Old People

By Susan Moldaw

I unbuckle my mother’s seatbelt, open her car door, sling her purse onto my shoulder, and watch while she turns sideways, slowly inching to the seat’s edge where she braces herself with the car frame as anchor. She’s arthritic, eighty-eight years old, and a widow. I hold my breath as she moves one leg out of the car, then the other, wobbly and teetering as she finally stands. She clutches my arm as she hoists one leg up from the curb to the sidewalk, then the second leg. And it isn’t a simple two-step; it’s like scaling a mountain for my mother, with an ever-present fear of falling—a not irrational fear for anyone over sixty. I count my own years.

“She’s a fall waiting to happen,” I fret to my sister a few days later, sprawled on my bedroom easy chair. My sister lives out of town; we talk several times weekly. “She needs someone who will walk with her all the time.” I’m preaching to the choir. We both know convincing our mother to hire a companion will take an act of God. What she will allow is housekeeping and cooking help.

A woman goes grocery shopping for my mother at Draegers, cooks meals of red snapper or baked salmon with golden beets. At times she zips a hard-to-reach zipper or fastens a button at the wrist. When I visit, she tries to support my mother as she rises from a kitchen chair. My mother stamps her foot and slowly stands on her own. Afterward, we walk to the family room and sit on a couch with a floral print.

“She’s only trying to help,” I say.

“If I stop doing things for myself, pretty soon I won’t be able to do anything for myself.” My mother is a connoisseur of robes. She brushes a few stray crumbs off her long, pink terrycloth that has a convenient front zipper. Several crumbs remain that I refrain from flicking away—this time. I glance out the window and see the two iron outdoor lounge chairs where my father and I used to sit before he died nearly eight years ago. They seem bare in January, without their summer cushions.

I look back at my mother. “That makes sense,” I say.

On another lengthy call, I say to my sister, “I can manage her, but it isn’t fair to same-age friends who help. She’ll topple them.” Emboldened by righteous anger—her stubbornness might endanger her friends—I sit my mother down in her kitchen, cheery with its brightly colored, hand-painted tiles and African violets in ceramic pots. I steel myself for her to stonewall, as she usually does.

“There’s a lovely employment agency in San Francisco.” I can’t use the agency’s actual name—“Sage Eldercare Solutions”—so I say “Town and Country,” an agency Sage sometimes engages. My mother brightens at the name. Many people she knows use Town and Country to hire household help. She has used them herself. My mother is reassured by familiar references.

“They have what’s known as ‘care managers,’” I continue. Her eyes narrow. Her breath grows rapid. She looks around the room, as if to spot the nearest exit. “Maybe Town and Country will find someone who can go to an occasional movie or out to dinner.” Weekends are hard since my father died, and she gets lonely, though she’s been a phenomenal widow, calling friends, making plans, and going out. “Nobody wants a widow at their dinner parties,” she likes to say, “though they’ll make room for the widower.”

My mother glances at the headlines of today’s New York Times, scattered on the kitchen table. She takes tissue from her blouse sleeve and blows her nose. She puts the Kleenex back in her sleeve, straightens the paper, and looks up. “All right,” she says. “I’ll talk with someone.” With no hint of excitement, I say I’ll contact the agency.

•••

Town and Country sends a young woman for an interview who comes to my mother’s home. She’s neatly dressed, with a pleasing smile. She sits on the couch, crossing her legs at the ankle.

“Tell me about yourself,” I say.

She nods and says she has a passion for the arts, is trained as a nurse, and most importantly, she loves people. She directs her comments to my mother and speaks in a quiet voice. My mother leans forward. She loves the arts, and she’s energized by people. Now we’re getting somewhere, I think.

References of potential hires are promised, the agency fees acceptable. But the hapless woman titles herself a “Geriatric Care Manager” in an email to my mother, and the deal is shot. My mother refuses further communications.

“Geriatric,” my mother fumes. “Old people.”

That patience so often extolled in daughters evaporates. I want to bark, You’re old! Just hire her, Mom! but I don’t. Calling my mother old is akin to calling her ugly or useless. I know she doesn’t like old people. Neither had her father. He was ninety when he died. I rein in my anger and muster a weak, “Let’s keep the contact,” and “Perhaps we can revisit this.”

