spiritual impoverishment to which it is so often consigned.

It all began with my mother who, when she died five years ago at the age of 94, was still living alone in the apartment she had occupied for 30 years in a middle-income housing complex in Manhattan. She knew everyone in her union-subsidized building, had good neighbors and elevator acquaintances, and said hello regularly to many people in the street. Yet, oddly enough, she had no companion with whom to run around. Warm, intelligent, confrontational, possessed of great vigor and rude good health, my mother was always on the go. She attended every free movie, concert, and lecture series in the city. Lincoln Center was her hangout. In compulsive need of social contact, she met people easily wherever she went. Not a day passed without an adventure in the street. New York and my mother were made for each other.

At 90 she began to lose her balance. Within two years she could no longer walk alone in the street. She was the same in every regard, except that now she was unable to travel freely about the city, providing herself with the stimulus she craved. That, however, was some except. More or less housebound, she changed rapidly. Her children and neighbors visited regularly, but somehow we could not give her what she needed. She grew steadily more listless and withdrawn. She began to drift. For the first time in her life she lost definition--she no longer looked like herself. She looked like a generic old woman.

One day when I was visiting I brought along a friend, a person who also talks to everyone she meets in the street. Unexpectedly, my friend's presence was enlivening. In no time at all, she and my mother were deep in conversation--real conversation, not the ritual exchange that elicits a ritual response. The change in my mother was immediate and astonishing. Within an hour she was not only looking younger and more alive, but--and this was really startling--like herself.

It wasn't hard to figure out what was happening: The conversation was allowing my mother to remember that she had a mind, and, in the act of occupying it, she was returning to her old self. What was remarkable to me was how strongly she wanted to be herself again. I saw that at the age of 92, my mother was hungry to stay alive in the only way that counts. Between then and the end of her life, given half a chance to be "herself" she invariably took it.

Watching my mother in the last years of her life, I began to think about my own old age. My situation, I thought, was not so unlike hers. I, too, was alone. I, too, was financially marginal, had a living relationship to the city, and many acquaintances but not many intimates. I realized that when I thought about growing too old to take care of myself, the worst part of it often seemed to be that I, like my mother, might end my days confined to a place where congenial company was not a given and, worse yet, I might be deprived of New York City. Fear of loneliness and isolation, I saw, was my great anxiety about the years ahead.

I BEGAN TO FANTASIZE. Wouldn't it be wonderful--this was my first daydream--to end up in a residence in Manhattan full of smart, lively women whose lives bore some rough resemblance to my own; a place where the chance for companionate exchange would be better than even, so that I might be "myself"--even if only for an hour or two a day at dinner? Then I stopped daydreaming and thought, Why need this be a fantasy? Why not a reality? I went through my phone book and invited almost every woman I'd known over the past 20 years to come and talk about what was on my mind. Thirty of them showed up.

The differences among us--in temperament, interests, and finances--were great, and the responses ranged from "What will it cost me?" to "Will there be medical care?" to "Who's in charge of Wednesday night movies?" But every woman in the room that night agreed that isolation of the spirit was the thing she most feared about old age. A residence formed with this concern in mind was altogether to be desired.

For the next two years, people came and went at these meetings. Many of the original group remained, some brought their friends, and a few showed up because they'd heard about the meetings and were drawn to the idea of the project. In time, the core group boiled down to 15: most of us artists, one scientist, and a couple of lawyers. The question we constantly mulled over was, How do we find the organizing principle that addresses the question of growing old among like-spirited people? What, actually, do we mean by like-spirited?

Everyone knew that the key element was to raise the lowest common denominator of a senior residence from the simple fact of age to one that would honor the needs of mind and spirit. The more we thought about it, the more we realized how vital was this thing we were trying to do. You spend a lifetime struggling to become a conscious human being. You develop a self through work, love, politics, talent, informed opinion--a self that you think of as your real self--and then, long before you're dead, with years of sentient life ahead of you, your lifelong effort to "become" is of no consequence. The only thing that matters is your age and your bank account. Anything we came up with would have to be an improvement on that.

The first suggestion (mine) was a retirement residence for feminists. That, in a roomful of feminists, was instantly shot down.

"Too broad."

"Too narrow."

"Too inclusive."

"Too restrictive."

"What, no men?"

The second suggestion was a retirement residence for women who'd been active in public causes. That quickly went the way of the first.

"Activists? What does that mean? They'll think we're communists."

"What, no men?"

The third was for women in the arts.

"What, no men?"

(It was interesting, that it was always the lesbians among us, not the heterosexuals, who said, "What, no men?")

Then one night, the filmmaker in the group, said, "Why are we calling this a retirement home? Who's retiring? And from what? From our work? From the city? Almost everyone in this room expects to go on working till she drops. And if the time should come when we can't go out into the city, why then, let's make a place where we bring the city to us."

Every face in the room lit up. On the spot, we decided that we would become a senior residence for women and men in the arts in Manhattan--and make every word in that description count. We would build a place smack in the middle of the city, equipped with lecture and performance and exhibition spaces where the residents would go on doing and presenting their work--and we'd invite in the neighborhood!

This is as far as we have gotten. We have an excellent relationship with our partner, WHEDCO. We have raised some money, met a challenge grant, put on a highly successful benefit performance in New York last September; and now we have a year's worth of programs taking place all over the city, just to show what dynamiteTHEA is going to be once it gets built. The only snag is the cost of Manhattan real estate. Our difficulty in finding a property that we can afford has been monumental. But we're determined not to be pushed out of the city that we have spent our lives in. So we work, and we wait. And when we get discouraged we remember that, from the very first, people on all sides have said, "This is a great idea," and "You'll never be able pull it off." We believe so strongly in the truth of the first that we have got to overcome the defeatism of the second.

Anyone with information or suggestions that might help THEA achieve its goal is welcome to call or write THEA, Suite 16-F, 175 West 12th Street, New York, NY 10011; 212-924-0658.

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The poet at 80
A tribute to the aging poet Marie Ponsot is full of the imagery of vigor and growth

By Marilyn Hacker

 

Marilyn Hacker Photo by Iva Hacker-Delany

THIS POEM WAS WRITTEN for the poet Marie Ponsot on her 80th birthday. Since then, she has published Springing, a volume of new and selected poems, and enlivened the intellects and imaginations of several more groups of students at Barnard College, the Cooper Union, Columbia University's School of the Arts, and the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York--at all of which she continues to teach. She is, in my opinion, one of the major poets of her generation. Though her first short book, True Minds, was published in 1956, when she was 34, the major body of her work has appeared in the last 20 years, and most of the poems she wishes to make public have been written since she was in her 50s. She has been considering and speculating on the possible richness and creative fertility of age since her early work, fitting for a poet who honors both experiment and the multiple traditions that inform American poetry; who honors also the multiple possibilities of women's lives. Her ongoing life remains part of a work-in-progress: the octogenarian poet, asymptotic to her own maturity, considers "What Would You Like to Be When You Grow Up?"

The reason for the garden is
this rooming house, this tidy
body's heart, this minded body

where I now rent only
the attic regularly
and the kitchen on odd nights.
…………
I think I've got whatever I need
in the overhead compartment.

Though Ponsot's work has not yet been extensively discussed in the context of second wave feminism, even by feminist critics, or made part of the feminist literary "canon," its assumptions, and, even more, the questions it poses, place it in that line (though never to the exclusion of other investigations). Marie Ponsot is at once a poet eminently of her time, whose work bridges the assimilation of and resistance to modernism in contemporary Anglophone poetry. Her work is comprehensible as part of the ongoing enterprise of poetry as she understands it, not limited to national borders or even to the English language, but an irreplaceable part of what defines the human mind and the human community.

FOR THE 6TH OF APRIL
for Marie Ponsot

Eden is
pots and tubs on the terrace.
Tenacious seeds root, wind-strewn,
to bloom around the ficus.

Light and shade
from this and every decade
cross and dapple the notebook
you hold open on your lap.

Eighty? Well,
forty, too, and twenty: still
no one's fool, a canny heart,
spirit joyously at school.

Precocious
child, you run ahead of us
aging enfants terribles of
a later generation

Slim mother
of a brood of boys, you were
(seemed) all honed will, clear mind, like
a boy, hermit, young sybil

while the day-
to-day life of the body

which needs food on the table,
an orderly neighborhood

and wages
worked through you. You filled pages
nonetheless: fables, lines, rhymes,
hints from all your languages:

how to live
well on bread and wine, forgive
old enemies and lovers
so that full days pass in peace.

Is it luck
no one gets her old life back?
What you regret you redress
if you can; use; don't forget.

Your daughter,
one more city gardener,
tends your best cuttings in pots

in pale sun a half-block west.

Your desk looks
out on your trees (past the books).
Thick thumbs of amaryllis
work their way up and spring comes.

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Mary grows up
The Virgin in her later years

Lesley Hazleton Photo by Olivier D'hose

By Lesley Hazleton

ICONS NEVER AGE. Especially not the Virgin Mary. In the cultural imagination, she is always in her 20s--a Renaissance artist's ethereal dream, nothing at all like the dark-skinned, hard-muscled Middle Eastern peasant adolescent she really was. She remains "ageless," as they say, as though this were a compliment, even an honor. In fact it is the opposite. She is all image and no reality--a kind of virtual Mary. Deprived of vitality, intelligence, and feeling, she is a being so self-effacing that all she can say at the Annunciation is "Let it be done unto me"--a phrase some biblical scholars interpret as a queenly "Let it be," but that can as easily be read as a cowed "Yes, sir," or even as a sulky "Whatever."

