On Turning Sixty-Five - Notes From the Field (Review)

On Turning Sixty-Five: Notes From the Field

By John Jerome. Random House. 255 pp. $24.95

Reviewed by Colman McCarthy

No question about it: John Jerome is a man of opinions. Also a man of wonder, and of dispensing advice. Stir these assets together and the seasoned result is a bracing and pleasurable blend of prose that carries along the reader like a canoeist riding the rapids.

Fittingly, Jerome’s photograph of himself in a canoe adorns the cover: at rest with a stilled oar, and peering through binoculars as if making a sighting for what possible rough weather, or becalmed havens, lay upriver. He expects both. “On Turning Sixty-Five: Notes From the Field” is an account of the looming year that meant “it was time to start planning an endgame.” With twelve chapters, Jerome chronicles his experiences, thoughts, and feelings month by month, beginning with a November and ending with an October.

“I’d recently watched a friend turn sixty-five,” he writes, “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.”

Jerome, a rural New Englander, an author whose ten books include “The Elements of Effort,” “The Writing Trade,” and “Staying With It,” and who wrote columns for Esquire and Outdoor magazines, manages to write about himself without being self-absorbed. His candor, plus the absence of pretension, helps. Like all of us involved in one or another of life’s transitions—from going to high school senior to college freshman, leaving the thirties for the forties, entering the autumn years—uncertainty marks the passages. “How do we achieve a graceful acceptance of aging’s inevitability, the chronological imperative?”, Jerome asks. “How do we even recognize where we are at that curve?”

For some, the journey’s signpost’s are physical; for others, mental. Jerome doesn’t rise much beyond the prosaic when describing the bodily changes that mark the mid-60s: “skin begins to sag and wrinkle; joints stiffen; lungs lose their elasticity; rib cartilage begin to become more rigid.”

Nothing new there.

Jerome is more effective when introspectively giving shape to the metaphysical, inner nuances of aging: “It takes a kind of hormonal, hard-nosed refusal to give in, and these are hormones I’m not sure I still have a sufficient supply of. According to the experts, the moxie for successful aging usually comes from the need to accomplish some larger purpose. Crumbling old gaffers such as myself need a project, something outside of—more important than—ourselves. This is morally and socially profound, I guess, but somehow it reminds me of that strategy which, applied to two year-olds, is called constructive redirection.”

As engaging a reporter as Jerome is—and, indeed, he is a reporter covering the aging beat—his autobiogaphical writing here does reveal a not especially admirable side to him. I could find no mention of his engaging in what he just stressed, some kind of other-centered activity: perhaps volunteering at a local literacy program in his area of Western Massachusetts, or taking turns to help out with Meals on Wheels or one of the local elderly programs, or toiling for any of the environmental or civic groups common to all communities. Several passages show him to be a loving and long-married husband, but once out the front door his head and heart don’t appear to be engaged in assisting his fellow mortals

Not surprisingly, the person whose life and ideas show up most often in “On Turning Sixty-Five” is Henry David Thoreau. He, too, was civically aloof. Thoreau did labor for a spell in the family pencil business and after graduating from Harvard in the 1830s taught school briefly. He could take only two weeks of it.

Jerome admires Thoreau because “mostly he tried to figure out how to live.” Not among others, though. “The thing about Thoreau,” Jerome writes, “is what for lack of a better word one has to call wisdom. There is a great deal of it in his writing, however silly, or grumpy, he is around the edges. Or at least it’s always struck me as wisdom, at whatever age I’ve read it. Despite my always wavering loyalty, I’ve ended up taking his advice, or rather trying to take his advice, all my life. I suppose that as you age your thirst for wisdom grows….There’s no evidence that age is going to make me wise, but it certainly increases my appetite, my need for wisdom.”

One piece of Thoreauvian counsel that Jerome avidly heeds involves “simplify, simplify”—what many readers consider the two most beautiful words in “Walden.”

The roadway to the simple life took Jerome further and further away from the intellectual world he knew best, the one of the media and public issues. He stopped renewing magazine subscriptions. Jerome, the one-time successful magazine writer and magazine editor, was now a magazine shunner.

“I miss them,” he half-sighs, “…but they sort of ran off and left me a few years ago…I can no longer read them with equanimity.”

Next to go were the movies, radio and television: “The things the electronic media consider worth talking about seldom engage my attention. Few films will get me out of the house. Politics no longer seem to require my constant monitoring. Every big issue that comes along reminds me of some earlier fuss, usually one that stubbornly resisted the kind of solutions that made sense to me. The arguments become like prison jokes: just mutter the number, and everyone will get it.

“The result is a detachment that, like the increasing stoop in my shoulders, I swore would never happen. I remember watching old folks let their interests dwindle away; not me, I said, I would not lose touch. How could one exist without knowing what’s going on? Now my adult children keep me apprised, if I bother to ask. Part of me is shocked at letting someone else do my keeping up. The other part no longer cares.”

With that and other declarations of independence, little doubt exists that Jerome is in control. He concludes his final chapter—“October: Uneven Ground”—with a few summing-up comments by which he assures the reader that aging can be sensibly managed. “One of the more rueful amusements of age,” he writes, “is watching yourself turn into only a slight variation of every other poor schlub who ever lived. We spend our youth and our adulthood earnestly working at separating ourselves from the ruck, trying to establish our specialness, our uniqueness. That certainly was my driving force….If I really sucked it up, it occurs to me, I could perhaps continue to be what I have rather fatuously considered to be that highly individualized person. I might hold out at the game for another five years, maybe ten. But the stunning truth is that being that fellow is no longer all that much fun. Maybe it never was. The individualism act wears thin….And, once again, it is the body that does it: I am far too special a person to have a swollen prostate, a bum neck, fading eyesight. That’s what happens to all those others, those old people. Whom I am swiftly joining”

So far, the joining goes well. We’ll know more later, perhaps when Jerome writes “On Turning Seventy-Five: Notes From the Field, Though Muddier and Weedier.”