I turned 66 last week and started worrying that maybe I really was getting older, but whenever that sort of thing happens I hold my head erect and whistle a happy tune.
Just messing with you.
What I did, actually, was walk into my bathroom and take the Wadler Sure Fire Accurate Aging Test, which I hope to be marketing soon. It goes like this: You count up the number of hair products you own, then you count up the number of digestive aids, and if the hair products are in the lead, you are still young. (I understand this test may not work as well for men; I’m open to suggestions.)
My count, anyway, was hair products, nine; digestive aids six, so I figure I’m O.K. for awhile.
Forget bald, forget going to bed at 10 p.m., because the real mark of someone’s age is their interest in their G.I. tract. People are old when they start telling their friends how their intestines are working. You’re old when you listen:
“I had a great steak last night. I guess it will be with me till spring.”
“No, I never do raw vegetables. They give me gas.”
“I was plugged up for five days. Then the dam broke.”
“The dam broke.” Is that an image anyone wants to linger over? Wouldn’t a vague, “I was feeling out of sorts for five days” be nicer? Or better yet, take the position that no one really wants to hear about your G.I. tract and skip the subject entirely.
It’s true I may be hypersensitive to this issue because of my upbringing in a boarding house in the Catskills in the 1950s. Here’s how you set the dining hall tables in the Catskills: Fork, plate, knife, spoon, prunes. Or sometimes: Fork, plate, knife, spoon, prune juice. I think in those days prunes were legally mandated if you wanted to run a hotel, the equivalent of today’s defibrillator in a restaurant; there was probably an inspector challenging my grandmother, who ran our place, every season.
“And your prune supply is up to date, Mrs. Wadler?”
“Yes, Mister, we got two million prunes, enough to last through Labor Day. And in an emergency, God forbid, I got a cousin in New York with a special supplier.”
After the guests had breakfast there was a disbursement back to the rooms. My memory is that it was mostly the men. Were the digestive tracts of middle-aged men more troublesome? Were women on a different body clock or merely more discreet? The universe gives up its secrets reluctantly. I do remember that when women were sunning themselves around the pool, with those black plastic things on their eyes to prevent unsightly sunglass lines, the men would come back and report.
“Anything, Morty?”
“Nothing. I sat there with a book for half an hour.”
This was in front of a row of other people, by the way. These people were not only not embarrassed to be discussing sitting on the toilet, but it could also instantly morph into their favorite game,"Who Suffered Most.”
“I have a sister, she didn’t go for two weeks.”
“When I was pregnant, I didn’t go for three weeks. Seven months pregnant. Can you imagine? I felt like it was up to my throat.”
As a little kid, I found these discussions appalling and swore it was something I would never do when I grew up. And I didn’t. Nor did my pals, even in the depths of back-to-the-earth ‘60s. Free love, yes, free speech, yes, put acid in the orange juice, let the children run around the commune naked because natural is beautiful, but let’s draw the line somewhere. Once in a while you would run across someone who hadn’t gotten the memo.
“The three great constipators are chocolate, cheese and nuts,” a blind date once told me. He was a Tony-winning lyricist by the way.
But this usually didn’t happen. Until recently, when most of my friends were in their mid-60s.
“I was worried I was fat, but my trainer told me it was probably gas. You can really see it in Spandex. It sort of started out from just over my ribs and poofed to my waist. I didn’t realize gas could go that high.”
“I said to Jack, ‘What are those horrible noises you’re making? You never made those noises before we got married.’ ”
“We don’t eat Indian any more. You have to have separate bedrooms if you’re going to have Indian at night at our age. Or be sleeping outside in a hammock.”
I once heard an interview with Dustin Hoffman in which he said — and I am going to have to paraphrase extra hard here: In your 20s, it’s “I met this great girl, we were up all night doing it!”; in your 40s it’s “Boy, did I have a great steak last night, it was fantastic!”; then, it’s “Wow, did I successfully evacuate my bowels!”
Boomers, we are the generation that was supposed to change things. We should stop these conversations. When someone asks you what’s new, tell them about a book. The Beatles, “On Air, Live at the BBC — Volume 2.” How glad you are that Kim Jong-un is not your nephew.
But perhaps I am asking the impossible. Discussing one’s aging digestive tract may be a universal pastime as old as the discovery of America, that will always be with us and always has been.
“So, Columbus, seen anything that looks like the New World lately?”
“I’ll tell you the truth, my bowels have been in such a knot for the last few days I can’t think about anything else. It’s possible I might have missed it. Which would be horrible because you know what Isabella and Ferdinand told me: ‘Be sure to bring back prunes.'”