Tad Friend, writing about ageism in The New Yorker, refers to a chapter in a collection on the subject, written by psychologists. They assert that many shun the old to protect themselves from thoughts of death. “Ageism is so hard to root out,” Friend continues, “because it allows us to ward off a paralyzing fact with a pleasing fiction. It lets us fool ourselves, for a time, into believing we’ll never die.”

If my mother’s dislike of older people hides her fear of death, she’s not alone. I avoid my own advancing age. Sixty-five, seventy—why, those numbers sound positively youthful. I’d rather not think too hard about how many years I may have left.

•••

My mother and I go to the San Francisco Fall Art & Antique Show. She decides to take her walker, a collapsible contraption that she’s festooned with dusty dried flowers in shades of rose and blue with one burst of yellow, affixed to the front of the walker with a wide pink ribbon wound round. Using a walker isn’t entirely unprecedented—she uses it around her house—but when she’d take it out before she’d excused it with complaints of temporary foot maladies, or she’d brought it on short trips as a necessary travel aid. This time, she makes no apologies.

Once we arrive, I retrieve the walker from the trunk and snap it open. My mother and I accomplish her departure from the car in our usual manner, and she establishes herself within the walker’s confines, beaming. My mother blooms in society, and dresses to good effect. She wears a dull gold tunic jacket, black silk pants, and black tennis shoes—a concession to the comfort of her feet and only noticeable if you manage to divert your gaze from her diamond antique brooch.

The evening unfolds in a cavernous hall of San Francisco’s Fort Mason, a former military base now home to non-profits, including the Blue Bear School of Music, the Magic Theater, and the San Francisco Children’s Art Center—an art program I took my sons to when they were preschool age and I was not old. Picasso drawings, fine English furniture, gold ladybug pins dotted with sapphires and rubies for eyes, amidst other objets line the walkways, tempting strollers on all sides. My mother greets passersby, old friends from her many years of activity in San Francisco society. A few glance at the walker, but she seems unaware. We roam freely; as the night progresses, the crowds thicken and we get hemmed in.

“Let’s get out of here,” I say, worried she’ll be knocked over. I don’t know how we’ll maneuver.

With a thrust of the walker, she plunges into the morass, scattering women in five-inch heels and men in dark suits with alarmed expressions. Why do I underestimate her? My father knew she was strong; he used Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policy dictate to describe her: that she spoke softly and carried a big stick. He tried to protect her anyway. “That’s why I married him,” she says. “I knew he’d take care of me.” Who will she let take care of her now—her purse tucked into the basket of her walker for anyone to snatch, her gait unsteady, her bones old?

My mother smiles as the crowds part and we safely emerge at the front door. Someone asks if I need help, but it’s all I can do to keep from laughing— what mettle! what spunk!—managing a “No, thank you.” I steer her into the car and store the walker in the trunk. When I join my mother, she has the show catalogue open. “Our favorite jeweler didn’t come this year.” She turns a page.

“Mom.” I throw my catalogue into the back seat.

She folds a page corner in her catalogue and looks up.

“You were great back there. That walker brings clout.” I check my lipstick in the car mirror and rummage in my purse for the tube. My husband sometimes asks why I wear it. Because I look dead without it, I think, applying fresh color.

My mother turns another page in her catalogue. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll need it,” she says. For the rest of your life, I think, a bit unkindly, though I only smile. Another truth I won’t utter. If I’m protecting my mother from her eventual decline, it’s no stretch to say I’m also protecting myself from my own.

•••

Nearly thirty years ago our family threw a party for my mother’s sixtieth birthday. I still have the guest list. The Bartels. Dead. Scott Carey. Dead. Connie Eisenstat. Dead.

My father.

The list goes on.

We both read obituaries compulsively. In the last few years, several friends my age have died. A neurologist I know says that she won’t get resuscitated if she has a heart attack. “After sixty, you never come out of it the same.” Sixty! I’m shocked. Am I already at the point of no return?

My mother makes younger friends. She likes them better because they’re that much farther away from death. Just recently, she called my friends and me, “young women.” “I’m not young!” I told her. (Neither are my friends.) Medicare, social security—all just a few birthdays away.

•••

I’m reading The Oxford Book of Aging, an anthology of essays, stories, and poems on growing old. A poem by Ruth Harriet Jacobs titled “Don’t Call Me a Young Woman” includes these lines: “I am an old woman, a long liver./I’m proud of it. I revel in it…” Jacobs, in the context of the poem, owns her age, though perhaps she struggles with ageism. Have I mentioned my age? I’m sixty-three. Like my mother, age is uncomfortable to declare.

