"No Longer Pretty, I Guess"

NO LONGER PRETTY, I GUESS

REVISED FROM A DECEMBER 2000 PERSONAL WRITING

Almost every day when I was teaching at Skyview High School, I ate lunch with Dave, one of my colleagues, in his classroom. Sometimes, when we weren’t planning outdoor adventures, pining for freedom from paperwork, or bitching about something that had upset us that morning, we’d get kinda philosophical. And one of our biggest topics back in the middle of the 2000-2001 school year was the aging process. One day, Dave was saying that one of the most disconcerting things he had noticed about growing older—he was 43 then, a year older than me—was that the visual effect he had on people (especially those of the opposite sex) had changed. He was a pretty handsome guy, accustomed over the years to attracting a certain amount of female attention, even among women much younger than himself. In 2000, however, he said he felt sometimes as if he was invisible, as if younger women who once might have “checked him out” were looking right through him, as if he had reached a stage in life at which he simply had ceased to matter to them. He could have been a piece of old furniture or part of the wall, as far as they were concerned.

Of course, this led him to the realization that many times he himself had done the same thing to older women—women who may still have appeared vitally attractive to older men. And this realization led the two of us to a discussion of the many people (men and women) whom we daily passed by and gave no second thought—perhaps not even a “first thought”—because they were older, fatter or uglier (or different in myriad other ways) than the people to whom we preferred to direct our attention.

How many people, we wondered, were living vital, rich lives but somehow had seemingly fallen beneath our notice? And how would it feel to live most of one’s life that way? And wasn’t it a shame that we didn’t give some people even a ghost of a chance to influence our lives simply because we “dismissed” them before they ever had that opportunity? And just how much of life were we missing out on because of such preconceptions and actions, whether they were conscious or subconscious?

Our talk that day reminded me of a master-teacher with whom I had  student-taught back at Soldotna High School in 1986. She had been a teacher of mine back in the early 1970s, and by 1986 she was just a couple of years away from retirement and probably somewhere between 40 and 45 years old. In fact, she was likely about the same age I was during the discussion Dave and I were having in 2000. In 1986, she was an attractive, athletic woman entering middle age, and she had noticed the way that a few of the young girls at the high school attempted to flirt with me. (I was then in my late 20s.) Almost wistfully, she said one day, “Enjoy the attention now. It doesn’t last long. I can remember when many of the young boys used to flock around….” And I knew that her nostalgia wasn’t prompted by any sexual desire for those boys of those bygone days, but more by a desire for the acknowledgement of her own vitality, and what she perceived in 1986 as her own fading physical desirability.

I understood intellectually what she was talking about back then, but 2000 I had internalized her message personally. I’ve never been a “pretty boy” or the object of considerable female interest, but by the turn of the century I had certainly noticed that I was dropping beneath the horizon line. The important thing, I know, is to be happy with one’s self.

Aging men and women don’t need the attention of attractive younger men and women to make their lives worthwhile or meaningful, but having a little of that attention is better than seeming invisible, and it even feels good sometimes.