ch a p t e r t w e n t y-t h r e e

K ick i ng My Ti res

On the first day after my eightieth birthday, but a week before

a big potluck friends were giving to celebrate my entry into my
ninth decade, I found myself trying to decide how I felt. Because
that’s what everyone asked me. “What does it feel like to be
eighty?” Of course the question is mostly social, something to
begin the conversation. Everyone knows that being eighty doesn’t
feel significantly different from being seventy-nine, which is what
I was a few hours earlier, or seventy-eight, which I was a day and
a year before this birthday. My interlocutors certainly don’t want
me to launch into an introspective catalog of my thoughts in the
hours since I turned four score. What they really mean by the
question, I think, is “How are you? Feeling okay, lonely, running
down?”
This apparent curiosity about how you are starts well before
eighty. I don’t know exactly when but it’s sometime after you
“retire,” as I recall, that people begin asking with a very particu-
lar intonation, “And how are you,” with the accent on the are,
right after they say “Hello, Joan”—as if they’re braced to hear the
worst. Perhaps the operative assumption is that you want permis-
sion to give what a dear old friend of mine once described as “an
organ recital.” “Well my eyes are okay, my lungs still work, and
my stomach’s fine, but I’ve lost some hearing and I really notice
my bladder.”
Aging is a funny thing. I’m pleased to finally be eighty. The
ages leading up to it seem so elderly. There’s something that feels
complete about eighty; it’s not “almost eighty,” or “coming up on
eighty,” or any of the other ruses I’ve used to avoid the pedes-
trian seventy-seven or seventy-eight or seventy-nine. I’m happy

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to be eighty—especially considering that the alternative is not

to be here at all—but I’m not sure I’m happy about how people
think of me when they hear my age or, even worse, look at me
and judge me to be officially old.
I vividly remember the first time a woman whom I would
have assumed to be old offered me her seat in the subway—a
woman! I’ve almost never been offered a subway seat by a man,
even when, loaded with a heavy backpack and looking as old
as I can manage, I stand right in front of one of those large-
thighed young men who sit splay-legged so as to occupy at least
two and a half subway seats. It’s always women who either get
up, or catch your eye and give a little nod to indicate you should
sit down. The thing is, when women offer you a seat you know
it’s not because you’re a woman, but because they assume you’re
older and feebler than they are.
How you really are, of course, when you’re my age has a lot to
do with whether you inherited good genes and whether you’ve
taken some care of their expression as you’ve lived your life. I
suspect my genes are pretty good—at least half of them, since my
mom lived to be ninety-four—let me amend that, she survived
to ninety-four. She lived until ninety when a big stroke put her
in a nursing facility to which, as she consistently made clear, she
would have preferred the alternative—in her case, heaven. And
my father’s life, all sixty-eight years of it, was foreshortened, I’m
certain, by the fact that he lived with so much repressed anger
that came out mostly as allergies, headaches, backaches, and the
like. But he had a chubby older brother who lived well into his
nineties so I suspect his family’s genes were good.
As for having taken care of my genetic endowment, I used
my body constantly as a young Southern Californian living
where outdoor play happened year-round. And where my diet is
concerned, I’m sure my mom tried; I certainly had to eat vege-
tables. But her idea of salad—a slice of iceberg lettuce dressed
with lemon juice and sugar, for her daughter who didn’t like her

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“French dressing” made with catsup—was sufficiently off-putting