“Age is just a number in your head,” my mother is fond of saying. Yes—and no. According to Tad Friend, aging is “…the leading precondition for most of the decline-hastening diseases, such as cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s.” Age, plus health, may be the winning ticket, so for my mother and perhaps others age really is just a number.

In a book called Countertransference and Older Clients, countertransference meaning, simply, how feelings the professional has about the client may impact care, there was a chart of disabilities that reminded me of aging. I never could get it out of my head. Here are the maladies that got me the most: “Being unable to recall who you were or answer simple questions about your past; Being dependent for bathing, toileting, and being moved from place to place; Never being able to do your favorite activity again; Watching your body waste away inch by—”

I have a sudden urge to throw salt over my shoulder, knock on wood. Writing more feels like tempting fate. “Don’t call me a young woman,” writes Jacobs. “You reveal your own fears of aging.” Perhaps the reason I don’t want my mother to call me young is that it reminds me that I’m not.

•••

There are blessings an observant Jew recites every morning, and though I’m not an observant Jew by Orthodox standards, I say a version daily while I’m still in bed. According to the Mishkan T’filah, Reform Judaism’s prayer book, these morning blessings remind us of the miracle of waking to bodily life: “Praised are you, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the Universe, who opens the eyes of the blind…who stretches the earth over the waters…who strengthens steps…”

My mother may walk with strong intention but walking hurts.

Bunions and corns and bursas and hammertoes condemn her feet with each step. Heeding my mother’s plight, I exercise my toes every day like tiny soldiers in formation, stretching them, raising them, making the big toes touch because they don’t anymore. Side-by-side they curve to the outside of my feet, the beginning of a bunion I was horrified to notice on my left foot. I rush ahead twenty-five years to a nightmare vision of myself: hobbling, bent over, hanging on to a walker—nothing like my mother’s queenly stance.

•••

One of my mother’s friends—a woman six years her junior— fell not long ago in Hawaii. My mother remarks over dinner at her home one evening, “Hawaii is hard for old people.” We sit in the family room on the floral couch, with trays balanced on our laps, the TV news on. “Yes, it is,” I say eagerly. “Hawaii’s been hard for you.” Finally—an acknowledgement of her age and frailties. I take a sip of tomato soup. On a recent family vacation to Hawaii, she’d been ferried in a golf cart to meals as her primary outings. My mother’s soup spoon clinks against the side of her cup. She looks at me in surprise. She hadn’t included herself.

I hold my soup cup and look into the swirl of red, then glance at her. She doesn’t have a trace of gray in her salon-dyed hair. Neither do I. My appointment for a cut and color is two weeks away. Just that morning I’d considered moving it up because I hate the sliver of gray, widening daily where my hair parts, but I’d used a color wand instead, called “Brush It Away.” I keep one in my purse and travel bag for “emergencies.”

The emergency of looking old.

Leaving her home later that evening, driving on suburban side streets as the sky darkens and my aging eyes struggle to adjust, I think about her mortality, and mine. Odds are, she’ll go first.

I hope she goes first.

I don’t want to think about her death! Or my own. Who wants to think about no longer being in the world? I merge onto the freeway. The lights of the oncoming cars disorient me. I keep my eyes on the road.

•••

In my work as a chaplain I’ve sat with death. The old and some young taking last breaths, sometimes alone, sometimes with family members gathered round. There are many ways one goes, or says good-bye— with love, without love, regrets, or without regrets, sadness, relief, anger. Most people fear a painful death. My fear is dying alone, but that’s not just it. I fear dying before my time, by fire, water, war, or other happenstances of fate, matter-of–factly listed in the Unataneh Tokef, the prayer recited at Rosh Hashanah— the Jewish New Year. I hear the prayer every year at services, and shiver.

I don’t have the courage to ask my mother what she fears. I hope I’ll have the guts when her time comes. Will I have the blessing of sitting with her at the end? Who will sit with me?

•••

I drop by the San Francisco Jewish Community Center one afternoon for Shabbat blessings. Children from the preschool sit on the atrium floor on carpet squares. A singer strums Sabbath songs on a guitar. He sings “Shabbat Shalom—Hey!” and at the “hey!” adults clap, kids belt “hey!” and some kids pop from their spots into the air, landing in a squat, repeating their blast on each successive “hey!”

