A New York Memoir by Richard Goodman

Author:Richard Goodman [Goodman, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138507265
Google: HaW1tAEACAAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2017-07-26T04:34:24+00:00

When I’m Sixty-Four

One day, things begin to change. You don’t remember exactly when, but they do. You start getting out of bed a little slower, and a little more reluctantly. You find yourself moving toward the bathroom a bit unsteadily, and your back is creaking like an old floor. You look at yourself in the mirror and you see a stranger. Who the hell is that frightening-looking man? How did he get in the house? I don’t know him. I wish he would go away. He’s old.

Suddenly you have skin hanging under your chin like a suspension bridge. Hair grows out of your nose and ears like spring corn, and your eyebrows start looking like Bertrand Russell’s. Let’s not forget the encroaching gauntness that slowly but surely makes you look like you’ve just been liberated from Bataan. And stairs missed, names forgotten, routines ferociously protected, and the more frequent trips to the pharmacy.

Getting old.

Getting old, and with it, so many new ways the world looks at me, and I at the world.

I’m getting the sense of what having a disfigured face is like. I’m beginning to see certain reactions to my own. It’s nothing like poor Lucy Greely got, but I still think the analogy works. Inside, I’m young and eager and robust. But the face I show to the world doesn’t mirror this energetic youth I am inside. A woman I know who’s my age—which is sixty, by the way—put it this way. “I feel like I’m in disguise,” she said.

This inside/outside disparity has forced me to make adjustments to the way I behave. If I see a pretty woman—not nineteen, but a reasonable age, say thirty-five or forty—inside, I’m bounding after her, a swain struck by her beauty who wants to declare his admiration. If those feelings transfer to the look on my face, though, I can get into trouble. I have to remember this is the face of a sixty-year-old man.

Sometimes, I do forget, and I can see those subtle reactions of impropriety on the woman’s face. I don’t know why the woman is looking at me this way, her eyes beginning to avert. Then I’ll pass by a store window and see my reflection and think, Oh, no, she was reacting to the outside me, not to the inside me, not to the real me. And I want to run after her and say, “Miss, you mustn’t get the wrong idea. It was the real me who was admiring you, the me that’s as young as you are. I’m not old, for God’s sake. This face is not me. It’s fake. I wish I could take it off and show you. I’m not really sixty! Can you understand that?” I never do this, of course, because it would only be a matter of time before I was carted off to jail or to the lunatic asylum.

Then Faustian thoughts begin to crowd my mind.

Living where I do, in New York City near Columbia University, where there is a constant ebb and flow of youth, makes me think dark thoughts indeed.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.