On Turning Sixty-Five: Notes from the Field - Hardcover

Jerome, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375500561 ISBN 13: 9780375500565

Publisher: Random House, 2000

Synopsis

"Personally, I've got a lot invested in reaching my stunning current age, and I'm damned if I'm going to hang on to that youthful crap. (I liked the idea of being a sixty-year-old so much I started claiming that age before I turned fifty-nine.) Parts of it, I don't like--the loss of energy that seems its inevitable accompaniment, for example--but when I consider how I used to boil that energy away as a younger man, and the things I boiled it away on, I am happy to accept a shorter tether and a more reflective way of going at things."


John Jerome, author of such beloved books as Truck and Stone Work, entered his sixty-fifth year with a number of goals in mind: to battle the debilities of age, to master them through understanding when he could not physically defeat them, and to keep a journal of these efforts. As he puts it, "It was time to start planning an endgame."

The result is a warm, compassionate, and honest look at the twelve months that led him to the gateway of old age--a survey of this time of life which ranges from strict physiology to expansive philosophy, from delicate neurosurgery to rough weather on a Canadian canoeing trip, from the despair and isolation of illness to the love and comfort of a sound marriage. The writing, in its clarity, grace, and humor, matches its author's spirit. "The quality of our lives depends on the quality of our time," Jerome reminds us. Reading this wise and funny chronicle of one man's--and everyman's--journey toward citizenship, senior division, will be time well spent, for young and old alike. It is that rare kind of book which comes to life as a companion, and even a friend.

About this title

About the Author

John Jerome sometimes claims to be retired but can't prove it. He has in the past raced in cars, on skis, and in swimming pools but now lives as slowly as possible in far-western New England and writes books. He is a former magazine editor, advertising copywriter, and columnist for Esquire and Outside magazines. His previous books include Truck, The Sweet Spot in Time, Stone Work, and Blue Rooms.

From the Back Cover

Praise for Blue Rooms

"[A] lyrical approach to the physical world. . . . Stunning."
---William H. MacLeish

Praise for Stone Work

"Jerome keeps making us see the world from new and
refreshing angles." ---The New York Times

"A small wonder. . . . His wry, candid, and self-effacing wit makes him impossible to resist." ---The Philadelphia Inquirer


Praise for Staying With It

"An exciting, warm, amusing story of victory over internal
limitations. . . . A consistently informative, invigorating
performance."

---Los Angeles Times Book Review

Praise for Truck

"I loved John Jerome's Truck. . . . The book is not so much about automotive mechanics as it is about mind and matter . . . about
obsession and compulsion, joy and doubt, rage and forgiveness."
---Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

From the Inside Flap

ally, I've got a lot invested in reaching my stunning current age, and I'm damned if I'm going to hang on to that youthful crap. (I liked the idea of being a sixty-year-old so much I started claiming that age before I turned fifty-nine.) Parts of it, I don't like--the loss of energy that seems its inevitable accompaniment, for example--but when I consider how I used to boil that energy away as a younger man, and the things I boiled it away on, I am happy to accept a shorter tether and a more reflective way of going at things."<br><br><br>John Jerome, author of such beloved books as <i>Truck and Stone Work</i>, entered his sixty-fifth year with a number of goals in mind: to battle the debilities of age, to master them through understanding when he could not physically defeat them, and to keep a journal of these efforts. As he puts it, "It was time to start planning an endgame."<br><br>The result is a warm, compassionate, and honest look at the twelve months that led

Reviews

"It's going to happen to you," Jerome writes at the outset of this deeply personal (and occasionally depressing) memoir about growing old, "and the outcome is ultimately going to be negative." Inspired by a rereading of Henry David Thoreau, outdoor enthusiast Jerome (The Elements of Effort, etc.) decided to spend his 65th year considering the philosopher's eternally poignant question: How to live? This book is the quiet, melancholy result. Month by month, as Jerome reflects on the emotional and physical effects of aging--the new limitations of his body, the distress of losing his contemporaries to illness and death, the adjustments in his priorities and lifestyle--he records the changes, big and small, brought on by the pasing years. Describing his struggle to "draw the line between fighting and accepting," he chronicles his disappointment when he and his wife, Christine, find they don't have the brawn to take as many summer canoe trips as they had planned. He also details his efforts to neutralize the aging process: he juggles to strengthen his cognitive skills, swims to strengthen his body, and attempts to maximize pleasure--in his sex life, his diet and alcohol consumption. Jerome's humorous and gently self-deprecating style serves him well; although he offers no new insights on age and death, his talent for conveying his experience with an evolved, observant awareness makes this capably written book relevant for anyone facing 65. Agent, Denise Shannon. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Generally, 65 marks the beginning of old age and intense self-reflection. Encouraged after rereading Henry David Thoreau, Jerome, a columnist for Esquire and the author of Blue Rooms, Truck, and Stone Work, wrote this month-by-month journalistic account of the feelings and events he experienced in the year before his 65th birthday. All too aware of his mortality, Jerome vowed to confront the weaknesses of aging, overcome them through understanding when he could not physically beat them, and keep a record of his efforts. His entries contain a mixture of the physiology of aging, philosophical allusions to Thoreau, and reflections from his own life (e.g., his disappointment when he and his wife discover that they are not strong enough to canoe as much), interspersed with subtle touches of humor. Vividly and entertainingly written, Jerome's "notes from the field" offer helpful insight into growing old gracefully. Recommended for most public libraries and special collections on aging.DElizabeth Goeters, Georgia Perimeter Coll., Dunwoody
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