Sitting at a round table covered with butcher paper, crayons scattered on top, I write “Peace to All” and “Welcome the Stranger” in bright green. I take a large hunk of freshly baked, fragrant challah from a basket offered by a staffer and a Dixie cup filled with red wine. Munching on the challah, I watch the kids laughing and jumping with all the energy of four- and five-year-olds, while images of the life course spin through my imagination: the kids, starting out, me, thriving in late middle, and my mother, bringing up the rear, her body slowing down but her spirit alive as any kid’s—all of us moving into an unknown future.

•••

In fall, my mother and I go to synagogue for Rosh Hashanah. We sit towards the front, my mother walking unsteadily with her walker on the aisle’s downward slope. In front of us is a family who lost their son in the previous year. My mother and I attended the memorial together. I look in my bag for Kleenex but I know she’ll have a supply—she always does. She hands me a wadded-up tissue and we both wipe our eyes as the cantor begins to sing. We listen as sunlight streams, illuminating the blues, greens, reds, and yellows of the stained glass windows. I glance at my mother’s profile, the view of her in synagogue I’ll always remember—the straight line of her nose, the curve of her cheek with its tiny red veins and rosy cast, the same slight brown spots that I so resolutely try to vanquish on my own cheeks on visits to the dermatologist. The image reminds me of my favorite photo of her, also in profile. She’s a teenager, just a few years before she met my father. Her hair is held back by a clip, she’s wearing a print dress with a little girl’s round collar, and she’s gazing starry-eyed into the distance, as if imagining the life she’d someday have.

Sometime during the service, a young woman goes to the bima—the raised part of the sanctuary—and begins to sing. She’s the daughter of a dear friend my age who died just months before. I tell my mother who she is. My Kleenex is soggy, she hands me another, then slowly and gently takes my hand. We sit holding hands as the singer’s voice envelopes us. The dead take their seats with the living and my soul expands, comforted by memory, my mother’s presence, and the connective tissue of love.

•••

SUSAN MOLDAW’s work has appeared in bioStories, Broad Street, Fourth Genre, Literary Mama, Narrative, Ruminate, and others. She’s a chaplain and gerontologist and is currently completing a program in spiritual direction. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Summer of the Senior Discount

violets — By Gina Easley www.ginakelly.com

By Patricia O’Connor

If you had known me as a kid, you would not have pegged me as a tree-hugging granola girl. Sure, my family loved nature, just not intimately. Friends’ families went camping (unsanitary) or canoeing (unstable) or skiing (expensive, probably deadly). My family went on road trips. We drove through or around Yellowstone, Estes, Grand Canyon, and Mesa Verde. My mother, a tuberculosis survivor who believed that if one couldn’t sit in the lap of luxury, a reasonable compromise is to just sit, and my father, a former farm boy who had spent too much of his youth shoveling the smellier elements of nature, preferred to view the great parks through a windshield. Any forays from the car were to the well-paved lookouts where Dad, in his Saturday Sansabelts, would snap photos of his doughy children leaning against the reinforced railing that safely separated us from the wild.

As an adult, I want to experience nature more naturally. I hike, snow shoe, ski, kayak, swim—albeit not very often or particularly well. Keep in mind that I got a late start.

I was just on the shady side of fifty when I returned to the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, this time with my husband Jeff and our teenaged daughter Kate, and I was looking forward to experiencing the park on foot. The first test of our bi-pedal fortitude was to stand in line for forty-five minutes to acquire our passes for ranger-guided tours of Balcony House and Cliff Palace, two of the most spectacular cliff dwellings in the park.

Eventually, we were greeted by a woman nearly my mother’s age perched behind a tall, wooden counter. Jeff initiated the conversation, but she trained her rheumy eyes on me.

“Did they tell you,” she asked me, “that The Balcony House hike is very strenuous with thirty-two feet of ladders, narrow tunnels and walk ways overlooking hundred-foot drops?”

They would have been her fellow ranger retirees, one of whom was a wiry gentleman wearing Tevas with socks who told us that if he had to choose only one site to visit, it would be Balcony House because it is so “arduous.”

“It is very challenging.” She raised her wiry eyebrows for emphasis. “You might want to just wait up top in the car.”

“Excuse me?”

