The Age of Age

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Sometimes in the middle of the night, if I’m having a particularly hard time sleeping, I entertain myself by formulating the most ridiculous question I can think of.

Recently I was lying in bed staring at the blackness that I presumed to be the ceiling when I wondered, Did God give Adam operating instructions for Eve? I mean, besides the leave-and-cleave stuff that’s recorded in Genesis, were there any other tips?

I’d like to think after performing the first wedding on planet Earth, God put his arm around Adam, led him to a secluded corner of Eden and intoned in a low voice, “Now, I know I said it wasn’t good for a man to be alone, and I’m all for love and procreation and companionship and all that.  But there are a few things you should know.  Many things, actually.  Come to think of it, you should probably start writing this down.”

And then, in no order of importance, God would proceed to give Adam operating instructions, starting with, “No matter how badly she burns dinner, always tell her it was delicious.” And ending with, “Lastly – you should probably pass this along to the snake, too- never ask her how old she is.” And then Adam would start to ask why not, and God would interrupt him, putting up his hand and saying firmly, “Don’t ask why not. Just don’t do it.”

I think this part of the imaginary conversation occurred to me because I recently turned thirty and I have been thinking a lot about age.

As I laid there in the dark that night, I wondered why it seems to be such a universal female trait to instinctively protect one’s age from outsiders as though it were a state secret. And since there’s nothing new under the sun, it wouldn’t surprise me if Eve, the first woman on the planet, also shared this aversion to age.

What is it about growing older that makes us want to indefinitely postpone it? Is hiding our age a form of denial, a fear of facing the future?  Is it a fear of facing our mortality?

Unfortunately, I fell back asleep before arriving at any satisfactory answers.

—

Recently one of my friends flew out from Connecticut to visit me in Portland.  He is obsessed with cartography, and was astonished to discover that I’ve lived here for a year and a half and have yet to purchase a map.

On our way up to Mount Hood, we stopped at a gas station.  While I was getting fuel, he ran inside, ostensibly to buy drinks and snacks, but he returned to the car with a stack of maps.  There was a map of Portland, a map of Oregon, a map of the hiking trails around Mount Hood, and one of the Oregon coast.

“Sorry, I couldn’t help myself,” he said sheepishly, as if I’d caught him smoking crack in the men’s room.

It made me feel bad for Lewis and Clark, who had nothing to navigate Oregon by but the Columbia River.  And here we were, with a comprehensive atlas obtained from a tiny filling station in a town called ZigZag.

As we continued to drive towards the mountain, my friend gave me a geography lesson, which included a long soliloquy about the Continental Divide.  I kind of remembered the term from a middle school book report, but I was vague on the details.

“That’s the line that separated the North from the South during the Civil War, right?”

“No, that was the Mason-Dixon line.”

“Right.  So then it must be that fault line in California where all the earthquakes happen.”

“Nope. That’s the San Andreas Fault.”

Determined to redeem myself, I ventured a third guess.  “It’s the river that divides the continents of the U.S. and Mexico,” I declared confidently.

He grabbed his head with his hands, moaning as if I were inflicting physical pain.  “First of all, the Rio Grande is the river between the U.S. and Mexico,” he said.  “Second of all, the U.S. and Mexico are on the same continent.”

I shrugged a silent apology.

“The Continental Divide,” he articulated deliberately, while easing his hands away from his ears, “is the point at which rivers on a given continent begin to flow in the opposite direction.  So in the U.S., it’s the point at which rivers stop flowing towards the Atlantic Ocean and start flowing towards the Pacific.”

He went on for a good while longer about the details of these divides, but I can’t remember what he said because by that point I wasn’t really listening; I was busy having an epiphany.

"Continental Divide" by Ann Gillis

When I was in college, I happened to sit next to a 20-something-year-old guy on a flight from Los Angeles to Baltimore.  We chatted for a while, and then he revealed he knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy, or something like that, so he had access to free in-flight alcohol.  “Do you want a beer?” he asked.

I shook my head and told him I was only 19 and though I’d never tried it, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like beer anyway.

I tried to act insulted, but secretly, I was flattered.  Did he really think I looked 21?  I must be doing something right.

A few years later, I was moving into my apartment in New Haven, Connecticut, about to start grad school.  I was chatting with my grandpa as he assembled furniture in my room, and I happened to mention I was hoping to meet a dashing medical student who would sweep me off my feet.

He hit his head on the underside of the desk as he shot upright, shaking a wrench in my direction.  “You’re much too young to talk like that,” he said.  “There will be plenty of time for boys after you’re finished with your education.”

A few years after that, at my graduation from grad school, my grandpa gave my biological clock permission to start ticking.

“What happened to your handsome Yale doctor?” he asked me.

“I never met him,” I answered.

He shook his head and proceeded to remind me that he and grandma weren’t getting any younger, and I had better start cracking if I were going to churn out his great-grand children before he died.

“But grandpa,” I protested.  “Last time I saw you, you told me I was too young–”

He interrupted me mid-sentence and pushed me into the lap of a clean-cut young man in a graduation robe.

I felt then that I had turned some unseen corner, and suddenly instead of being too early, I would always be too late.