The events of the gospels are immensely physical--conception, birth, feeding, healing, excruciating death--and yet Mary seems to sleepwalk through them, so vague a presence that she doesn't even appear at the crucifixion until the last gospel, John, and then only as "his mother," without even the courtesy of her own name.

The most revered woman in the world surely deserves better than this. The least one can do is honor her by gracing her with reality. Who was she, then? This was the deceptively simple question that impelled me to write Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography, which will be published next spring.

I began by giving her back her real name: Maryam in Aramaic, the language she spoke. That helped me to ground her in a time and a place, in Palestine 2,000 years ago. After four years of intensive research, a portrait emerged of a woman who was far more than we have yet acknowledged her as being: a strong and courageous woman who did not merely assent to her role in history, but actively chose it and lived it to the fullest.

The further I explored the multiple facets of her life--peasant villager, wise woman and healer, activist, mother, teacher, and yes, virgin, though in a sense we have long forgotten--the more relevant and admirable a figure she became. I was struck by how political, social, and cultural issues seemed to echo across time, creating new perspectives. The question of Maryam's age, for instance, challenges contemporary assumptions

PREGNANCY AT 13 sounds scandalously early to the modern ear. It brings to mind stories of inner-city girls who have sex in desperation for love and attention, then treat their newborns as though they were living toys--barely out of adolescence, children bearing children.

It can't be, says the western mind. Not Mary. Except for the collective mind of the Vatican, which retains a less sentimental and, ironically, more realistic view of human physiology. The official Roman Catholic celebration of Mary's 2,000th birthday was in l987, 13 years before that of her son.

Never mind for now that the Vatican reckoning is off, since calendars have become more precise through the intervening centuries. Whether you reckon the year of Jesus' birth at the academically agreed upon if peculiar date of 4 BC--Christ born four years Before Christ--or at the simpler and popularly accepted stroke of midnight between 1 BC and 1 BC, or at the more likely date of 6 BC, one fact remains: Maryam was 13.

Even today, in much of the world, girls are married off at puberty. And Maryam lived 17 centuries before what historian Philippe Aries called "the invention of childhood" in the West. Children were seen simply as small adults. Their ages were figured not by numbers, but by what they could do: "the age of chasing stray sheep" or "plant gathering" or "plowing."

Marriage came early. It had to. When life is short, you need to grab at every opportunity to reproduce it. And life 2,000 years ago was very short.

True, there is the biblical reckoning of a long life, still echoed in the Jewish birthday toast "to a hundred and twenty." But nobody does live to a hundred and twenty, not today and not in biblical times either. Long before records of births and deaths were kept, 120 was an idealized lifespan, providing an image of the patriarch or matriarch looking on in satisfaction at four or five generations of offspring, the visible proof of having been fruitful and multiplied.

To grasp just how idealized this biblical number is, you don't have to go back 2,000 years. You need only look at almost any peasant population today--in Afghanistan, in Somalia, in all those countries that many westerners barely register as existing, until some form of military intervention suddenly brings them into the brief and fickle spotlight of world attention.

The numbers are chilling. Data from 1980 show one stillborn per five live births. One in ten of those born die during the first year of life. A third are dead by age five. Fewer than half of those born make it to puberty. And even for the survivors, life expectancy in many parts of Asia and Africa is under 50 years.

Not that the western world is that far removed from such lifespans. Go back a mere couple of centuries to 18th-century London, and records show well over half of those born dying by age 16. Only ten percent made it beyond age 45--the same number as in ancient Rome. In 19th-century Massachusetts, more than a third of all women died by age 20. It wasn't until the 20th century, with the germ theory of disease, and especially with the introduction of penicillin and vaccination, that lifespans began to increase to those we now take for granted in the West.

In the ancient Middle East, as many as half of all children died before age five. Infant mortality was so high that Aristotle noted in his Historia Animalium that newborns were not named until a week after birth because many wouldn't live that long.

Childbirth was almost as dangerous for the mothers. Miscarriage was common, usually due to malnutrition or disease. Of those who carried an infant to term, about one out of three died in childbirth from uterine hemorrhage or infection, often with their first delivery. Five or six live births would be high for any one mother, and since so many children died in infancy or early childhood, the effective birthrate was lower than it is today in the industrialized world.

The other famed biblical lifespan, three score years and ten, was the preserve of the fraction of one percent who were wealthy and sheltered, and even then of very few of them. The second-century philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, raised by his grandfather after his parents died when he was young, saw nine of his 12 children die in infancy or childhood, and that was with the best hygiene, nutrition, and medical attention available in Rome.

And such figures applied only to "normal" times, when death was caused by disease, or by the kind of gross accident familiar to farmers worldwide, or by infection--even a cut or a rotten tooth could kill you. Death by human violence shortened lifespans still further. Political upheavals sent foreign armies roaming and killing at will, making no distinction between military and civilian targets, while internecine conflicts spiraled out of hand as they still do two millennia later (think of Hutus and Tutsis, Serbs and Bosnians, Irish Catholics and Protestants, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, to name just a few). At such times, death rates surge beyond predictability with, depending on the place and the century, firing squads, "disappeared" people, massacre by machete, torched villages, mass crucifixions, marketplace bombs, unmarked common graves.

Imagine, then, the idealism it took to conceive of someone living to three score and ten, let alone to a hundred and twenty. Imagine the power of the biblical command to be fruitful and multiply when being fruitful and multiplying was so rife with risk, the odds so loaded against success. Who needs such a command, after all, except those for whom it is in doubt?

When life is short, there is no such thing as "youth." There were no teenagers 2,000 years ago, as there are none in many parts of the world today. To be 13 when the average lifespan is so short is equivalent to being a young adult in modern western society. Westerners are shocked at 13 year olds toting Kalashnikovs and shoulder missiles in African and Middle Eastern warfare, but that is because we take for granted the idea of childhood, and of the teen years as a kind of older childhood, a slow adaptation to adulthood. We forget that to be a teenager is a luxury afforded only those with good nutrition and healthcare. For nearly the whole world 2,000 years ago, there was no such luxury. Together with the short lifespan, the high risk of maternal and infant death in childbirth made early marriage and pregnancy essential to survival of both families and peoples.

A 13-year-old girl was considered a woman. Menstruation had begun. She was fertile, and fertility meant maturity. What we now celebrate only as ritual--the passing into adulthood marked by rites such as Confirmation or Bat Mitzvah--was fact 2,000 years ago. A 13 year old would be a mother. A woman of 40 would be a great-grandmother. By 50, if the survival odds worked in her favor and left at least one surviving child in each generation, she would be a great-great-grandmother. She would be truly ancient.

TO PARAPHRASE The End of Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus--"We have to imagine Sisyphus happy"--we have to imagine Mary old. And that means reconstructing her life after the crucifixion, when she disappears completely from the gospel record.

Are we really to believe, as various apocryphal and legendary versions have it, that she retreated to Ephesus to live out her days in the care of John, or was sheltered in Jerusalem by Peter, or went back to the Galilee to live out her days in quiet anonymity? In fact, are we really to believe that such a woman would retreat at all?

This is the woman who was the source of her son's powers of wisdom and healing, the woman who taught him about justice and freedom. She had just been through the worst any mother can know--the excruciating death of her child. Face etched deep by hard work and harder experience, it is inconceivable that she would simply accept such cruelty with another silent "Let it be."

No. Given what we know of the time, and of women's role in early Christian life, it makes more sense to see her in a far more active role. The gospel writers refer to "the many women who came up with him to Jerusalem," and these women would almost certainly have gathered around Maryam to form a new kind of community. In an early form of liberation theology, they would have combined activism with contemplation, offering shelter and healing to those in need, in the spirit of justice and the path of wisdom.

WISE IS NOT A WORD much used any longer. One can be smart, one can be intelligent, one may even be a genius. But wise? That has an unreal feel to it, simultaneously too grand and too vague for practical people.

Yet in Maryam's time, there was nothing vague about wisdom. Quite the contrary. A great deal of the Jewish theology of her day was built around the divine female figure known as the Lady Wisdom. She had a distinct voice. She spoke directly, in quotation marks, in several books written by Judean gnostics living in Egypt from the third century BC on.

Her name, Hochma, was the abstract form of hachama, wise woman. Her earliest known appearance is in the third-century BC Book of Proverbs, where she descends from the divine world to guide and save humanity. She was there when God created the world, she says, before anything else existed. She proclaims her greatness, gives dire warnings of the dangers of ignoring her, and demands and expects loyalty. As the manifestation of God's presence in the world, this is her due.

In the apocryphal Book of Wisdom, written in the first century BC, Hochma encompasses all the sciences of her time: physics, alchemy, astrology, biology, psychology, herbalism, and medicine. The book praises her in a list of 21 attributes--three times the magical number seven--that make her everything a woman and a goddess could be: "Intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, active, incisive, unsullied, lucid, invulnerable, benevolent, sharp, irresistible, beneficent, loving to man, steadfast, dependable, unperturbed, almighty, all-surveying, penetrating, all-intelligent, pure and most subtle spirits."

At times, her language reflects the grandeur of contemporary hymns to Isis; at others it seems very close to the sensuality of the Song of Songs. In the apocryphal second-century-BC Book of Ecclesiaticus--often called the Wisdom of Ben Sirach to distinguish it from the better-known Ecclesiastes--she says she is like the finest vines, the sweetest blossoms, the most beautiful roses, the tallest and most graceful trees:

I have exhaled a perfume like cinnamon and acacia, I have breathed out a scent like choice myrrh... Approach me, you who desire me, and take your fill of my fruits, for memories of me are sweeter than honey, inheriting me is sweeter than the honeycomb. They who eat me will hunger for more, they who drink me will thirst for more...