I wondered what she could see through the thick, curved wall of the wooden counter—the bluish swell of veins along the insides of my calves, perhaps. Could she detect my fallen right arch propped up by orthotics, my weak ankle and attendant knee? Perhaps she could smell my pheromones and determined that I am postmenopausal and therefore at increased risk for osteoporosis and heart disease. I am again a bit doughy, as I was when I first visited the park as a child, but no more so than many other people in line, less so, in fact. I fucking do Zumba, lady.

“Just be careful,” she said, tapping the edge of counter closest to me as if she were patting my hand. Did she think that we were contemporaries? How could we be, I thought, observing the half dollar-sized purplish-black carcinomas peering through her thinning hair, the plume of white that sprouted like pampas grass from a mole on her neck, the slight palsy in the hand still reaching for my own?

“I’ll be just fine, thank you very much.”

“Me too,” said Jeff helpfully, and he steered me away before I could say anything more.

Our first stop was at the Spruce Tree Dwelling (where I did not wait in the car). We hiked down switchbacks to the circa 1190 structure where the Early Pueblo people once lived. My long-legged husband and daughter sprinted ahead. I marched steadily at my own, more comfortable pace. I am generally the carrier of the camera, not to mention the family backpack loaded with waters, sunscreen, and snacks. As family historian, I must allow time for photo ops. As a writer, I must allow time for rumination and observation, but as a fifty-something, perhaps I just need more time.

I pondered this along with the Counter Lady’s warnings as I made my descent. I noticed I was following a woman wearing three-inch wedged heels and carrying a designer purse tucked tidily under her armpit. I wondered if my Counter Lady had a cautionary conversation with her. What about the very white family from Holland who embarked on their hike without hats or sunglasses, or—judging by the pinking of their noses and ears—sunscreen? What about the myriad flatlanders attempting to hike in flip flops, the gay couple (one of whom sported ballet flats), the pair of Cheetos-fed adolescents in their XX Large, orange-dusted T-shirts drawn taught against their heaving chests—did any of these travelers receive the Counter Lady’s dire warning, or was it just me?

I was still fuming about this when we stopped for lunch at the cafeteria near the visitor’s center. Kate took off to peruse the gift shop, while Jeff and I lingered to finish off the brownie we shouldn’t have ordered.

“Is it my imagination, or was that lady singling me out with the warning thing?” I asked him.

“No. It was really obvious. She was talking to you.”

“She didn’t seem worried about you at all.” Sure, Jeff is better coordinated, faster, and stronger than I am, but I exercise more than he does. Beneath his bargain-box tee-shirt with the Mickey Mouse ears and the letters C-A-L-I-F-O-R-I-N-I-A laid out in a misspelled arch beats a heart that loathes gyms. And beneath his Cardinal’s baseball cap hides his balding pate. But that’s not what the Counter Lady saw. She saw only the fine fringe beneath the rim that is the same fawny brown it was when I met him thirty years ago.

“It’s my hair, isn’t it?” I asked, but I knew the answer. It’s my effing hair, my long, wavy, slightly sweaty, gray hair.

“Yeah, probably so.” It’s the answer he didn’t want to give. He spent a year convincing me that going gray wouldn’t be so bad. I had been chemically dependent on drug store dyes for more than twenty years. I dyed every month up to my fiftieth year, and I would have kept on dyeing had I not poisoned myself.

It happened one afternoon. I made the mistake of answering the phone shortly after applying my box color to my hair. The call was from an old friend whose wife had just left him. What was I supposed to do—tell him to hold his story so I could rinse the toxic sludge off my head? I either ignored the timer or didn’t set it. By the time I got off the phone, my entire head was sizzling. I ran to the shower, but it was too late. My scalp was raw, oozing clear pus from open wounds. For the next few days, I felt like I had the flu. My head ached both inside and out. Everything tasted faintly of chemicals. My doctor sent me for blood tests. My liver is fine, thank you, but that experience scared me straight. I haven’t cracked open a box of color since.

I spent the next eight months visiting the salon the way another addict might visit a methadone clinic. Bridgette, my therapist/stylist, mixed high- and low-lights (none of the above ever touched my scalp) to create a hazy blend of brown and gray. Eventually, highlights stopped offering contrast, lowlights wouldn’t take: I was gray.

Honestly, it was a relief not to play the dyeing game anymore. I was glad to be rid of the gloves, goo, and stench, not to mention the potentially toxic overexposure to trideceth-2, carboxamide mea, propylene glycol, hexylene glycol, and aluminum hydroxide.