This is why, as my friend droned on about the Continental Divide on our drive up the mountain, I had an “a-ha” moment.  The change in my grandpa’s attitude, the sudden difference between too early and too late, was the Age Divide, the point at which your life stops flowing in one direction and starts flowing in another.

It explains the irony that humans spend the first decade or two of their lives trying to look older, and all the decades after that attempting to look younger.

It explains why teenage girls wear low-cut tops and too much make-up and giggle when a man offers to buy them a drink.

It also explains why women my age bitch slap the first innocent sales clerk who dares to call them “ma’am.”

—

I was sitting in the break room at work on the day Michael Jackson died.  I watched with my co-workers as the talking heads on T.V. declared Michael Jackson was unconscious, then that he was in cardiac arrest, and finally, that he was dead.

“How old was Michael Jackson, anyway?” someone asked.

My co-workers ventured various answers.  The lowest guess was thirty-nine; the oldest was sixty-two.

I sat there marveling that one person could have been so ambiguous about not only his race and his gender, but also his age.

Michael Jackson was king of many things while he was alive.  The King of Pop was also King of Bizarre Behavior, which included dangling his baby off of a balcony in Germany and wearing rumpled pajamas to a court appearance in California.  But if he was king of music and scandal, he was Master of the Universe when it came to altering his physical appearance.

No one knows exactly how many plastic surgeries he had, or who performed them for that matter, but one thing is clear: he had too many.

As we watched a montage of Michael Jackson pictures, starting from his debut in the Jackson Five and ending a few weeks before his death, one of the nurses next to me remarked, “He had so much plastic surgery, you couldn’t even tell he was a man.”

“A man?” another nurse said.  “Honey, by 1995, you couldn’t even tell he was a human.”

“But those cheek bones,” another nurse added wistfully.  “I’d kill for that kind of definition.”

I wrote his epitaph in my head as the pictures rolled on:  “Here lies Michael Jackson, the ambiguously-gendered musician with stunning cheek bones.”  It had a poetic ring to it, I thought.

I considered the legacy he would leave, and was saddened at the thought he may be remembered more for his career as a plastic surgery patient than his career as a brilliant musician.

He was an icon that represented our generation – not only in our affinity for MTV, but also our deeply rooted insecurities.

Unfortunately for him, the storm clouds of modern medical technology and our culture’s obsession with youth collided on his face.  Having millions of dollars’ worth of procedures to disguise his age didn’t help him in the end.  He was dead at fifty.

As I continued to watch the coverage of his death, it occurred to me that perhaps, if he was very lucky, the Catholic church could one day make him the patron saint of plastic surgery.

I imagined that as patients rolled into the operating room, they would cross themselves and whisper, “Saint Michael, Patron of Plastic Surgery, pray for us.”  As the anesthesiologist put the oxygen mask over their face, they would blissfully think of this saint’s blessed cheek bones.

And then, as the paralyzing and sedating medications flowed through their I.V., they would remember with horror his tragic nose.

In 1492, Columbus crossed the Atlantic Ocean for the first time.  In 1493, he crossed it again, this time accompanied by Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon.

Ponce de Leon spent more than a decade conquering the Caribbean, including the islands of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola.  In his conversations with natives, he heard legends about a Fountain of Youth.  Eager to find a cure for his aging body, he set sail again, this time heading north from Puerto Rico to the land we now call Florida.

Historians speculate he first landed at St. Augustine, and it is widely believed that in this area he discovered his miraculous Fountain of Youth — although Ponce de Leon’s subsequent death and Florida’s aging retiree population argue against this.

Fast forward 500 years to 1993, the year the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine was established.  Americans had stopped looking to magic, and were instead looking to science, to discover the cure for whatever aged them.

Anti-aging medicine has become a multi-billion dollar industry in the U.S.  If you give a plastic surgeon enough cash, you can get any treatment you want.  If you happen to be really loaded, you don’t have to choose between them; you can have them all.

You can have botulism injected around your eyes to make the crow’s feet disappear.  You can have your nose intentionally fractured and re-set to make it thinner and straighter.  You can have bones removed from your feet to enable you to squeeze into a smaller-sized pair of stilettos.  You can have silicone balloons implanted in your breasts.  And men, just in case you thought you were above these procedures, you can elect to have metal rods strategically implanted in your genitals.  No, really, it’s true.

The anti-aging technique that’s most appalling to me is euphemistically called “autologous fat transplantation,” and involves suctioning fat from a person’s backside, compressing it, and injecting it into their face to minimize wrinkles.

The fact that this procedure was not only conceptualized, but is performed regularly, is a testament to the lengths to which we will go to thwart the aging process.  One could argue that if Columbus and Ponce de Leon launched the Age of Exploration, and philosophers like Thomas Paine ushered in the Age of Reason, celebrity culture and plastic surgery have entered America into the Age of, well, Age.

Just like my glut of maps made me feel bad for Lewis and Clark, the availability of cosmetic surgery makes me feel bad for Ponce de Leon, who wandered for years in Florida’s humid heat, searching for the Fountain of Youth.

Perhaps his only mistake was he was trying to find a cure for age outside of himself, when all this time it was hiding in his ass.

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