With surprising grace and no small measure of cantankerousness, Jerome shares his patient reflections on aging. Using both his own reading and the study of the body he inhabits, he tells us what happens, physically, when you are a man--accustomed to fairly vigorous activity coupled with the sedentary habits of a writer--facing your sixty-fifth birthday. Jerome and his wife live in New England, near a pond, a place full of beauty and blackflies. The year he shares with us is mostly media-free--an experiment he and his wife undertook--and companioned by Thoreau, that wondrous, curmudgeonly fellow who died rather younger than Jerome is now. Some of this is screamingly funny, all of it is thoughtful, and much of it is prickly in an ingratiatingly irritating manner. There isn't much about food or sex--Jerome manages to be both open and reticent--but it is a deeply masculine book. The author provides the best comparison, contrasting his take on aging to Carolyn Heilbrun's The Last Gift of Time: Life beyond Sixty. GraceAnne A. DeCandido

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

NOVEMBER: The Dumpster Project

"Says I to myself " should be the motto of my journal.
-Henry David Thoreau, November 11, 1851

As a sixty-fourth birthday present to myself, my plan was to rent a Dumpster, park it in the driveway, and clean out the house and garage. Toss in the accumulated clutter-unwearable clothes, dead appliances, bicycles, skis, car tools, decades of abandoned projects. A ton of paper. It struck me as an appropriate way to start off my sixty-fifth year: as if preparing for a move, although we weren't going anywhere. It's a foolish dream, I suppose, to catch up with the mountain of stuff we seem to keep pushing ahead of ourselves. Clearing out the trash of youth and middle age. I'd yearned to do it for years.

It was the birthday, of course, and not the clutter that was driving this extravagant if not hysterical plan. I'd recently watched a friend turn sixty-five, receive his first Social Security check, and sink into depression: the government had officially declared him an old man. Seeing him struggle was instructive. It had entirely sneaked up on him. I hadn't given sixty-five much thought either. I don't like being blindsided any more than the next guy.

Not that age wasn't already landing the odd sucker punch. I had begun to find winters, for example, harder to take. A writer's days are insidiously sedentary, and in winter it becomes far too easy just to sit still. Brooding ensues. The previous winter had been a severe one in New England, not in the least conducive to physical activity other than perhaps shoveling snow. I couldn't run, or didn't want to, and vegetated instead-and took a serious hit from the aging process as the price.

Sitting still is the specific winter problem: how to obtain sufficient movement? I used to ski, and have known skiers who continued into their dotage, but the thought of a ski slope now makes me shudder. I guess I got tired of being really cold. Age does exacerbate that. ("When you're old, you're cold"--the late Dr. Benjamin Spock.) I swam through several winters, in indoor pools, and really enjoyed it, but overdid it, developed overuse injuries, and had to quit. It's a quandary, lack of movement. By the time last spring arrived I was startled to find myself feeling, for the first time in my life, positively frail.

Well, I thought, I'll get that right back, and plunged into a hashed-up exercise program, almost immediately reaggravating the bum neck that had made me quit swimming in the first place. Weak spots do have a way of quickly turning painful, particularly as we age. Getting strength back took longer than seemed right, and it didn't all come back. My wife, Chris, and I love wilderness canoe trips, but the previous summer's expeditions had been shockingly hard. Ordinary household tasks seemed to leave me unnecessarily tired and sore. I was suddenly not so bullish. A lot of plans, professional as well as personal, looked due for revision--downward.

The high point of the summer, on the other hand, had been some exquisitely enjoyable lake swimming in the Adirondacks, after my neck had quieted down. I decided I'd try swimming again as winter exercise. If I eased into it maybe I wouldn't have problems. Only a couple of days a week, swim a quiet thirty minutes or so, and see if I couldn't manage to keep moving a little more consistently over the winter to come.


A friend, hearing of my Dumpster plans, referred me to Walden. Thoreau attends the auction of a deacon's estate, and, not uncharacteristically, is mockingly aghast:

As usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had begun to accumulate in his father's day. Among the rest was a dried tapeworm. And now, after lying half a century in his garret and other dust holes, these things were not burned; instead of a bonfire, or purifying destruction of them, there was an auction, or increasing of them. The neighbors eagerly collected to view them, bought them all, and carefully transported them to their garrets and dust holes, to lie there till their estates are settled, when they will start again. When a man dies he kicks the dust.

