Boomers Won’t Relinquish Their Claim On Youth
The cartoon in the New Yorker depicts it perfectly. Two women of an undetermined age nurse cocktails at a dark dance club. The crowd behind them moves to the music like ecstatic cranes. One woman leans across the table and says to the other, looking so above-it-all in her sunglasses, “Let’s face it, Michele, We’re not getting any older.”
This seems to be the last best wish of the baby boomers; that we may never age past the time in which we might, in just the right dim light, be mistaken for someone young.
Yes, as our own personal stairway to heaven moves closer to the top floor we are rethinking this whole aging thing. Maybe youth can extended well past 60, maybe mid-life begins at 70, maybe Saran Wrap really does cure cellulite. Hope, like the top button on last year’s jeans, spring eternal. Countless generations have taken the trip, but boomers are the first to earn air miles searching for the fountain of youth. And while looking young and being young are not quite the same thing, a lot of people over 40 are willing to split the difference. Sometimes that involves a large chunk of spare change.
Plastic surgery. It’s not just for celebrities anymore. Librarians are getting eye lifts. Soccer moms are having the fat sucked from their thighs. Those who fear the knife still have options: lasers, collagen, Retin A, or the witness protection program.
For those who insist on the “natural” approach, there is ginseng, melatonin, green algae and denial. If we can all slather on enough sunscreen and chant the right mantra, we might just live to be 120 and never look any worse than, say, Yasser Arafat. Is it hot in here or is it just me?
Baby boomers are used to being heard. We have the numbers and we have the cash. The thought of going gentle into that good night only drives us to carry snake lights and run another five miles. As a group, we will never be gratefully dead.
Maybe it isn’t death we fear so much as invisibility, the invisibility we once happily foisted on our elders. But to the most vocal and visible demographic group in the world, anonymity is not an option. We invented the culture of youth and now that we are just a teensy bit older, we want to reinvent mid-life and beyond. More time, more attention and more hair.
Well, why not? Pushing the envelope on aging is a natural venture for a generation that has defined itself by its causes. And reinventing the self is our distinctly American passion.
Of course, the underbelly of this venture is trying frantically to look like some embalmed version of ourselves at 17. But there’s an upside too, a joy that hinges on a different kind of suppleness. It’s the chance to experience our minds, bodies and hearts as the work of a lifetime.
Work done for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in Spandex or support hose, for as long as we live. With a little luck and good genes, we might last long enough to send our inner child to camp and discover our inner Grandma Moses. Only now, she’ll probably have buns of steel.
The tightrope walk between firm buns and firm spirits is an old one. Boomers didn’t invent it; we just lengthened the rope. But every generation makes the crossing and all of us work without a net.
My 77-year-old mother is paging through magazines. She stops to admire the fat, dimpled bottom of a baby. The skin, pink and plump, looks like a round ball of dough in which some hasty baker left fingerprints. Mom laughs with delight at the image then says, to no one in particular, “Enjoy those dimples, honey. This is the last time they’ll be adorable.”
And so it goes. Mom straightens her bifocals, adjusts her Wonderbra, and opens The Wall Street Journal. She, like the rest of us, is keeping her options open.
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Kathleen Corkery Spencer The Spokesman-Review