Liz Carpenter, Journalist, Author and LBJ staffer 
The Silver Lining
Growing old gracefully.
(Page 3 of 3)
I admire my older brother’s attitude toward the small infirmities of age, such as having to ask a clerk to read prices to him because he can’t see small print, or making soup all the time because he has so few teeth, or missing calls because he doesn’t hear the phone ring. He told me about it in one of our 6 a.m. talks. (Yes, 6 a.m. We are both early risers, and we have conversations about anything and everything each morning across the twenty miles that separate our homes. Early risers do need phone conversations with early risers! Find one. It adds thought and spice to your day.) My brother says he has started to enjoy his infirmities. “I do like to talk to young clerks. At the discount stores they are very nice about it. I have come to like to make soup. There are lots of kinds, and it is challenging to see how much flavor you can get out of a bone. And as for the phone, well, it’s embarrassing when someone tells you the phone is ringing, but it’s no big thing, and I make lots of phone calls to my children who might have called.”
Losing control is not that easy to bear for those who are truly sick, but I think there must be ways to solicit their opinions and give them a say in the control of their lives. We do it for the very young. “What would you like for breakfast, Johnny? The cold pizza or the Mr. Rogers’ alphabet cereal?”
I have a rancher friend in West Texas, Watt Matthews, now 86, who has built his own old-age cabin, complete with a bed for the nurse and handles on the bathtub. He hasn’t moved into it yet, but he enjoyed showing it to me and explaining how the low windows will allow him, from his bed, to keep an eye on the barn where the cowhands saddle up to do the chores. Meanwhile, it serves as a guest cottage, and I suspect it always will.
My darling friend Terrell Maverick Webb could never remember my phone number but could remember how to get to my house. Instead of searching for glasses and a phone book when she needed me, she would drive over, endangering the local citizenry en route. She would waltz in and try to remember what she wanted to tell me. “Which way is north?” she would ask, pressing her fingers to her forehead as though to squeeze out the memory. “You can remember if you face north.” And she would. Then, like the World War I coquette that she had been, she would sit at the piano and suddenly be “packing up our troubles in a kit bag.”
The last two fears: not feeling loved and not being touched. The sensations of love and touch are separate yet together. And oh, how you miss them when they’re gone. If you have ever cared for an elderly person, particularly one who is deaf or blind, you know how much the simple act of holding a hand means, how eagerly the person welcomes it, how reluctantly he watches you leave. How can you walk out on someone who needs you so much? So you put off walking in, visiting the friend in the hospital or nursing home. It’s such a small thing—expressing love, touching—yet people can barely stand to be without it. We understand how important cuddling is for children; why have we ignored this need for the elderly? Unless you live close to grandchildren or are fortunate to have two or three affectionate suitors, the hunger never subsides. So you budget money, if you can, for many plane trips to visit those who feed your hunger, and you should.
You entertain. You can grow old waiting to be entertained. You have a vacation house party during the empty holidays. You offer love. And you find that “who brings his neighbor’s barque to land will find his own has reached the shore.”
Having sorted out my fears, I turned my attention to my home and to how its rejuvenation could be my own. I reshaped it for what I laughingly call the happy hour of my life, otherwise known as senility. The empty rooms that once housed husband and children are not sacrosanct. Use them to expand your life.
I took a look and decided that for the rest of my years I will need that house to (1) eat, (2) get dressed, (3) write, and (4) enjoy conversation. So I started knocking down walls with abandon. Because I like to cook for company, I arranged the kitchen so that people can sit on comfortable chairs and talk to me while I cook. That project went so well that I knocked down some more walls, and now I have a closet where I can see everything I wear. It has three hanging spaces, all just below the arthritic level of my arm. I set up a daybed—I can’t wrestle with those foldout couches—in the dining room, which has a fireplace, so I can sleep while the embers glow on a cold night. I kept on knocking down walls and opened up an extra bedroom to use as my study, with a table in front of a picture window that looks down the river. I indulged in soft carpets, and I can, if necessary, crawl to the typewriter and have another go at some immortal words. I expect and hope to write my way to the grave. In fact, I have to.
Redecorating for my own taste was therapeutic. I like light, flowery colors and fabrics; my house is so full of them that my son tells me he feels like bringing clipping shears when he comes to visit me. It makes me happy to see yellows and pinks and lime-greens and lots of blooming things. I live on a hill overlooking the city, and my friends can take in my view. All the curtains are gone; we just look out over the world and watch the deer come up to feed. I’ve begun talking to the deer. I started with two and now there are nine. They even come and snort in front of my picture window if I haven’t put their food out. The deer love me, and one day they may even let me touch them.
Some say mine is a very "physical" house. I hope so. I use the hot tub for communal conversation; it seats eight friends or six enemies. My guest house has room for a massage table, and friends like to come for the evening to enjoy a soak and a rubdown by a masseuse who makes house calls.
Then there is that vital ingredient to aging, humor. My mother’s humor was always such a part of her world that to me it always represented something for me to strive for. Humor was a quality born out of love for humanity and a high heart. She often admonished her five children to “try to see the humor” in a situation whenever we took ourselves too seriously.
I took her advice to heart. Nowadays, instead of being annoyed by my nearly deaf ear, I find myself arranging the seating at dinner parties according to people’s ears—whom do they really want to listen to? Instead of worrying about not being able to get into my hot tub one day, I may follow state treasurer Ann Richards’ advice and put in a sliding board from my bed to the tub, which sits outside the window overlooking the Austin skyline. Rather than be buried or cremated, I think I would like to be bronzed sitting in my Jacuzzi, spouting hot water all over the city. I hope the law allows it!
A lot of my heroes are people who have shown me how to grow old with grace and humor. Since I fancy myself a writer, I like to read poetry and gather people—writers, poets, and politicians—together. I am especially indebted to a poet I never met, an Englishwoman named Jenny Joseph. She has outlined the rest of my life as I would like to live it:
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me,
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit. . . .
But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised.
When suddenly I am old and start to wear purple.
My Library