The customs of some savage nations might, perchance, be profitably imitated by us, for they at least go through the semblance of casting their slough annually; they have the idea of the thing, whether they have the reality or not.

Aha, casting our slough--that's what I had in mind. (And look, they seem to have had the equivalent of garage sales back in the 1850s.)

Digging out the Thoreau was an entertaining exercise. He's long been an interest of mine. Another of the winter's projects was to read his journals, all two and a half million words of them. I'd bought them in a two-volume set years before, but had lost momentum about a quarter of the way through. Maybe, I thought, I'd get going on them again. Whatever he wrote, his entire life, concerned the one central question: how to live. I figured I could still use advice on that subject, even in my sixty-fifth year.

I love the journal form. I keep one myself, for practical rather than literary purposes. Thoreau used his mostly for observation of the natural world. You don't find much detail about his daily life, except for where he walked and when. But he did sprinkle his pages with new understandings, new awakenings, from his ongoing self-education. He was certainly obsessed with that--Walden is in a sense a record of his own development-but he usually chose to conceal this self-involvement. Occasionally he let it slip. "I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well," he famously says at the outset of Walden. Much later, in 1860, he wrote his friend Harrison Blake a more mature version: "--whether he wakes or sleeps, whether he runs or walks, whether he uses a microscope or a telescope, or his naked eye, a man never discovers anything, never overtakes anything or leaves anything behind, but himself. Whatever he does or says he merely reports himself."



That's what I'm doing here. What follows is not a journal, exactly, but a record of a year nonetheless. Actually, like Walden--to which in no other way does it bear the slightest resemblance--it is two years compressed into one: the year in which I turned sixty-five and a year of attempting to assess that turning. Thus I write of one November while experiencing the next, a handy reminder. Thoreau's journals cover twenty-four years, giving me roughly an additional twenty-four Novembers to refer to, if more are needed. So broad a reference seems appropriate in talking about age. In a sense I'm trying to cram as many years' experience as possible into one--the object of the aging game being, as well as I can judge, to acquire as many years as possible. Make that good years.

If you have no interest in what it's like to grow old, what follows is not for you. However, if it's going to happen to you (and it is), and the outcome is ultimately going to be negative (and it is), then finding a way to make the process as bearable, even as enjoyable, as possible might be worth a little attention.


According to the World Health Organization I'm already "elderly," a category I find insulting enough. WHO considers that category to span ages sixty to seventy-five. I'd prefer just to be "old," but don't reach that designation until seventy-six. Most geriatricians consider their practice to start at seventy-five. Over ninety, according to WHO, is "very old." At the end of the year, on my sixty-fifth birthday, I can actuarially expect fifteen more. That will put me well into "old," the last category I have much interest in.

If I make it into "very old," I hope to do so with my sense of humor intact. We have a ninety-four-year-old friend who writes, "The event of the week is that, passing the vision test, I have a renewed driver's license for five years. I would need the genes of a swan to live that long."

Call him Pierre; he is senior in my cohort of ancients, the other old men I know, from whom I am trying to learn about aging. By "aging" I am really saying "aging/ dying," but will try to avoid saying that as long as possible. Mention either aging or dying, however, and you get my attention. It comes with age. Pierre has prostate cancer but doesn't seem to be dying of it, at least not in any great hurry. A retired professor, he claims to derive wry amusement from steadfastly outliving his remaining faculty colleagues. There are two still to go, whom he visits in a nursing home regularly.

He lives alone--he nursed his wife through Alzheimer's--and is self-sufficient still. A lifelong outdoorsman, he took care of a couple of nature preserves into his eighties, until he could no longer perform the trail maintenance. As a postretirement project he took on a massive legal battle for the public good, and won it. He doesn't want to be identified, so I won't say what that battle was, but it will be his very nice monument.

I am trying to ask him and my other older friends about their aging, but I'm not sure I know what the questions are. A while back I did ask Mike if he'd been noticing any physiological changes from aging. Mike is Chris's adored and adoring eldest brother, a year and a half my senior. He's a former Canadian naval aviator who, with fifty-four-year-old mate Jo, recently built a house--I daren't call it a "retirement" home--in Nova Scotia. He's an avid birder, a fellow canoeist who has cycled all over Europe, a vigorous person.

"I certainly don't have any physical problems," he cheerfully denied by return mail.

The old body just ticks along doing whatever I want it to, when I want it to. It's just as serviceable as it was thirty years ago. Well, except for the right shoulder. There is a more or less constant ache in the upper arm and shoulder area which pretty well prevents me from throwing anything overhand with any force. I buzzed...

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375500561
• ISBN 13: 9780375500565
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272