And so they did. Two centuries later, Christian gnostics would expand the earlier Jewish writings and elevate the Lady Wisdom still further. Calling her by her Greek name, Sophia, they explicitly revered her as the great virgin mother. In The Apocryphon of John, she becomes "the invisible, virginal, perfect spirit." She impregnates herself, and so is "the Mother of everything, for she existed before them all, the mother-father." She is the origin of all things; without her, the world would not exist.

Inevitably, gnostics hungering for divine knowledge identified Sophia with the first great biblical figure who hungered for knowledge: the mother of all humans, Eve. Where Adam was content to exist in ignorance, Eve dared to reach for more. She picked and ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The gnostics saw this as reaching for knowledge of the divine. They believed it was an act of courage and spiritual integrity, not of disobedience. Eve was Wisdom in action, to the extent that in the gospel On the Origin of the World, she becomes Sophia's daughter, sent by her mother to teach Adam, who has no soul, so that he might attain one.

But Sophia's main child in the gnostic gospels is Jesus, the teacher and mediator of Wisdom. He is her son, her lover, and even, in the Sophia of Jesus Christ, Sophia herself. "The earliest Palestinian theological remembrances and interpretations of Jesus' life and death understand him as Sophia's messenger and later as Sophia," says theologian Elizabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza in her book In Memory of Her. "The earliest Christian theology is sophialogy."

A world without Wisdom, without Hochma, must have been unimaginable. She was literally a proverbial presence, constantly invoked. And now that her favored child, Jesus, was dead, his spiritual and earthly mothers would unite to transform grief into wisdom, disaster into renewal. For if ever there was a flesh-and-blood manifestation of Wisdom, it was the white-haired Maryam: the mother, the healer, the wise woman.

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Taking a U-turn
The aging woman as explorer of new territory

By Carolyn G. Heilbrun

I HAVE BEEN A FEMINIST for most of my adult life, which makes my drift away from feminism in my middle 70s a bit strange, even to my eyes. Not that I do not work politically for feminism now as ever, perhaps more while the Christian Right rules over us. My feminist antennae continue to quiver. But recently, the fate of women in fiction or nonfiction has failed to compel me as a reading subject; my writing, reading, and cogitations have turned to other avenues of contemplation. When not pondering life in general, I read and learn about science, primarily physics but also evolution and the grandeur of Darwin's life and thought.

In the wondering part of my life these days, I seek out poetry. But even here, the poetry that I meditate upon is not the poetry I read for so many years before my 70s. The women poets, many of whom seemed, in past years, to be writing my life, make little demand upon me. My esteemed Auden, too, leaves me only with excerpts for things I need to say and cannot say other than in his words. I mostly return instead, odd as I find it, to Wordsworth and to Gerard Manley Hopkins--Hopkins most strangely, since for me one of the chief comforts of science lies in its abandonment of God. Yet here is Hopkins, perfectly conveying what is these days my chief despair:

birds build--but not I build; no, but strain,
Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

And here is Wordsworth:

Another race has been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

But poetry accosts and assuages me less often. I have turned to science, turned to reading of men, with their feasible destinies, their ready-made support groups of men like themselves, and their chance profoundly to affect human knowledge and action. I allow the felicity of their lives to overpower me, even as I cannot help but notice their dissimilarity to most female fates. I had, in fact, grown weary of the constant defeat by destiny or chance of even the best qualified women; I had grown weary of the readiness of many women, even feminists, to disparage those of our sex who flourish. Whether fate or the roller coaster of politics had impeded the progress of feminism and of female accomplishment became extraneous to my thoughts as I fell, with astonishing relief, into the bounty of male lives and male stories.

I am struck by the way the work of these men forced them into challenges, if not denials of the prevailing and powerful religions of their day. They did not so much deny God as suggest that the laws of the universe might be better understood, not only by disaffirming God, but by refusing to see him as an adequate hypothesis for the universal laws of physics and evolution. To attribute all creation to God was to accept the threat, as with Galileo, of having to disclaim one's discoveries. Faith has been called the evidence of things not seen; rather it is, for scientists, the refusal to see. I may learn but little of science; yet, turning to scientists in my 70s, I make myself a poet by Thoreau's definition: "The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something." (And I rejoice in his vestigial, elegant use of commas.)

The great reward I find in science is the way in which scientists see a problem and set out to solve and understand or, at the least, to interpret it. Sometimes they are right; sometimes their efforts are later disproved; perhaps there is no answer at all. In fields like sociology, psychology, philosophy, and literary criticism, however, no lasting answer is ever to be found. Certainly for the question to which the major part of my life was devoted--the question of women's attempt to become whole human beings able to chose among destinies--there is no "right" answer to be found. There are only cycles and pendulum swings. A math problem from my childhood concerned a frog who, trying to get out of a well, continually climbed up five feet and fell back four. The frog did, eventually, make its way out; for women, on the contrary, the fall back seems eternal. In science, any solution, any explanation, must be capable of being repeated. It must also face and survive Karl Popper's test for falsification, which says that you cannot prove that a proposition is correct unless you have tried to falsify it and not succeeded. Richard Feynman, as his biographer James Gleick reports, "believed that the inefficiency, the guessing of equations, the juggling of alternative physical viewpoints were, even now, the key to discovering new laws." But new laws in science, once discovered and defended, are established.

Also, I find gratifying the models of a "good" life offered by the scientists--lives encompassing work that powerfully matters, in relation to which a private life is definitely secondary. Romance, spouses, children are appreciated but are not, and never can be, at the center of rewarding achievement or endeavor in the world of science.

Do I understand the science I am reading? I grasp it a little better than I did before entering upon this venture, but the extent of my comprehension is best expounded by Chaim Weizmann, describing a trans-Atlantic crossing with Einstein in 1920: "Einstein explained his theory to me every day; by the time we arrived, I was finally convinced that he understood it." The work of Newton and Einstein are more available to the likes of me than either cosmology, about the birth of the universe and the death of stars, or string theory, the postulation of tiny one dimensional invisible filaments called strings uniting quantum mechanics with general relativity. The reward in each case is in the striving to understand and the glimpses of the scientists at their work. In addition, I am greatly aided by the exposition science journalists provide precisely for such as I. As to evolution, that I seem able to grasp more directly and with greater ease.

AND WHAT PART HAS GOD in all this; and why do I bother with that question? My oldest friend, who believes in God, formulates the problem for me. Why do so many scientists, even Stephen Hawking, sooner or later invoke the name of God? Why did the mathematician John von Neumann turn to Catholicism at his death? Grappling with this question has allowed me to face the agnosticism of my life--and to confirm it. My friend sends me highly intelligent, searching articles about the connection between science and God. These, figuring God as a master mathematician, convince me that such investigations are necessary to those who need a place for God in modern science, but not for those who find the universe, and the earth itself, sufficient compensation. Wallace Stevens' Sunday Morning, though he too died a Catholic, expresses perfectly my final religious conviction, which was probably Stevens' first: "We live in an old chaos of the sun." And at the poem's end we have not a single dove's annunciation to Mary, but casual flocks of pigeons who make "ambiguous undulations as they sink / Downward to darkness on extended wings." I intend no condemnation of those institutionalized religions that do not define themselves by their enemies, their own righteousness, or their missionary zeal. Ritual and community, worship and holidays, are essential to many, but not to me--and the scientists bolster me in this.

Do I imagine that others in their 70s, or approaching them, or now beyond them, will find any benefit from learning where I find myself? Yes, some will. For they may, as I have, come to realize that it does not suffice to hold on to the life one has long known as a way to prolong it. I have found that a swift deviation from past interests is surprisingly sweet. One's politics may not radically change; one's commitments usually remain unaltered. But if the focus of one's attention shifts sharply, one awakens. There are, I surmise, three alternative, reasonable roads to a workable compliance with old age: One is to go on doing what one was doing, preserving as far as possible those physical aspects and activities that help to deny aging; another is to contemplate the past, reflect upon it, and, if one is talented, write about it in the form of memoir; a third is the way I have taken, of a u-turn onto something hitherto ignored. This last, I have found, has the benefit of stimulating one's mindfulness, one's new-found capacity for attention, the faculty most readily lost in old age.

And then there is death. "'In the middle of my party, here's death,' Clarissa Dalloway thought." What business have I to talk of death in these pages? At the opening of my book, The Last Gift of Time, I wrote that I had always planned to end my life at 70, the biblical span. That statement astonished many people, and my explanation--I was often asked about this when speaking in public--seemed to offer them little enlightenment. My encounter with death at 70 was neither sudden nor dramatic; it was rather a daily struggle willingly to proceed and endure. It was not that I had nothing to live for; it was that, at that time, and later, I could not credit the unconsidered commitment to go on living if my particular journey seemed to be over. At 70, rather to my surprise, I found I still had promises to keep.

Is the end of the journey now near? I fear living with the certainty that there is no further work demanding to be done. Margaret Atwood, at the beginning of Negotiating with the Dead, quotes Marguerite Duras: "Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book"--Duras perfectly describes the situation.

