Death and Birth in Oklahoma

My friend Janine Smith of the famous JZine site collects movies where at some point, generally toward the end of the second act, a character says, “I’m too old for this shit.” She’s found thirteen of them, enough to make a genre. I call it the-aging-actor-repeating-a-story-he-nailed-thirty-years-ago thriller. Bruce Willis and Harrison Ford are in the midst of deja vu careers pulling these roles. Because I’m living with a six-year-old, I watch a lot of Disney Channel, and I’ve noticed a similar repetition. I must have seen twenty made-for-TV Disney movies in the last year, and in practically every one, well-intentioned-but-misguided parents try to control teenagers who are torn between doing what matters and doing what other people tell them matters.
In the end, the kid finds proper values, but right before the climactic victory, the mom or dad who wants the kid to go to Harvard or be a sports star or something equally terrible whines, “But, honey, I hate to see you give up your dream,” and the balanced, together teenager says, “No, Mom/Dad, I’m giving up your dream.”
How many movies can use that line before producers start suing each other?
What brought up this trip down Insight Lane is I just got back from Oklahoma where my dad had surgery after yet another fall in the nursing home. He has this in-and-out dementia where he forgets he can’t walk and then he falls down and breaks bones.
Old age is a good time to get to know your parents. They’re stuck in a hospital bed and you’re stuck in a vinyl chair next to the hospital bed and there’s nothing much to do but reach closure with the past. Nobody feels judgmental, at least my dad doesn’t during the cogent hours, so you can talk without filters or fear.
I asked him why he and Mom never gave my grief about being a fiction writer. I mean, I turned 35 living in a tent, illegally squatting, on Forest Service land, working as a gardener for the Rockefellers three days a week and washing dishes in an Italian restaurant three days a week to make enough money so I could move indoors and write all winter. If my daughter is still homeless by choice at 35 I will personally drag her by the ear into an employment agency. I’ll say, “Grow up, for Chrissake. It’s time to get real.”
“Why didn’t you and Mom tell me that,” I asked Dad. “You must have thought it.”
“You still had a dream,” Dad said. “We couldn’t tell you that was wrong.”
Only now, when he has to be fed by hand and he craps himself daily, did I get around to thanking him. Or even realizing what he and Mom did. It’s too late to thank Mom.
On a slightly lighter note, he was in assisted living first and a nursing home later as I was writing Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty. The book is about an inmate revolt at a continuing care center full of aging hippies in 2022. It’s Cuckoo’s Nest meets Grumpy Old Stoners. The top nine layers are funny geriatric sex and drug use. The revolutionaries chant, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, AARP is going to win.” Half of them think it’s 1969 and Nixon is outside the walls.
But the tenth level, way under there, is serious as Alzheimer’s. Americans treat old people like dirt. We steal their dignity, self-respect, and pretend they are invisible. So it goes.
The interesting thing I found in assisted living is old people act exactly the way they did in high school. There’s the cool kids, the cliques, the petty jealousies, the geeks (me), the incredible importance of who sits where in the cafeteria, the gulf between those who drive and those who don’t. The sexual plotting is wonderful. Gossip controls the rec room. Meanness and kindness are doled out without thought.
Life is a circle, in the words of Kahlil Gibran or Woody Allen or somebody else wise. You’re in diapers, you walk, you drive a car, you have sex, you work like a sweatshop whore in Cambodia for fifty years, then you stop having sex, they take your car, you stop walking, and, soon, you’re in diapers again. Death and birth are the same thing.
This is true. You have to believe somebody, so it might as well be me.