As I progressed in my recovery, I developed a kind of radar for dye jobs. I saw them everywhere—the fresh and too vibrant brunettes or luminescent blondes, the barbeque reds. And the dimming shades, I saw them too—the tinny, brassy, dulling, sometimes frizzing tresses, the tell-tale skunk stripe at the scalp foreshadowing emergency trips to Walgreen’s or desperate phone calls to stylists: How soon can you get me in? I was free of that now.

I could see them easily, but I felt less seen. As my hair grew lighter, I noticed fewer people made eye contact with me in stores and restaurants. The barista at the coffee stand at the community college where I teach stopped asking me how my day was going. A new acquaintance asked how much older than Jeff I am. I’m just waiting for some freakin’ Boy Scout to offer to help me cross the street. Or maybe up to some cliff dwellings.

You might want to wait in the car.

“This is exactly what I wanted to avoid all those years by dyeing.”

“I know,” Jeff said, trying to soothe me.

“Women are treated differently when they go gray.”

“It isn’t right.”

I could tell that he couldn’t decide if he wanted to try to calm me down or run off to join Kate in the gift shop.

“This, this was blatant.”

“Yes.”

“And from a woman!” I roared as Kate walked up. She looked at her dad, then at me.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing. I’m just a grumpy old lady.”

“I could have told you that,” she said. I must have glared at her.

“Jeez. Take a joke, why don’t you?”

•••

My appalling lack of humor about ageism is nothing new. I remember as a toddler, my parents would trot me out at dinner and cocktail parties to spell C-A-M-E-R-A or S-O-M-B-R-E-R-O. Guests sloshing high balls and Manhattans would ooh and aah for my parents. But they talked to me in that high-pitched voice adults reserve for infants and Chihuahuas.

As an older teen, I would balk when my mother, who ran the sales department of the family want-ad business, insisted on taking me along on sales calls. My jobs were to drive the car and fill out the paperwork. I was her “shill,” she joked, but I didn’t think it was funny when a lecherous client would offer me Cokes from the mini-fridge and invite me to sit a little closer.

I rankled as a young adult on my first writing job at a city lifestyle magazine when the then editor called me “honey” and assigned me the crappy fashion and shopping guide stories. To be fair, I was young and untested as a writer, and if I were the editor, I might have given me fluff stories to start, but I wanted to be taken seriously, even as a toddler, a teen, and young adult. Too often I felt dismissed as a kid or girl.

Eventually, I outgrew all these awkward and easily-labeled phases of life and hit the sweet spot, chronologically speaking – sometime around thirty through early forties. This is the age of relative respect in a woman’s life. You still have your looks, but you look like you might have some experience. By this age, you probably have launched a career, maybe had a child, have done, or at least begun, some important life work.

But, I was a late bloomer. The looks started to go before the career was launched, before my baby was a toddler, before I was ready. I kept dyeing not because I wanted to be a Barbie or a bombshell. I just wanted to linger in that sweet spot a little longer, before I felt discounted again.

My mother, who is a very young eighty-nine-year-old, still lives alone, drives, plays the piano and keeps up with the news. Sometimes when I take her shopping she insists that we bring her “Cripple Card” so that we can park in handicapped spots. She says she wants to spare me the long walks, and she takes my hand. She likes it when we shop together, but she is annoyed when I try to do too much for her. She is perfectly capable of carrying her own bags, of retrieving her own mail from the box. “I’m not as old as you think,” she says. She speaks slowly so I can understand: “I’m not in-valid. You are dis-abling me.”

•••

We arrived a few minutes early for the Balcony House tour and parked in the lot overlooking the first descent before the arduous, strenuous, death-defying climb. Jeff and Kate suggested I might want to wait in the car. “We’ll crack a window,” Jeff offered. I offered my middle finger in return.

My anxiety, which had not been great, diminished considerably when we joined our fellow adventurers at the shaded and paved waiting area. Among them was a long-limbed woman from London who appeared to be at least six months pregnant, the increasingly pink-nosed family from Holland, and the gay couple, one half of whom had exchanged his ballet slippers for flip flops. In fact, flip-flops outnumbered Keens, Tevas, and athletic shoes. There were sunglasses and hats, but only on the smallest of children, one of whom was a three- or four-year-old boy with round, red, tear-stained cheeks who was in need of a nap.