that I still don’t put salad in the “must-have” category.
And except for canned spinach, I can’t think of a vegetable I
really enjoyed during those California years when I could have
had anything fresh. Looking back, I find the canned spinach
deviation astonishing; I haven’t touched it since I left home, but
the fact that Popeye ate it may have affected me more than I dare
acknowledge. I did eat a lot of fruit. Oranges were abundant and
cheap; seasonal fruit was always there. But even though we had
an avocado tree in our California backyard, I didn’t learn to like
avocados until I came to New York. And during my years as a
single woman at Time, I had a generally rotten diet, often a Coke
and a chocolate bar from the vending machines for breakfast.
But in reflecting on my adult diet—that is, what I ate after
I married, had children, and studied nutrition—I suspect it
earned me some health credits. While pregnant, thanks to my
brother-in-law, I read health-food guru Adele Davis who was
heavy into vitamins and protein, and fatty, vitamin/protein-rich
liverwurst long before animal livers were thought of only as the
last resting place of industrial toxins. So I ate a lot of liverwurst
and gained weight, and I tried hard to put healthy food on the
table. Then as I aged my life moved strongly into food produc-
tion, and eating what I grow, so my diet has probably undergone
constant improvement in the last twenty years.
I was spending some time recently thinking a bit more about
bees and their mysterious disappearance, and wondering
whether the bees aren’t dying of malnutrition; they are moved
around to orchards and live on really restricted diets, nothing
but almond nectar, for example, for long periods of time. Their
self-chosen diets would have a variety of nectars, including some
from protective wild herbs. And that led me to wonder whether
the very instability of my present eating environment might be
helping me stay so healthy in old age. I’m not “working out,” as
I have earlier reported, and I confess I am eating out more than

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is probably good for me, although some of my restaurant food is

locally produced, and hence largely seasonal.
But when I eat at home, I have to keep shifting what I eat to
keep up with what the climate is doing to my crops. So it may be
that a bad year for production is part of what keeps me vital. The
potatoes did well this year—not perfectly but fine enough that I
can count on them—the sweet potatoes gave promise of a good
crop even before I finished digging them, and the carrots and
beets are flourishing, which means I’ll have them available for
much of the winter in my hydrator drawer and elsewhere.
But the tomatoes were hit hard by blight and failed to recover
in the cooler fall weather as they usually do, which means I have
put away less tomato sauce and puree than I normally make. And
harlequin beetles hit the brussels sprouts so I’m not going to
have many, if any, of them for January. The peppers did so well
that I’ve had to learn how to use more of them to supplement
tomatoes; the Tuscan kale that I grew for the first time ultimately
survived the beetles that did in the brussels sprouts; and so on.
As one of the articles I was reading this week says, “Redundancy
ensures reliability, so if one component of the system fails, there
is always another able to replace it.”
And although my choices seem narrower than those of people
whose food is selected from the thirty thousand odd (a deliber-
ately chosen modifier!) products in the supermarket, the plight
of the bees on their modern diet reminds me of the underlying
narrowness of our modern diet in which corn, soy, and sugar
feature heavily in the great majority of those food-like items on
the grocery shelves. It’s possible that our current health catastro-
phe—the frightening statistics on obesity and diabetes among
other things—may be the human version of Colony Collapse
Disorder, from which my garden protects me.
Moreover, I’ve finally realized that the “How are you?” ques-
tion my friends ask is the verbal equivalent of kicking the tires
of a car you’re wondering if you should buy. Both approaches

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are ineffectual at figuring out whether the kickee can still go—
which I can. But the question really means “What are you? Are
you interesting enough to talk to—even though you’re old?” To
which I would like to reply, if only it were asked directly, “Well, I
think I am, but you’ll just have to find out for yourself.” What I do
instead is answer the question they actually ask. “Oh I’m fine,” I
say brightly, skip the organ recital, and launch off into politics or
world affairs—or the garden. I have no idea how to behave differ-
ently until I feel different, and—except for a bit more reluctance
to go out and work when the weather isn’t good—I don’t.
Actually, now that you ask, I’m fine. I do have scoliosis. And I
don’t want that to get so bad that I can’t stride down the street for
the next ten years or so on my funny feet, but it doesn’t hurt, and
it’s certainly not the main thing on my mind. Well, sometimes
it is. I was talking to another aging friend of mine once about
how much better I looked in the mirror first thing in the morn-
ing when my back was relatively straight and my belly reasonably
flat, than at the end of the day when everything seemed to have
collapsed into bulges in reaction to a day of uprightness. She
laughed and said, “Yeah, that gravity—it’s awful.”

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