Inner Pictures

Growing up an artist, I haven’t had a very strong affiliation with the numbers that define age in our culture. Artists, especially dancers, remain forever young… until, one sad day, they are old. And then, it seems, there is nothing they can do to change it.

I beg to differ. There are, in fact, many ways.

Getting rid of the inner pictures.

My grandfather died when I was four. I remember him lying in the silken lining of his wooden casket, neatly groomed with a single purple flower planted in his ice-cold, cupped hands.

He was the oldest man I ever knew.  

He was 63.

My grandfather, lying in his coffin, is the image that surfaces when I wonder what old looks like, ever since I turned 65. His face is the reference point for my understanding old age. He has become, for me, the personification of the word, ‘old.’

At least three times a day now I ask myself if his is the face people on the street see when they look into my eyes. Do they see the 25-year-old I feel within, or a man on the brink of decrepitude?

 Furthermore, whenever I am presented with a physical challenge of any sort, I wonder if he, in his advanced state of decline, would have been in the position to get the task done. My yoga class starts and I find myself thinking if my students see me as a vibrant, appealing personification of peace or a wretched old man who is playing at being something he is not. When I dance onstage, I often ask myself if the audience is applauding my performance at the end of the show, or cheering my courage to present myself in tights and ballet slippers at this late phase of my life. When I take a dance class, are the other students secretly laughing behind my back because I am 20 years older than the oldest of them, or are they in wonder watching me dance to my inner drummer? And, should some tasty morsel of manhood look my way when I am out walking, is it because they see a booger hanging out my nose, or because they have a perverse taste for old men.

The vision of my grandfather’s aged face superimposed on mine haunts me day by day making me feel like death is waiting just around the corner.

Obviously, this image of what I should look like now that I am a senior is hindering me from feeling any kind of fulfillment as I enter this late phase of my life.  I am well aware that it is time to find a new role model, one that shows me what which I am capable of and not one that reminds me I am too aged to get up off the couch without a cane, has me gagging when I get undressed in front of a mirror, forces  me to turn down challenges that keep me out of my comfort zone and prove I haven’t even begun to stretch my limits. If I am ever to become the glorious person I used to think was only possible with the help of youth, it is essential I find the respective role model.

But where do I find a substitute for this picture that haunts me? And, once I do, how do I make the exchange?

To be continued.