Polly Campbell: The bittersweet nature of aging

I’m writing this on my 70th birthday, sitting in the back room of my house listening to late-career Nick Lowe on CD while it rains like crazy. The newly planted trees outside my window are getting plenty of water. I’d usually be doing something outside on my birthday. We had planned to go out to a friend’s farm and walk the woods to look for bittersweet, that vine with the bright orange and yellow berries that makes such pretty fall decoration. Apparently there’s a wicked invasive kind so it’s easy to find. But this is a true deluge, keeping me in this window-walled room with a metal roof amplifying the rain. It’s a day for cups of tea and self-reflection. 

Invasive bittersweet: I can’t help but think what an appropriate phrase that is for a 70th birthday. 

This is a sweet time of life. You should be so lucky to be 70. I have all the great things: free time, financial security, a good family and the freedom to do whatever I want. But it comes with the tinge of bitter. I am amazed at how much stuff I know, but I can’t always pull it up from the memory bank. I have the confidence for travel and adventure, but I have to do it with my knees hurting. I truly am wise from my years of living, but things are so different, I’m not sure how relevant my wisdom is. I am solidly sure of who I am and what I’m capable of, but it’s that long time of life when women seem to become invisible to other people.

I’m sure 70 sounds ancient; it did to me not that long ago. Turns out, it’s not. So I work pretty hard to make people communicate with the real me, not a preconception. I work overtime to make sure I earn and hold on to attention. It’s easier because I can take advantage of the freedom that comes from having lost all my conversational filters.

Maybe I’m trying too hard. I could give up and let other people think I’m whatever they think old is. I have the choice of holding on to the habits and tastes of my youth, the ones I most truly care about. I could hang out with other baby boomers doing the same thing, and reminisce about the days rock concert tickets cost $5. But I don’t want to be obviously out of touch, nor do I want to relive what I’ve already lived. 

Or I could try to keep up, hang out with younger people, wear short wide-leg jeans full of holes, embrace AI. But I don’t want to look ridiculous.

Fortunately there is so much room at 70 in which to change, choose, reinvent, stay authentic to oneself, just a new version, a person who feels and acts one’s age without feeling old. I will always prefer flare-leg jeans, keeping a journal with a ballpoint pen, and will always put on Laura Nyro or Van Morrison when called for. I am probably never going to truly update my music preferences. I’m never going to use third-party delivery services.

But I am not going to refuse to understand the new feminism, or all the nuances of race politics, of gender switching or gentle parenting or working from home. And if I think new ways of living or understanding make me uncomfortable, it doesn’t matter, because new ideas and young people always win. Soon enough it won’t be my world. 

The spindly native trees I planted in our yard that I can see through the rain are for those next people. It is a literal and figurative obligation of all people later in their life to plant trees. I hope they are appreciated after we have to move somewhere else. It’s also a metaphorical obligation: Some of that time and liberty we have later in life should be dedicated to making the world healthy and safe for those people inheriting it. 

This music I’m listening to is a good example of one way of aging. Nick Lowe was a new-wave rocker. Rock is a young person’s territory, and a lot of over-the-hill musicians try to continue in the same spirit, with sometimes cringey results. But when Lowe was in his 50s he started putting out records that were full of songs that could only have been recorded by a person who’d lived awhile: They’re nostalgic, bitter, sad, regretful, though not always depressing. They are rich and adult and the definition of bittersweet.

That’s what I wish for all people my age, to draw on the richness of a life lived for decades, using the bitter and the sweet to be in the world in a way that is uniquely yours.

Polly Campbell covered restaurants and food for the Cincinnati Enquirer from 1996 until 2020. She writes monthly on a variety of topics, and she welcomes your feedback and column suggestions at editor (at) moversmakers.org