The ranger introduced herself as Nancy. She looked to be near my own age with a thick, wavy (dyed) auburn hair and a matter-of-fact attitude. She asked us to introduce ourselves and to say where we were from. “Let’s find out who has traveled the farthest.”

The English lady and the Dutch family were in the lead until we met Yaya and Jack, a couple who had flown in from Qatar that morning to visit their daughter and her family living in Colorado on a work visa. Judging from their attire—casual business slacks and basic brown lace ups for Jack, a floral short-sleeved blouse and black walking shorts for Yaya—the couple had no idea what they had agreed to do on their first afternoon in the States. Jack and Yaya’s daughter and son-in-law, each with a child on hip or in hand, seemed well acclimated to high altitude and thin air of the Rocky Mountain desert. Jack looked pale and clammy. Yaya looked terrified, particularly when she looked at Jack.

Privately, I wondered if they had come all this way to break the news in person: Jack has congestive heart failure, or Jack has leukemia, or Jack has any number of ailments that make taking him on this arduous, strenuous, death-defying climb a bad idea. But there couldn’t have been time for such a conversation so early in their trip. The young couple with their very young kids seemed unconcerned by their father’s waxy complexion. But Yaya and me, we were worried.

How is it that I got the Counter Lady’s warning and these people did not?

I was wrong. Everyone got the warning, just no one took it seriously. Ranger Nancy recited the same narrative, even added details that the Counter Lady omitted: “If you are acrophobic, claustrophobic, suffer from shortness of breath or poor balance, this may not be the hike for you.” In addition, she said, you must be able to climb under your own power and use both hands on the ladders, so “children must be able to climb unassisted.”

The ranger looked at the family from Qatar. I looked at the red-cheeked preschooler. Yaya looked at Jack. Jack looked into the middle distance. No one spoke. And so we were off.

Ranger Nancy stopped us from time to time to tell us about the dwellings. Balcony House wasn’t the largest of the cliff dwellings, but it may have been one of the best protected. Tucked into the rock wall like a multi-roomed pearl in an oversized oyster, the dwelling would have been virtually invisible from above. Invaders from below would have had to climb hand-over-hand up sheer rock to reach the hidey-hole homes, which is to say their hands would be otherwise occupied and unable to wield their weapons, making them easy pickings for the cliff dwellers above. Further, invaders were usually flatlanders, unused to the ups and downs of cliff life. Of course, the cliff-dwelling people were expert climbers, often hoisting baskets of food or water along with themselves up the rock wall, nothing more than their fingernails with which to secure their purchase. Even the children skittered up and down the rock like spiders. I wonder if Ranger Nancy enjoyed telling us this bit so that we modern-day climbers might feel a little like sissies relying on the sturdy, double-sided ladders secured to the rock by bolts and cables. As an added protection, our thirty-two-foot ascent wasn’t continuous, as the Counter Lady would have led me to believe. Instead, we climbed two discrete ladders, separated from each other by a bit of paved trail and a short set of concrete steps—with railings. Easy peas. Even the preschoolers skittered.

The second ladder delivered us to the dwellings themselves. Our party spread along the narrow walk ways that circled sunken kivas and edged the rock walls of the remaining apartment-style sleeping quarters. We paused not only to observe the ceilings stained black with thousand-year-old smoke, the symbols etched into the stone indicating wind, water, or the cycle of life, the worn footprints in the stone floor, but also to catch our breath and enjoy the cool shade provided by the stone alcove. Everyone was quiet, even the children.

Ranger Nancy used this time to tell us a bit about the Ancestral Puebloans. It is politically incorrect, she informed us, to call the original dwellers Anasazi. The old Navajo word does not just mean “Ancient ones,” as we were taught as kids. It literally means “ancestors of our enemies.” The new terminology is more accurate. The natives of the Four Corners area didn’t die out but moved on to become the Pueblo Indians of Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado.

The Ancestral Puebloans took up residence 1,400 years ago and made a good long run of it—seven hundred years—here in the rocks. Their lives were difficult, not only in terms of acrobatics and tribal warfare, but they were at the mercy of the weather. The average life expectancy of an Ancestral Puebloan was thirty-five years, said Ranger Nancy. Jack and I would have been anomalies.

