GRAND Magazine - Fall 2022 - 11

ageism
I wish I could report that I found the answers in one
blinding epiphany. Instead, it's been a gradual awakening
over the past twelve years. There have been
many glum days at the keyboard, and some sleepless
nights dictating brilliant insights into my phone, most
of which were a lot less brilliant in the morning light. I
had the good fortune to be mentored by Dr.
Robert Butler, coiner of the
term " ageism, " before his
death in 2010. I attended
seminars for journalists
who cover the " age beat, "
inhaled countless books and
articles, and started thinking
out loud in blog form. I
delved into a world of advertisements
and movies, policies
and bylaws, and products and
promotions that had shaped
my unconscious beliefs with
one overarching message: old
= no good. Or, as the Twitterverse
might put it: It sucks to be
old.
A chance dinner conversation
in 2007 with my partner's
mother, Ruth Stein, got me started on this journey.
In their eighties at the time, she and her husband,
Bill, were booksellers, and that night she said, " I think
you should write about something people ask us all
the time: 'So when are you going to retire?' " The idea
was upbeat and sound bite-friendly. I started learning
about longevity, interviewing people over eighty who
work, and blogging about it.
11 GRAND Summer 2022
I headed to Santa Fe, where I had family to stay
with. My first interview was with eighty-eight-year-old
folk artist Marcia Muth on the porch of her little adobe
house, shaded by a tree festooned with shiny compact
disks and surrounded by her hubcap collection.
Muth
had been raised in Fort Wayne,
Indiana, by her grandparents, to
whom she was " a disappointment,
because I liked classical
music, I liked Shakespeare, I
loved poetry. To them, work
was having a store. " She went
on to become a law librarian,
poet, publisher, and, in
her fifties, a successful folk
art painter and teacher. A
newspaper clipping on the
wall quoted Muth's advice
to her Elderhostel students:
" You are never too old, and
it's never too late. "
Embarrassed by her lack
of formal training, Muth
painted in secret for ten
years. When a local artist dropped
by and caught her scurrying to hide her brushes, he
offered her some advice: " Don't take any lessons. Just
keep going. " She did, and it became a way of life that
she was grateful to have found in her middle years.
Chronic bronchitis had ended her teaching career a
few years earlier and tethered her to an oxygen tank,
but " it doesn't interfere with the painting, that's the
important thing, " she said. " Your life does change
as you get older, " she told me. " You get into what's
important and what's not. " She and her partner went
out less and moved more slowly, but her work continued
to improve as she got better at listening to
herself. " Don't fear old age, " she advised. " Your years
can be just as wonderful as you get rid of some of the
anxiety people suffer from. And I find my eighties have
been even more fun than my seventies were. "
The possibility that life could become more fun in
your eighties had never crossed my mind. Nor that
growing a little shorter of breath each year would fail
to terrify. Nor that an ever more circumscribed life
could be an ever greater source of personal growth
and specific pleasures. Nor that such joyful clarity
would be rooted in awareness-not denial-that time
was short and therefore to be savored. After this first
jolt of fresh old air, I kept going. From pediatricians
to park rangers, Americans of advanced years and
all stripes told me about their work behind steering
wheels and desks and band saws and television cameras
and how they'd gotten there.
The more I learned, the better
I felt about the years ahead.
It came as no surprise that they were as different
from one another as could be, not to mention from
the stereotype of the doddering ancient. But something
did surprise me: the discrepancy between what
I'd simply assumed it was like to be eighty or ninety
and what I was encountering firsthand. The more I
read and the more experts I talked to, the clearer it
became that these older workers were typical of a
large and fast-growing cohort of older Americans.
Why the disconnect between what I had imagined
" "
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GRAND Magazine - Fall 2022

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