The Golden Years

I have just finished reading an online communication from AARP which showcased twenty five celebrities in the their seventies whose photos reveal that they are remarkably well preserved.  This follows upon The New York Times Sunday Magazine issue with a title something like "The Fountain of Youth," in which a number of persons are featured who are well into their seventies and eighties who are still running races, writing books, making new discoveries, oh, any number of remarkable triumphs in which they defy the natural expectations of their age.  Except that the idea is that theirs are the "natural," whereas the rest of us are pikers, cannot manage to achieve any of these triumphs.  This goes hand in hand with The New York Times' shift in their Sunday issue to focus on persons and places and housing tp which there is no way that the average person would have any access.  Now, of course, one must not imagine that their readership is the average person, and of course they focus on New York City and its environs, but still the lavish decor, the expensive houses, the ravishing gowns of the persons photographed at society events all these things are so beyond even the well-to-do average New Yorker.  I have a friend in New York who says that she and her husband live on half a million dollars.  They are in my estimation "very comfortable" but not wildly "extravagant," and clearly they could not live the life that the Sunday Style, Housing, Travel sections envision.  But forget about money.  What I resent is the present day emphasis on the very limited group of people who defy the expectations of their geriatric cohort and make it seems like the rest of us, the slow, the halt, the lame, and the retired are at fault for not being engaging, and engaged, and up to the mark with new ideas and job plans.  Yes, I do get out to the gym, yes, I do walk without a cane, yes, I travel often to Europe, yes, I keep up with the latest, and I am in some sort of way enjoying life.  But I feel more like a latter day Norma Desmond remembering the heartwarming and enchanting hours with my glorious children when they were youngsters, the wonderful parties, the martinis one after another, the great classes I taught when fate delivered so many bright students, and, yes, the fantastic sexual partners that enkindled many an otherwise lacklustre afternoon, and I am in a kind of a funny way waiting for my comeback call from the studio, but unlike Norma I know that it will never come.  So I do indeed resent all these glistening people of seventy five or eighty all these enchanting pent house apartments in Manhattan gleaming and sparkling and listed at ten or fifteen million, and all the exciting recipes, and restaurants, and new bars.  I know that the paper's readership does not want the somewhat drearier truth, so I guess I should cancel the subscription