I have always believed that, over 70, one should be as free to choose one's death as one must, earlier, be free to choose whether or not to give birth. Well into my 70s I live, as all must live at this age, with the inevitability of approaching death and the chance of a devastating, unanticipated assault from some bodily failure. I have, unlike many of the old, consented to life only on the terms of borrowed time. Perhaps, however, there are, even among those most privileged by life, more than we might guess who, like myself, ruminate daily upon death and consider each day as accepted, so to speak, on loan. One may, of course, choose to hold onto the loan beyond one's ability to decide on death--one of life's profounder ironies. But there is also a curious compensation for this risk: If each day is a loan from eternity, one spends it with the joy known to gamblers betting everything on a last roll of the dice. The payoff is intensity.

Meanwhile, I shall probably not attempt to publish a book about the men of science; I write because, as I read and cogitate, I must write--but only for myself. Is that, I ask myself, because, were I to attempt to publish, I would have to fear rejection? Yes, there is that, but not as much of that as there might be.

What it comes down to, finally, is that I think life beyond 70--and these days life can go on for decades beyond 70--is an adventure so far largely unrecorded, unanticipated, unacknowledged. Wordsworth warned if "solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief / Should be thy portion," well--what in that case shall we do? These portions are inevitable, part of the adventure of old age, like frostbite for explorers in the arctic. Such dangers are undertaken by the old, as is extreme cold by explorers of the poles, in the hope of startling oneself into vibrancy.

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Kerryn Higgs Photo by Lisa Gross

A tale of two accidents
Injury at 20 is not the same as injury at 55

By Kerryn Higgs

AN ORDINARY MORNING in Syracuse, New York. The kettle was on. I decided to whip down the basement stairs to start the washing machine. Stairs with a rail, but a rail set back in a recess. A brick wall at the bottom, so you have to make a sharp turn into the laundry. The laundry bag was lying on the top stair, so I kicked it down - or that was my intention. I don't know where the bag ended up, but me, I was airborne, headfirst, grappling at empty space.

I can't say I remember the impact; next thing, I was lying on my back on the concrete in the narrow gap between the bottom stair and the wall, and yelling for my partner, Harriet. Harriet is one of those people who is always in the middle of something and tends to say: Wait there. One moment. But I screamed, and she came straightaway.

From her point of view, it looked bad, my forehead covered in blood, no sign I was about to get up. As the shock began to wear off, the pain in my left arm grew. My mouth was dry. I agreed she should call 911.

An army of tall men arrived, first the firefighters for some reason, then the ambulance paramedics. Surreal, towering at the top of the stairs, giants stepping over me. A barrage of questions about whether I'd lost consciousness, then they eased me onto a rigid stretcher and fitted a neck brace, even though I said my back and neck felt fine. No painkillers, they insisted, and no water, until I was x-rayed and had seen the doctor.

Later, it was evident I had hit the wall with my arms and head, left arm first, then forehead several times like a drumroll, then right arm. I hadn't the slightest bruise on my lower body. The x-rays showed a dislocated left elbow and shattered wrist. My other wrist felt a bit sore, but so much less so that it was it another two weeks before we found out it was fractured too. I had no glaring symptoms of concussion at the hospital, but when I lay down that night, and whenever I turned over, the room spun.

If one is going to fall headfirst down a flight of stairs, the US in the 21st century is an ideal venue--as long as you have insurance, that is. My Australian travel policy covered me, but the costs could have wrecked an uninsured person's life--the situation of millions of people in the US. Doing without treatment after such an accident would hardly have been an option--by the time I was moved, the pain of the dislocation was almost unbearable.

It took an hour or two before it was finally ruled safe to give me painkillers. In the meantime, when we were left alone, Harriet and I, fresh from months of antiwar rallies, wryly chanted: What do we want? Morphine. When do we want it? Now.

Harriet stayed the whole day in the emergency room, while I was wheeled in and out of x-ray, inspected by an excellent orthopedic resident called Elvis, and finally knocked out while they wrestled the dislocated bone back into its socket, manipulated the shattered wrist into a straight line, and encased my left arm in plaster. They sent Harriet out for this procedure, which must have been rather gruesome for anyone who was not unconscious--the nurse fled the cubicle near the end, looked wanly at Harriet while parting the curtain, and fainted at her feet.

It was 35 years since my body's other watershed moment. I was 20 then. It was equally sudden. A cool April morning on a country highway through the forests of East Gippsland in southern Australia. One minute heading for my sister's eighth birthday party, the next skidding into a head-on collision. That transition dream-like, a moment when the back wheel caught the soft dirt on the road margin and the car was on its own trajectory, out of my control. Again, no memory of the impact--very little memory at all. I recall telling an ambulance officer I had to be back at work on Monday and how he smiled. I was still sitting in the driver's seat, in deep shock, unaware of my broken legs as they cut me out of the car.

Nor did I feel any pain until, eight hours later, I got to the Gippsland Base Hospital in Sale, where I was born, and they took the splint off my broken femur. My language, in 1968, absolutely scandalous for a girl; so bad apparently that the doctor lectured my mother about it. After that, apart from a dream--a lurid nuclear catastrophe at Port Melbourne and a narrow escape through the docklands--I knew nothing for a week. Then I woke up feeling pretty good, with a grin and an appetite.

Surfacing to five months in hospital, I nonetheless felt lucky. Few people, I was told, had ever survived a severe embolism of the bone's fatty tissue--an occasional effect of a bad fracture, where the marrow leaks into the bloodstream--and no one had in Australia. It was touch and go, but I made medical history. Thanks partly to my mother's anxious watch and insistent interrogation of the doctors, and partly to the unpredictable behavior of the fat, which bypassed my brain. Young then, and determined to resume a full life, my helplessness did not much trouble me--I was confident it would be ephemeral.

I WAS THE KIND OF PERSON who ran everywhere and, though this habit was interrupted briefly by the car accident, I was running again a year later and went on running for another 20 years. As the running subsided, I walked in rugged country. For years, my greatest pleasure was to drive up into the mountains of the Great Escarpment of eastern Australia, with whatever friend I could persuade, take map and compass and a billy for tea--and tramp out into the trackless bush, through gorges and turbulent upstream rivers, across swathes of dense groundcover where I had to cut my way, aiming for pinnacles and waterfalls. I called them Iron Woman expeditions.

Though recovery felt complete, my broken legs had set hidden traps for the future. With age came the return of the injury. Damp weather began to attack my knees. I could predict rain. Then, around my 50th birthday, quite suddenly, the arthritis set in--the intermittent twinges became constant. My doctor told me to walk less often and shorter distances. As if I had only a certain quota of steps left, and I'd be wise to ration them. The Iron Woman sat down.

There's a lookout on the northern spur of Firestone Mountain on the escarpment, where you can look east into the Forbes Valley and west into the Hastings, a rocky spot with windswept gum trees and a sense of being in the sky. To get there, you ascend through the rainforest, no track, blazing the trees to mark your path. Last year, when Harriet came with friends from California, I was determined to take them there. Having plied myself with anti-inflammatory drugs for days, I made what I knew would be my last trip to the northern ridge.

A luminous winter day for the eight mile hike, boiling the billy on the summit in the sun, lazing on the warm rocks. A certain frisson on the way back when we lost the next blaze for a while. Despite the unnerving sensation of bone grinding on bone and days of hobbling recovery, I was recklessly grateful for the pretext to use up a great number of paces, to be up there with friends among the windswept gums, to gaze down again at the forested folds of the mountainsides and the tiny paddocks, far below on the river.

Like many middle-aged people--and despite the glaring evidence of wrinkles and aches--I had not until now been compelled to make the transition from identifying myself as "young." My recent injuries cut across this fiction. Though relatively mild, at least by comparison with broken legs and coma, the context is sharply different.

At 20, being helpless was a passing phase, borne amazingly lightly. This time, I got a foretaste of being old and irremediably dependent--in the first week I couldn't face stairs without an escort. Six weeks later, my head is still dizzy, my left arm swollen and stiff. The road back feels endless. Optimal recovery no longer promises a return to perfection.

At 20, being a miracle survivor reinforced my youthful sense of immortality, made me invincible. And tempered every tendency to feel unhappy about the damage to my legs. Now, though I've focused on the considerable luck involved in not breaking my neck--or even my right arm--it's been hard to counter the sinking feeling, the regret, about damaging a body already past its best.

Last weekend at Niagara Falls, exhilarated by the causeway walk over the rapids, but exhausted by lunchtime, I tried to reassure Harriet. Won't be long, I said, till I'm back to the full 82 percent.

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My "old ladies"
As writers age, they find ways to continue their work

Florence Howe

By Florence Howe

IT IS EARLY MAY, and I am seated in a large room filled with over 700 women and a few men, almost all over the age of 60, with a few heading towards 100. It is the annual Alumni Association luncheon celebrating the 133rd birthday of Hunter College, and Helene Goldfarb, with whom I attended Hunter in the late 1940s, is presiding. I am seated beside an old friend, William Zeisel, here to honor scholar Marjorie Lightman, who is being inducted into Hunter's Hall of Fame. We are talking about aging. "What does the word 'old' mean these days?" he asks.

"I know what it doesn't mean," I say smartly. "It doesn't mean Mariam Chamberlain," and I turn to her seated on the other side of me. "Remember, Mariam, when I came back from seeing aged relatives and greeted you at dinner by saying, 'I am so glad, Mariam, that you're not old.' You save my life and my disposition. You cheer me up." Mariam is 85. She has retired twice, but she goes to her office every day, even when others are put off by inclement weather. She has projects and agendas for me and for others. She sits on a half-dozen nonprofit boards, travels abroad to meetings, writes essays and research papers for publication, and attends movies, theatre, and dance with friends. Her mind is far sharper than mine and those of others far younger than both of us. She is a resource for anyone who needs information or advice. Her judgment is superior.