Jack was still standing, if winded, during this high-altitude lecture. Yaya leaned heavily against a rock. But eventually, the lecture ended, and it was time to move on. The next hurdle was to climb up a large boulder-sized ridge to reach a narrow crawl space. We would be aided, Ranger Nancy said, by hand and foot holds left for us by the Ancients. For most, the hand and foot holds were unnecessary. The flip floppers all but flew up the rock. But Jack struggled. He slid. Yaya tried to grab his arm but missed. His son-in-law caught him and helped pull him up to a flat spot where he could get down on his hands and knees in order to crawl through the narrow tunnel. Jack and his family disappeared into the dark crevice before we even entered it. Kate moved gracefully ahead of me, and I followed, less gracefully, behind.

Finally, we reached the last set of ladders that would return us to the top, but the flow of traffic stopped. Jack was stuck, seemingly unable to move up or down the ladder. Yaya was ahead of him, cajoling him to move forward. The son-in-law positioned himself beneath Jack, prepared to give him another boost.

Jack’s arms and legs shook. He stared vacantly, away from the stone wall before him, ignoring the worried voices, the overly helpful hands. When he was ready, he climbed. When he needed to, he rested. Eventually, he made it to the top. We were too far behind to see Jack crest that final rung. I didn’t get to see him hurried off to the car or the rest area where he could throw back some baby aspirin or nitroglycerine or whatever he needed. But I’m sad I didn’t get to see his face. I would like to think he wore an expression that said to Yaya, his daughter and son-in-law, the preschoolers and the other adventurers, I made it, suckers, and you didn’t think I could!

I had underestimated Jack. I had underestimated the flip floppers, the preschoolers, the pregnant and the pink—just as the Counter Lady had underestimated me.

•••

Later that summer, I took Kate and friends to the public pool. The teenaged girl working the sales desk pulled herself away from a giggly conversation with off-duty life guards. “Do you consider yourself a senior?” she asked, not quite looking at me.

“No, I do not,” I snapped. I consider you impertinent, I thought but did not say. I paid the $1.50 extra for my admission—a small price for dignity.

The question came up again and again that summer—at the theater, museum, car wash, amusement park. One woman just gave me the senior coffee (smaller and cheaper) at McDonald’s without even asking.

I went back to my color therapist Bridgette. She walked around me. “The silver is pretty but not on you. Your face is too young.”

I love Bridgette.

Bridgette suggested trying a demi: “A temporary color. It will blend with the gray, and it won’t hurt your scalp.”

And suddenly, I was brunette.

It was like celebrating eighteen months of sobriety with a beer.

Jeff was startled. Kate rolled her eyes. But both said they liked it, kind of. Shortly after the start of the fall semester, a male colleague at the community college stopped me in the copy room: “You look so much better.” I posted my picture on Facebook expecting to receive what-did-you-do-that-for comments. Instead, I received “likes.” People in grocery stores and theater lobbies started talking to me again. And no one asked me if I consider myself a senior.

I’m back, baby!

I am embarrassed to admit it, but I fell all too easily back into the dye. I look at my face once again framed in brown and I see hints of possibility, glimmers that the Counter Lady clearly did not see when she looked at my hoary hair first and at me second. And, to be fair, I looked right back at her as if through her tuft of cotton candy white. Like sisters raised in a culture that treats aging like a disease, we saw in each other what we are expected to see: one compromised, diminished, or, as my mother would say, in-valid.

Kate, my now sixteen-year-old daughter with the long golden brown hair, is far wiser than I. She eschews make up, hair doo-dads, curling irons. She prefers sweat pants to skinny jeans, and she is beautiful. She tells me what she learned in her history class about how cultures who revere their elders tend to be more peaceful. If you want a warrior society, separate the aged from the young.

She tells me this during our trip to the grocery store to pick up a few items for my mother. It’s a Wednesday. Senior discount Wednesday.

The cashier, a man near my own age, looks at me with pleading eyes. He wants forgiveness. “I don’t know how to ask this,” he begins. The young woman bagging the groceries seems annoyed. “He’s trying to ask you if you qualify for the senior discount.”

“I’m fifty-three,” I say.

“Well.” The man seems relieved. “You don’t. It’s so hard to ask. You know, people are so sensitive. I mean a lot of women. They get angry. I don’t mean you. You seem nice.”

He could have meant me, but I smile benevolently and shake my hazy-brown head. “Some people.”

•••

PATRICIA O’CONNOR is a demi-dyed mother, writer, and teacher of English composition living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her semi-athletic husband and altogether graceful teenaged daughter. Her creative non-fiction work has appeared in Brain, Child and Vela magazines.