Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake by Anna Quindlen

Author:Anna Quindlen [Quindlen, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780679604006
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

Older

Here’s what happens when you raise the question of getting older at a restaurant table or a cocktail party or standing in line at a coffee shop: the moans begin, the sighs, the eye rolling. John had a hip replacement. Jane has tennis elbow. The back hurts, the feet ache. And let’s not even talk about age spots or eyesight or buying a bathing suit.

But what I’ve found is that if you push people a little harder, ask them what’s so terrible about getting older, almost everyone eventually gets past the plantar fasciitis and the crepey neck and winds up admitting that they’re happier now than they were when they were young. They feel as if they’ve settled into their own skin, even if that skin has sun damage.

A Gallup poll of 340,000 people showed unequivocally that we get more contented as we age. Respondents started out at eighteen feeling really good about themselves and their lives, then became less and less satisfied as the years went by. But after age fifty there was a change in the weather, and from then on happiness was on an upward trajectory into the eighties. As those in the survey grew older, they reported that stress, anger, sadness all declined. Perhaps if we think of life as a job, most of us finally feel that after fifty we’ve gotten good at it.

All this reminds me of a system I once learned to help make any important decision. Take a sheet of paper, draw a line down the middle, list pros and cons. The old house has a leaky roof, rattling windows, a wilderness of a garden, a damp basement, bad gutters. All cons. I love the place. One pro that obliterates all the others.

We can graph good sense all we want, but most of the time we feel what we feel. We can lay out the downside with ease. Getting older means the disintegration of the body, and sometimes the mind. It means being seen as yesterday’s news. Perhaps because I grew up in the newspaper business I always realized someday I’d be yesterday’s news. Perhaps because I’m the oldest of five, I’ve always felt older. There’s a lot less to my future than there is to my past, and there are undoubted minefields along the way. But what can I tell you? I look at the list of pros and cons, and I always come to the same conclusion. I like the house.

This feeling goes double for women, and the reasons are clear when you talk to them. We started out pretending, trying to adjust our throttle to some generally accepted notion of femininity. In her commencement address to the graduating class of Barnard College in 2010, Meryl Streep said that the characterization of the pleasing girl she created in high school was a role she worked on harder than any ever after. Speaking for so many of us, she recalled, “I adjusted my natural temperament, which tends to be slightly bossy,

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