Bill is not to be put off from his question. "Is aging getting old?" he asks. And then, before I can respond, he adds, "Maybe we now have to think about 'old' as an extension of middle age that passes through the 40s and 50s and on into the 60s and 70s." I suddenly remember the title of a book by Rebecca Latimer: You're Not Old Until You're Ninety…Best to Be Prepared, However.

Bill and I have to stop talking because from the dais the roll call of classes begins: One person stands to represent the class of 1927; three the class of 1928; and ten the class of 1933-all in their 90s. I've met several of these tiny women at other Hunter functions over the years. Then several hundred from the Golden Anniversary class of 1953, stand and we all cheer them. Joan Gellinoff Masket comes to the podium to talk about those days when a subway ride to Hunter cost a nickel, when college registration each term cost eight dollars, including books. She represents my generation, who are in their mid-70s. Like many in her audience, she is chic, articulate, energetic, funny, and smart. Joan notes that the two original leaders of the class of 1953 are no longer alive. So the ones in this room are the lucky ones, the healthy survivors.

On the way home from the Hunter reunion, I said to myself, "You are one of those 'old ladies' now. Why can't you get used to that idea? Why do you continue to feel like the kid sister, the young one in the group, the one who has to keep learning?"

I can think of several reasons, but the one most important is the Feminist Press. Shortly after I helped found the Feminist Press in 1970, I began to collect women I now call "my old ladies." Many were authors of the fiction the Feminist Press was bringing back into print. They included Tillie Olsen, Meridel LeSueur, Elizabeth Janeway, Josephine Johnson, Wakako Yamauchi, Dorothy West, Louise Meriwether, Grace Paley, Edith Konecky, and Sarah E. Wright. Others were editors or scholars.

DURING THE FALL OF 1979, I met Alice Cook when we were both Mellon fellows at Wellesley College. We occupied adjacent offices in Wellesley's Center for Research on Women and apartments in the same building across from the campus. Each morning when I entered my office between half-past eight and nine o'clock, I could hear Alice's typewriter clicking away in her office next door. In early November, Alice offered two discussion sessions on questions of trade union organization, federal policies, and the law as an instrument of social change-all with reference to women. I admired the way her mind cut to the center of issues. She had traveled to more than a dozen countries in Europe and Asia, studying the status of working mothers in trade unions. After these sessions, I invited Alice to dinner. I had a burning question I wanted to ask her.

At first we talked about local matters, gossiping about who would become the next director of the Center, and about what other Mellon fellows were working on. After dinner, as we drank second cups of coffee, I asked Alice whether she would answer a personal question. I was in awe of this tiny, spunky woman.

"Perhaps," she said.

"I'm 50," I said, "and you are 75. How is your life different from the way it was when you were 50?"

"That's easy," she said. "I can't work after dinner any more."

"But when do you get up in the morning?" I didn't mention that I could never get to the office before her, even when I turned up at half-past eight.

"Around five," she said.

"What do you do at that hour?" My voice must have expressed my amazement.

"I used to run two miles, but my doctor won't let me do that any more, and so I swim two miles, then walk a mile or so before breakfast."

My own response was swift: "If I got up at five tomorrow morning, I couldn't work after dinner either."

Before we parted at Christmas, I urged her to write a memoir. She laughed and said she had many books to write before she could think of doing such self-indulgent work.

Alice Cook's vital physical and intellectual energies continued to serve her for almost 20 years longer. Each year after that, as I wrote to thank her for her annual contribution to the Feminist Press, I asked Alice about her memoir. Late in the 1980s, I had a swift reply--she was in the middle of chapter four. When I offered to be a reader or a blurb writer for her publisher, she wrote that she had none and would be honored to become my author. She also added that she'd learned to use a computer so that she could place her footnotes at the bottoms of the pages.

We worked together on A Lifetime of Labor for more than five years, during which time Alice rewrote some chapters four times, often interrupted by the need to finish other books or essays. As she turned in the final draft of the final chapter, she wrote to me that I was "not to bother her for some months, until [she] finished the manuscript of another book and the proofs for still another." She was 93, and it was the summer of 1996.

I edited her manuscript and planned to call her after the first of the year, for there were many queries we would have to work on together. But Alice had a stroke around Christmas and died in February 1997. I had a special interest in her memoir, not only because of its discussion of international working class women's history, before and after World War II, but also because I had persuaded Alice to write about how it felt to age physically and what it meant to be a single woman aging. After describing in brief, stoic language a litany of bodily degeneration--knee surgery, falling, vertigo, Bell's palsy, stomach ulcers, deteriorating vision-her pain emerges in one clogged sentence: "Calling for help is a matter in itself that I am still learning to do and to accept." When she wrote about her circle of "Wise Old Women," who called themselves WOWS, in Ithaca, New York, neither of us expected that one WOW, Fran Herman, would help me prepare Alice's book for publication.

IN 1983, I BEGAN to talk with Tillie Olsen about an anthology I wanted her to produce for the Feminist Press's 15th birthday in 1985. I was 54 and Tillie was 7l. When we walked together, she was far more vigorous than I, dashing up flights of stairs two or three at a time in contrast to my stolid lumbering. Together, walking and talking, we settled on mothering as the anthology topic. In February 1984, Tillie wrote to me, "Although I vowed not to use myself in 'other' work this year, I am passionately eager to do the calendar, but the text and selections will have to be mine-with strong opinions from you which as you know I have vast respect for. I want amplitude for the calendar." Mainly, my job consisted of urging her to select and omit, since the volume had to be a reasonable size. Mother to Daughter,/ Daughter to Mother: A Daybook and Reader, illuminates the vast breadth and scholarship of Tillie Olsen's reading. One hundred and twenty writers, from the world over, claim the theme of women's responsibility for life on the planet. Characteristically, Tillie extends the definition of mothering to include grandmothers, sisters, teachers, mammies, and mothers-in-law.

Tillie used her editorial space in the volume to apologize for the omissions and to urge readers to check out the full works of each author. Buried among the selections for December is Tillie's essay about her own mother, "Dream-Vision." In her customary terse poetic style, Tillie describes her non-religious mother's deathbed vision of elegantly robed "wise men" who come to talk with her but who then turn into "the old country women of her childhood, their feet wrapped round and round with rags for lack of boots." The vision includes the singing of the women and a baby they cradle: "My mother, through cracked lips, singing too-a lullaby." And then her mother woke:

"Still I feel the baby in my arms, the human baby," crying so I could scarcely make out the words, "the human baby, before we are misshapen; crucified into sex, a color, a walk of life, a nationality…and the world yet warrings and winter."

In March of 2003, shortly after her 91st birthday and my 74th, I sit with Tillie in her room and we talk about the world, the wars still crippling the planet but not her spirit. Thirty years ago Tillie taught me to care for my body, to swim, to walk, to do what she still calls "stretchies." Once, her limber body shamed my stiff one. Now, ignoring a painful back ailment, she walks a few blocks with me around her Berkeley neighborhood, pointing out the 100-year-old trees and the beautiful spring gardens. Some days we talk about books and even quarrel about writers, as in the old days. She tells me I am privileged to be working with African women, and she admires Women Writing Africa: The Southern Region, which she's reading. Half the feisty woman I've known for 33 years, and half the frail new Tillie who is hanging in there, she says, "Maybe I can take one of those trips with you."

SOMETIME IN THE MID-1980S, when I was still writing notes to Alice Cook, several women approached the Feminist Press booth at a conference and asked whether they might speak to me about an urgent matter. They were prepared to picket the booth, they said, but they thought it polite to warn me first. "But why the picket?" I was truly puzzled.

"We think you discriminate against older women," one of them said. "You never publish about them. All your novels are about growing up. Aging is a real issue."

I was surprised, I can admit now, for though I was then in my mid-50s, I was not thinking about aging. I explained that the Feminist Press was publishing novels about growing up female in order to supplement a college literature curriculum filled with male bildungsroman. Girls needed stories like Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall and Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley. I assured the group that, during the next several years, we would be publishing novels and other books by and about older women. In 1989 we would republish Sister Gin, the comic Southern lesbian novel by June Arnold that critic Jane Marcus said had "the very best descriptions of hot flashes in literature."

Also, I said, we would have Anna Teller by Jo Sinclair, a novel that opens with a 74-year-old freedom fighter, called "the General," on a plane bound for Detroit and the family she hasn't seen for 30 years or more. "You'd like her," I said to the would-be picketers, "She doesn't walk or talk like an old woman." Indeed, the novel reminds me today of Jo Sinclair's ability to see into the future. The youthfully widowed Anna Teller manages a huge farm and dairy business, develops an urban chain of bakeries, and then, past 70, leads men and women into resistance against the Soviet army moving into Hungary. She is not about to sit around and "relax," as her American family expects. She, I realize, could be me.

Jo Sinclair became one of my "old ladies" shortly after we published The Changelings, an autobiographical novel about an unusual friendship between a black and a Jewish girl, both 12-year-olds, who try to bridge the divide between their families. The novel also gave me a name for the kind of person I am. Like the novel's protagonist, I too at 12 had become fiercely antiracist and angry about my family's attitudes towards all who were not Jewish. Am I still, at 74, a "changeling"?

Jo would never let me come to see he--she was too ill for human company, she'd say. And she would not talk on the phone--she said she was too deaf. But she wrote long letters to me and expected prompt and lengthy replies. She had been born Ruth Said in 1913. She took the pseudonym "Jo Sinclair" when she submitted an article to the male-biased Esquire magazine of the 1930s. The editors assumed she was male and published her piece. Like me, she was Jewish and working class. Like me, she was never sure that she really was a writer.

Jo was very independent and would not take charity, even from the Author's Guild, for example, where I had gone to get her money for a needed eye operation. She was irritated with me, but she trusted me enough to offer her treasure to the Feminist Press, a memoir she had written in 1969 but had decided to place in her Boston University archive rather than publish. With our advance she paid for her eye operation and we published The Seasons: Death and Transfiguration in 1993. It is a very rare cross-class lesbian memoir that tells the story of Jo's life, and of her love for Helen, a middle-class, married woman with young children, who invites the alcoholic and impoverished Ruth Said into her home, where she lives for 25 years, writes her novels, and wins prizes. Helen is a gardener and for Ruth, the garden becomes her way out of alcohol. Eventually, as Helen becomes an invalid with a serious heart condition, Ruth becomes her nurse and the main gardener. The memoir includes Ruth's decline after Helen's death and her battle back to sobriety and writing.

ON THE DAY AFTER the Hunter alumni luncheon, I awake thinking of the "old ladies" who have died: Kate Simon, with whom I used to enjoy dinner once or even twice a week during her last six or seven years; Bella Abzug, an opera companion, whose memoir I would have liked to publish. I know I must prepare for my next African trip this coming week. And that sets me thinking about one of my newest "old ladies," Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, the "mother of Kenyan literature," as she is known there. She is my age and regards me as a maverick, not only because I continue to work--she, of course, continues to write--but especially because I have the energy to travel long as well as short distances, and to work long hours in meetings. When Marjorie was 20, 55 years ago, she left England for Kenya, where she married a Kenyan. With him and their four children she lived through and participated in the revolutions that turned Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania into independent countries. The Feminist Press has republished two of her early novels, Coming to Birth, a bildungsroman about a young woman and a young country, and The Present Moment, about a group of African women in their 70s and 80s. Both books remind me again of how much history each woman may hold in a single long lifetime.

For the Feminist Press's 30th anniversary in 2000, Jean Casella and I were able to draw on the American books we had published to produce an anthology called Almost Touching the Skies: Women's Coming of Age Stories. For our 35th--in 2005--perhaps we will be able to produce one that celebrates the history of the last half of women's lives, the mature years, filled with both large and small heroisms. I think of Elaine Hedges' worrying about completing her plans for a wedding party for a young friend two days before her sudden death. I think of Kate Simon's decision not to accept chemotherapy, despite the risk that she won't live long enough to finish the third volume in her series of memoirs. I think of Perdita Huston, spending her last months finishing the monumental Families as They Are: Conversations from around the World, and then attending two book parties with her feeding bag strapped to her back or just a few feet away. I think of Helene, heading the luncheon committee again, and the old ladies at the Hunter luncheon saying, "See you next year."

A few days later I am in a restaurant with Grace Paley, eating soup and a salad. She is to read from her 1950s stories that evening at the Graduate Center/CUNY, and we are talking about her recent visit to Tillie. I am thinking about how small Grace has become, thinner and shorter than I remember. I say, "Do you remember that night when five of us were crammed into a tiny jail cell in Washington? And one of the five was the poet Cynthia MacDonald? And how you whispered to me, 'Why can't we be grandly fat like Cynthia?' I guess that's not going to happen now, is it?" We both laugh, and I add, "Even Cynthia isn't grandly fat any longer."

Walking the couple of blocks, I hold her arm and think again about how differently each of us ages. Grace, seven years older than I, also continues to travel. Five years ago, I had called her in Vietnam, where she was attending a meeting of writers. We talked on the phone about the foreword she had written for the Israeli collection, Apples from the Desert: Selected Stories by Savyon Liebrecht. I had a few queries, I said, and then she said she was really glad I had called, since she wanted to add something to her foreword. She told me briefly about the meeting she was attending of Vietnamese writers, editors, and publishers-all men--where she had to repeat the sentence she had asked a decade before of Israeli writers: "Where are our sisters?" And she dictated, "But is there no end to the aggressive need to ask that question, 'Where are the women writers?'"

Yes, I said then and can say now, there is no end. And how could there be an end? Though many of us are now "old ladies," the women's movement itself is still young. The Feminist Press, responsible for the earliest reprints of "lost" American women writers, many of whom are now part of the standard college curriculum, is itself only in its youthful 33rd year.

If we're among the lucky ones today, we will age like Grace Paley and Alice Cook or my friend Judy Lerner who in her 80s works as a journalist and a UN activist. What makes this kind of aging life possible? Good health, of course, but after that, Judy Lerner quotes Bella Abzug's advice: "Get involved. Make a difference." I used to tell my women students in the '60s that they needed both love and work. Marriage and a family were not enough. Though their forms may have changed, work and love are essential also to "old ladies" like me. If we don't have lovers, we have loving friends. If we no longer have paid work, we work in politics and as board and committee members of nonprofit organizations whose future we care about. And if we are writers, the next poem, story, essay, book is always on the horizon.

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Running out of time
Reaching the age of acceptance and pendulous earlobes

Jane O'Reilly

By Jane O'Reilly

THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO I wrote an article about managing time. One expert advised that no piece of paper on a desk should ever be touched more than once. It is perhaps my complete failure to follow that advice that explains the fact that I own a barn entirely filled with boxes of unanswered mail.

Another expert, the graphic designer Milton Glaser, offered me two more clarifying exercises. He urged me to design a perfect day five years into the future. He said that when he assigned that task to his design students quite a number of them showed up the next day determined to leave town, change careers, or change partners. I imagined living in Vermont, picking the first peas, editing the last draft of a book, being visited by my granddaughter, and packing for a trip to Europe. In fact, although it took a lot longer than five years, I have achieved such days. They seem perfect enough, so it was probably a good idea to have tried to visualize them.

The second exercise was to try to decide what I would do if I had only six months to live. Fully, if unconsciously, confident that no such absurd thing as death would ever happen to me, I immediately said that I would take my child out of school and travel around the world. My dearest friend astonished me by saying that she would lose weight and tidy her apartment. I suppose the things that haunt us as left undone are extremely variable. Now, I might spend the time dealing with the boxes in the barn, as a last act of consideration for my satisfyingly increased number of heirs. And then again, I might not. Now that I know death is the meaning of life, real if still absurd, I am not sure I want to waste time thinking about the jumbled archive of myself.

I am running out of time.

In fact, the very experience of time has changed completely.

FOR EXAMPLE, I WAS GIVEN a glorious week at Canyon Ranch for my birthday. I am in pretty good shape--way too fat, but fairly strong and limber. All those hockey games in school, all those drinks and cigarettes abandoned, all that yoga and walking have paid off. I won't be taking up kick boxing soon, but I am better off than some women my age. Not most, just some. But at the lectures and classes on nutrition and aging I had the eerie sense that most of the audience still believed the train was just leaving the station, with a long, long run of track still ahead. I have already arrived. Becoming has given way to being. The watchword is maintenance. Forget transformation. This is it.

My daughter-in-law is 32. When I tell her I am running out of time, she worries that I am announcing that I am giving up the fight. I'm not. I will, eventually, be like my friend Kay, who is 95 and ready for the slow creep of daily time to end. (She still reads and walks and thinks, however, still fighting.) I actually won't be surprised if I live to 95. It's just that I also realize that I truly, no kidding, might not. And even if I do, I probably won't be able to speak fluent Chinese, or earn a living in Provence, or get a pilot's license, or even learn to ski properly. I won't become a real artist, write a novel or two or six, learn to sing, or figure out how to work my cell phone.

But, on the other hand, now that I have written it down, maybe I will.

If I have, say, ten years left, I bet I can conquer the cell phone, and possibly the art of watercolor. Except that when I think about how little I accomplished during the last ten years, and how quickly they whizzed past, I wonder if I even have time to clean out my closets, much less the barn. Much less learn Chinese. Time goes fast when you are going downhill. When I think of the time it took to grow from two to three, and the much longer time it took to raise a child from two to three, when I think of the hours of my life I spent napping (my one truly, completely achieved art form) and bearing grudges and trying to control the outcome of things, I realize I am now living by an entirely different clock. Without such parameters as a school year, Saturday nights, and the monthly visitor, children seem to grow up overnight, and Christmas comes at least four times a year (What! Christmas again?!) Time just runs on, on its way out, and I don't want to waste it.

Rejoice in the moment. My friend, the artist Mary Kaye, says "Yes, living in the moment. That's all we have, really, lest we be dominated by the now loud sound of the falls over which we all must go. It seems just a few years ago that the sound of those falls was only a whisper which was heard only when the wind was right."

We can live every day to the fullest, doing things we really enjoy, making the most of the time we have--if we can figure out what that particular platitude really means. I know a woman who thought it meant moving to six states in three years. She didn't really have time for that many new beginnings, and neither do I. But then, I feel a bit parsimonious about doing things for the future in any case. Like Mary Kaye, I want to plant a golden elm tree, which is said to grow eleven feet in a year, not a sugar maple that takes 30 years to look like a real tree.

My particular sugar maple was the women's movement and all that it meant. George Bush is sweeping away my life's work. My friend Mary Kay Blakely says, "I have outlived my optimism, and I miss it." We thought time was a continuum, ever progressing forward. It seems instead to be a cycle, and I doubt I have time for another turn. So we are left again with making the most of the moment. Mary Kay's sister, who is only coming up on 50, pictures us "volunteering for a kind of senior citizen draft. Whatever civilian outrage is in the offing then--NRA guys selling guns at flea markets, terrorists bombing abortion clinics, riot squads beating college students, school boards banning books--we'll march to the nearest barricades and make them shoot us instead of our teenagers." I like her vision of gray-haired furies. The very idea makes me realize that time spent acting together is time tripled.

Just for the record, I am now 67 years old. I looked in the mirror on my birthday and discovered that my ears had gotten old. They are no longer shell-like and appealingly pink, but pendulous and wrinkled, something like Hermione Gingold's ears in Gigi (and how many years has it been since I realized I had begun to relate to Hermione instead of Leslie Caron when I watch Gigi?) The spots and freckles, the flab and wobble, the folded eyelids and the stubby eyelashes, the creaky knees and crumbling teeth had, until the moment of the pendulous lobes, been matters for denial and half-hearted plans for renovation and disguise. Old ears were my turning point. I have reached the Age of Acceptance.

Just as well. I don't have time for anything else.

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Gayle Pemberton Photo by Ariel Jones

No regrets
Which ambitions and possessions are important, and which are not, was a lesson learned in an unlikely setting--Hollywood

By Gayle Pemberton

IN AUGUST 1984, I rented the second bedroom of a small Los Angeles condo belonging to Edythe Kemp. Mrs. Kemp, 88 years old and known affectionately as "Kempy"--was somewhat of an LA legend. She told me that she was the first African American child born on Coronado Island off San Diego, where her father had worked on the lavish hotel there. After graduating from Wilberforce College during World War I, she returned to southern California and later worked as a studio assistant in Hollywood during the Golden Age. Kempy said it was a union job, and her role was to make sure that the star she worked for was ready for the day's filming. At one time or another, she worked for Ina Claire, Ann Sothern, Evelyn Keyes, and Bette Davis, who called her Kempus.

My cousin Nat, an LA resident for over half a century herself, had found Kempy with the room to let just a few days after my arrival, via that apparently seamless and wireless communication network of middle-class black Americans of their generation. I had gone to Los Angeles with a Hollywood taste in my mouth. I wanted to learn something of the screenwriting game, but the tough lesson I did learn is that Los Angeles can be a very cruel and fickle place. But, that's no news. What was news, and good, about my crash and burn was Kempy, who for five eternal months kept my spirits up and delighted me. She was a new friend, grandmother, sister, and guide.

Several months before my arrival in Los Angeles, I'd stopped to chat briefly with a colleague at a college where I taught. He rarely spoke to me, this weary, cynical man who hadn't been a good teacher for many years, if ever. In our one conversation, he admitted to loathing the idea of retirement, yet it was clear that he also loathed what he had been doing for decades. After our brief encounter, I made up my mind to leave academia and to try my hand at something else before it was too late, before I became a piece of academic driftwood, filled with regret and having nothing positive to say to young people about literature or life. Some would say, with reason, that my choice of Los Angeles as a place to begin my new life was insane, but I think of it merely as hackneyed. Learning nothing of screenwriting, I did see the inside of directors' and producers' offices from behind my temporary secretary, receptionist, and typist desks, and in retrospect, I can say with some assurance that lottery tickets are a better bet than success in Hollywood.

Kempy's condo was mostly red, her favorite color. The furniture, rugs, and walls were also variants of red or pink. It could startle. She went out now and then for excursions to her favorite restaurants and friends' homes. But for the most part, she stayed in bed and watched television. I would sit with her and watch a show or two in the evening, and we would talk. She had been a famous cook. One Sunday afternoon she scraped together a meal so divine I can still remember the taste of the roasted chicken and the macaroni and cheese. Her body was marginally ambulatory, testimony to the high-calorie entrees and desserts that had created her reputation. Yet her kitchen was bare, with only a few plates, a couple of pots and stainless steel cutlery for two or three. Kempy had given up cooking and when she did, she gave away the tools of her trade. In fact, she had unloaded almost everything she ever had. The only things left were the few pictures and personal mementos of her life with her husband, long since dead, and her son, whom she had outlived as well. Her attachment to what remained appeared deep, but not overly sentimental. She had only given up driving two years before I met her, and no doctors had warned her of her impending demise. Yet for years she had been giving the material goods of her life away. Only three years before meeting her, I had spent a week of ten-hour days with my sister and best friend cleaning out my parents' home, where nothing, it seemed, had ever been tossed--including a used Styrofoam cup that I found in the attic one day that prompted a hysterical laugh that took me five minutes to contain. Kempy's solution to the sometimes tenuous relationship of "stuff" to mortality appeared to me to be brilliant. It was information worth saving, and I stored it in my brain.

I AM A THIRD OF A CENTURY away from being as old as Kempy was when I first met her, but in looking at the things I carry with me from one move to another, I am aware that it is time to begin unloading some of them, along with a few of the dreams. The horizon simply is not wide enough to hold it all at once. I have a closet shelf filled with camera equipment. For years, I was the one at the party with the camera. I was good at portraits and candids, favoring a 105mm lens so I could get a full face shot without being in my subject's face. An old Nikon F that was my inheritance from my father would capture a hip caught in mid-shake on the dance floor or an eyebrow raised across the room at that hip. I have boxes of photographs of academic colleagues, some of whom have become quite eminent, and some whose appearances in the photographs are the only proof that I knew who they were at some moment in this life-because I certainly have no idea of who they are now. There are images of city streets, national parks, English moors, countless rivers, two oceans, many dogs, 40 Christmas trees, and quite a few beautiful cakes and pies. I always thought that I might spend more time studying the art to become a better photographer, but it's time to put the cameras for sale on eBay and keep just one, because I can't imagine being completely without a camera, whether I use it or not.

I should add to the lot the unused, new sewing machine, a book on juggling and some balls, two squash racquets, a box of watercolors, a calligraphy pen and instructions, and all the paraphernalia for refinishing wood furniture. Four guitars are too many; there is not enough of me to become an outpost of the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet. The French novels that I have never been able to read I will never be able to read, unless life takes me to France for a long time. I have decided not to take up Italian.

Old friends know that every year I get a bad case of spring fever, and such is the case this year. Although I was not drawn to Hollywood by its sometimes ludicrous fictions about love, I have loved love and been unlucky in it, as most who love love. As I grow older, I've tossed out all sorts of fantasies about romantic love and faced, in ways I could not have imagined when younger, the joy of loving friends. Things sometimes even out in the wash.

Kempy made a point of befriending younger people. She had pals 50 years her junior, as I was, people 20, 30 years younger, and just one or two near her own age. She told me that it made no sense to stick to one's age cohort and be alone when they all died. In my 30 years of teaching, I've found friends among of a number of my students--a sophomore this year has all the makings of entering the group--and I hope to live long enough to see the youngest of them well into their middle years. I had no children of my own, and I certainly will not be having any now, but some part of the pleasure and pain that must come from having children I have experienced by teaching so many and finding friends among some of the most wonderful.

I will never play a good game of tennis, but I'm keeping the racquet-and the golf clubs. I will not learn the major cuisines of the world, but my pots, pans, knives, and molds stay where they are so that I can to continue cooking what I do know. I started piano lessons two years ago, and I intend to have a recital in a couple of years. I am willing to wear patent leather maryjanes and an organdy dress, if required. As I write essays--and screenplays--on my computer, I look at photographs on the wall from the past and find in them inspiration and comfort.

I went to Los Angeles because it is possible to control what one ultimately chooses to regret. Or almost. I wish I could forego the regret of having met a couple of people who pulverized my heart. But beyond that, because of my sojourn in Los Angeles, in spite of the failure that it was, I believe I will never be as bitter or resentful as that university colleague whose dreams were tossed aside at the beginning of some road he had not taken for fear, or pride, or laziness. When I needed the counsel of someone older and more experienced, who could help me discover what in my life was worth saving, throwing away, regretting or not, I found Kempy.

Kempy lived to be 92. We would talk on the phone from time to time. And through me, she found another good friend, my own friend and former student Jim, who loved her as much as I. He had a job working for one of the major studios and one day, he took her to lunch at the MGM commissary--a place she had known from the early days. He arranged a screening of her favorite film, Jezebel, which starred Bette Davis. Kempy was not a great fan of all of her employers, and she had many stories that she refused to tell publicly because of her ethics and sense of propriety. But she loved Davis, as she called her. Kempy, as Kempus, was probably a good match for the fiery Hollywood star. My mementos from my months with Kempy are a few photographs of her and the memory of a photograph of Davis on Kempy's wall signed, "To Kempus, Love Bette." I have my own picture of Davis on my bulletin board. A seemingly unlikely connoisseur of needlepoint, Davis is sitting in a chair staring at the camera, of course, with a pillow reading, "Old Age Ain't No Place For Sissies." Kempy taught me that it is possible to be both graceful and not a sissy as one ages. I will be lucky to live long enough to put her lessons into practice.

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Scrabble with my mother
What the words really spell

Suzanne Ruta Photo by Nancy Dahl

By Suzanne Ruta

I LOVE IT WHEN MY MOTHER beats me at Scrabble, because it proves that at 89, she's just as sharp as ever. I hate it when my mother beats me at Scrabble because she plays a crabbed, competitive game, making three or four words with each move, filling every available square, boxing us in to a single corner of the board so I'm the one who has to sacrifice, stringing out my one-point letters any old way, to open up the game. Then she really takes unfair advantage. She was holding onto the Q, I should have known, and she lands it on a triple-letter score. She's a very canny player, she knows all those horrid little words like quin and jo and ai that are to be found in the Scrabble dictionary but nowhere else in life--in real life, that is.

Unless Scrabble is real life. Or the inevitable stand-in for real life, for the conversations we never had and at this rate, never will, about the long gone past, her early aspirations, early disappointments (a child of the Depression years) difficulties with my father, joys and regrets. The kinds of questions they ask you for your 40th reunion from college. My mother's 60th reunion (Hunter College, class of 1935) came and went. No one asked, she didn't tell.

Before each visit to her sister's house, where she lives now in a refurbished top-floor apartment (the madwoman in the attic, we sometimes tease her), I prepare my list of questions for my mother. What was your mother like, tell me about your father, where did he do his rabbinical studies, why weren't you nicer to me when I was 15 and miserable (I'm 63 now.) But once I'm with her, some mysterious force takes over--habit, custom, generation, character--and my interviews fall flat.

"What was your mother like?"

"Overworked and short tempered."

"Tell me about your father."

"He died when I was 12, I was his favorite."

It's like torturing a clam. She occasionally volunteers the odd complaint. Living under someone else's roof brings strains. She starts off in high dudgeon "Did you ever notice how so and so does such and such…" but quickly loses steam.

"We won't talk about it, I'd rather play Scrabble."

MY MOTHER IS A strong-willed woman: my will is mush compared to hers. I've always been a dawdler (her word, from way back, when I was slow getting dressed for kindergarten at the public school three blocks from our Bronx apartment) and a dreamer, both lazy and ambitious, a losing combination. My mother is just the opposite: she's modest and energetic. For 15 years she was the information clerk at the research arm of the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. You walked in the main door, between the lions, and crossed the marble floor of the vast, high-ceilinged lobby, and there she sat, behind a high desk, dispensing information, advice, and wisdom, five days a week from nine to five. Then she added a second job. Two nights a week, she left the library, grabbed a quick bite at a nearby coffee shop and caught the bus uptown to the public high school at 68th and 2nd, where from six to nine p.m. she taught English to foreigners. A 12-hour work day, but she always had amazing stamina, and her students loved her. No one was surprised when she, and they, recent immigrants from Hungary, Colombia, and Morocco, were chosen by Alastair Cooke to represent the making of new Americans in a bicentennial special for public television in 1976. My mother's diction, always excellent, became even crisper when she taught English as a second language, and so it remains, with the slightest trace, in moments of great agitation, of her deep Midwestern origins. When provoked, she may say "chy-uld" for child, and "gonna" for "going to" runs in the family, but as I take great care not to provoke her, as a rule Ohio remains dormant in her diphthongs.

Our routine is always the same. I walk in the door and, impatient for gratitude, at once unpack my gift of books she may have read but won't mind rereading and passing on to friends. She has a strong predilection for terse, dyspeptic English women novelists: Pat Barker, Anita Brookner, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Bowen. Virginia Woolf is too speculative, Zadie Smith too exuberant. I bring her treats as well--chocolate bars, Mallomars, which are her favorite cookie, but I only buy them when they're to be found on special. The regular price is up to $4.29 a box, a scandal, she says. She keeps track.

Within five minutes of my arrival, never more, sometimes less, she has lunch ready on the kitchen counter.

"I made you a Waldorf salad, I know how you love Waldorf salad," a misconception of hers I could never bring myself to correct. Maybe by now, after all these years, I do love, or at least like, Waldorf salad, because of what it seems to mean to her--chiefly, a delicacy they used to serve at Schraffts when that ladylike restaurant chain still existed. It closed in the mid '60s in New York. "Apples, walnuts, celery, grapes in a mayonnaise sauce" also reminds us of the Fawlty Towers episode where Basil goes berserk and evicts all the hotel guests in one fell swoop. With the Waldorf salad I have a toasted cheese sandwich, which my mother fries in a pan with a little butter. I would rather skip the butter and have my sandwich grilled under the broiler, but I don't question her methods--in her kitchen she's the boss. Mind you, by acquiescing in her menu, her style of cooking, I'm not humoring her--although who's going to start a fight over a teaspoon of melted butter?--I'm just doing things the way they've always been done. Now is not the time for major changes or upheavals--if there ever was such a time. But if there was, I missed it, through oversight or absence or indifference or lack of pluck.

After lunch she cleans up. My offers of help are routinely and roundly rejected. The amazing thing is that I keep on making them. Why don't I just give up, after all these years? Whence this stubbornness? Of course, I feel ashamed to have her on her feet at the kitchen sink while I'm sitting on the living room couch reading the op-ed page of the New York Times, but I have learned to live with my shame by now. It's short lived in any event, because my mother is a quick worker. She doesn't dawdle at the sink, and the minute she's through with her chores we turn to Scrabble.

We have an old, deluxe edition, with one of those metal and plastic boards that revolves on a sort of lazy Susan, but we always forget to give it a whirl. There's no need, because we huddle close together, at one corner of the dining room table, sharing practically the same vantage point. My mother keeps score with those little metal pegs that I find difficult to manage. I keep forgetting whether I've moved my pegs or not, and rather than risk losing points through an oversight, I prefer to keep score with paper and pencil as we go along. This has an added advantage in that I can always tell her score from the position of her pegs, while she doesn't know my score until the game is over. Of course if she asked halfway through, I would tell her my score, but she never asks. She plays a concentrated, focused game, with her head down over her letters and the board, ruminating over both at the same time. She would probably have been an excellent chess player if she had ever cared to try that game.

The list of things she didn't care to try is long. Ask her if she's ever been to Venice or Hawaii, and she'll tell you, "I don't travel," as if travel were a vice, like smoking. She never learned to drive nor consulted a psychiatrist or a divorce lawyer. Divorce was in the air for a few months in 1961 but my father's second heart attack scotched any notion of even a trial separation.

We extract the tiles from a small drawstring bag of soft fabric her younger sister--her usual Scrabble companion and competitor--sewed for her. I always give the bag a good shake before we start, like shuffling the deck before a game of cards--we both hate card games: we find them boring and pointless. To begin, we each extract a single tile. The alphabet determines who goes first. Lately I've been on a winning streak, impossible to explain, and wind up going first, time after time, an advantage I would gladly cede to my mother but

A. she doesn't need it; and

B. if she did, it would be tactless of me to call attention to her failing powers, assuming they were failing, which they're not, by offering to bend the rules in her favor.

So, we let chance decide.

SCRABBLE BY ITSELF is an ugly word; it suggests a furtive, desperate search for the necessities of life, as in hardscrabble farming, and it contains, quite close to the surface, barely hidden, the word rabble. I wonder at the harsh associations that cling to the name for such a gentle, undemanding pastime. What were the game's inventors thinking, back in the 1950s? It was the middle of the Eisenhower era. I was a child, or "chy-uld," of 12 or 13. In those days I never played Scrabble with my mother. She was at work when I got home from school, and in the evenings she was too tired and too busy with the kitchen chores she shared only grudgingly with me.

I learned about Scrabble, this new phenomenon, from my mother's friend D, who lived one street over, whose own daughters had no interest in the game. Some days I went to D's house straight from school and stayed there playing till it was dark, and my mother was due home from work. D played a lazy, relaxed game. Like me, she could afford to. Her husband had a great job, with the Board of Education, so D could stay home and flick little tiles around a board, as if it were mahjong, although she mocked women who played mahjong (and since I copied her opinions, so did I). She even let me cheat--she let me spell out French words and Latin words, and she did the same, when she could think of any. She was proud of our polyglot version of the game, and we agreed that the manufacturer ought to incorporate our rules into a new variant of Scrabble to be called Omelette, which D pointed out was just fancy French for scrambled eggs.

Sometimes we got to talking and became so engrossed in our conversation we forgot to finish the game, as when I told her that my parents were not on speaking terms that week, and she analyzed my father's character for me, using terms like "inferiority complex" and "overcompensation," and congratulated me on being smart enough to comprehend the meaning of these words that were too long for the Scrabble board, but indispensable in accounting for adult behavior.

If I were to compare them to small animals, D would be a cat, a silky, well-groomed Siamese perhaps, or a Persian with long fur, stretched on a satin cushion. My mother, who got down on her hands and knees with a damp cloth every morning to wipe the floors downstairs and up (I thank God in retrospect that the total floor space, including living, dining, and three bedrooms, in our attached brick house was about 800 feet), then bathed and ran to merge into the subway to Manhattan, would be a mole. D was a domestic animal. My mother lived in wilds of her own making. Or maybe of my father's making. At any rate, she was running, anxious, predator and hunted, foraging, scrambling, scrabbling to make ends meet after my father lost his real job as a newspaper columnist and his fake job as a low-level staffer for the Senate subcommittee that took over where Joe McCarthy left off in 1954. What did my mother make of my father's friends on the committee?

She shrugs. "He had to make a living."

When I finally invented my own answer to that particular question and published it in book form, she was not offended, only amused. "I'm grist to your mill," she said. "As long as they pay you properly, it's all right with me." She knows I have to make a living too.

MY MOTHER STRATEGIZES, plots three moves ahead. She plays a smart, defensive game. While she concentrates on blocking my access to the triple-word-score spaces, I ponder the similarity of Scrabble boards and Ouija boards, and wonder if my mother and I are trying to tell each other something with the words we lay out. Messages from inner space. Why does the word atone crop up so often, for example? A measly five pointer. And what about the word vin (rhymes with win) defined, in the Scrabble dictionary as white wine. My mother doesn't know from wine--she claims she hates the letter V and just wants to get rid of it. I take a more interpretive approach. Vin, the dictionary notwithstanding, could be a kind of kabbalistic shorthand for vindictive. My mother is full of unaired grudges. She puts them aside and gets on with her life. That method clearly works for her. Vin is also shorthand for invincible.

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