Nonfiction
by
Cathy Fiorello
Out-of-Sync
All my adult life I’ve been out-of-sync with the women of my generation. Though we were the same age, they were always years ahead of me in reaching life’s milestones. More significantly, I was always years behind them. They married long before I did, started families when I was starting a career, enjoyed the rewards of grandparenting while I was still in the throes of raising teenagers. They segued gently into retirement, cutting their engines when I was revving up mine. Being the youngest child in a large family, it took me longer to grow up, to do the things a woman does, in the right order, at the right time. I was a late-bloomer.
When I married and moved to the suburbs, that hotbed of frantic mothering, the women who had children my children’s age were tennis-playing Barbie dolls with whom I had nothing in common but our kids. My preschool son had no one his age to play with in our neighborhood. He became a moving-van chaser, investigating every new family as it moved in, hoping to find a boy who would be his friend. One day he came running home, excited. “Mom, there’s a boy for me in the new family!”
Needing a friend myself, I asked, “What’s the mother like?”
“She’s a teenager,” he said.
My son and that boy became best friends and that “teenage” mother and I are still friends. This was one case where age wasn’t a factor for either of us. However, at a Christmas party she gave, I was introduced to another mother of a four-year-old boy. “You’re Bobby’s mother?” she asked. “I can’t believe we have a child the same age.” I felt more like Methuselah’s mother than Bobby’s.
I volunteered for every school activity. I was always the oldest mother on the bus that took the class to the Bronx Zoo or the Museum of Natural History. I baked carloads of cupcakes for fundraising sales to pay for more bus rides to places that I didn’t want to go. Though city-bred and not attuned to the wonders of nature, I went camping with my daughter’s Brownie troop to prove I could do anything the young mothers could. I couldn’t. I answered all future calls to sleep in a tent with, “Just tell me how many cupcakes you need.”
When at last both my kids were out of kindergarten and in school all day, I begged the workplace to take me back. I needed to return to a world that was a better fit for me. It had been ten years since my last job; I was ready to rejoin my peers in a profession I loved. Alas, the publishing world I returned to was awash in young interns just out of college. Once again, I was out-of-sync.
My boss and mentor at Parents Magazine gave me sound advice on aging which, for the most part, I’ve followed. “A woman should never tell her age,” she said. “It puts her in a box.” When she first passed that mantra on to me, I didn’t understand it. As I aged, it became quite clear: The world defines a woman by her age, socially, as I was defined at that Christmas party, and more important, professionally, which can result in denied opportunities. I was between publishing jobs and not yet ready to seek another permanent position when I registered with a temporary agency that placed office clerical workers. I thought being a receptionist for a few months would be just what I needed before plunging into another demanding job. I prepared a resume listing my earlier clerical jobs and, dressed carefully in my Ralph Lauren blazer over a crisp white shirt, I presented my best professional self to the receptionist at the agency. I was interviewed by a recruiter who assured me they would have no trouble placing me. She kept my resume and my ID to pass on to a second recruiter, then asked me to wait until that recruiter was free to interview me.
While I sat in the waiting room, a young, gum-chewing woman, sloppily dressed, hair flying, came in and went directly to the office of the recruiter I had just seen, where she was loudly called down for not showing up for an assignment the previous day. She was sent out on another job immediately. This is going to be easy, I thought. Then I heard the second recruiter call into the first, office to office, “Didn’t you notice—she’s 58?” My interviewer came out to the waiting room and returned my driver’s license ID. “We have nothing for you today,” she said. “We’ll keep your resume on file.” I never heard from them. From that day on, I told my age to no one but my doctors.
In-Sync
I was retired for ten years when I got my last chance to be in-sync with the world I live in. We had moved to San Francisco from New York and I was desperately lonely. Everything was new and everyone was young and I was not. I would never fit in here. I longed for the porch in that suburb I was so anxious to leave. As I had always done in times of stress, I sought solace in my local bookstore. Two or three times a week, I sat in a bottle-green leather chair that wore the slits and stains of others who had needed the comfort of being there. It was next to a window that looked out on San Francisco Bay. With each visit, a feeling of well-being washed over me. I had a book in hand and a water view, who needed friends?
This bookstore had something for everyone. Some days my browsing brought me back to Left Bank Paris and I sat again at a table at Les Deux Magots when two sparrows swooped down and made off with pretzels in their beaks. This being the Bay Area, home to Alice Waters, sustainable greenmarkets, and a restaurant for every food preference, my foodie obsession was well fed in its cookbook section. I especially enjoyed watching the children in their corner nurturing what I hoped, for their sake, would become a lifelong reading addiction. Sitting on miniature stools, stretched out on the brightly colored foam alphabet mat, pulling books from the shelves at will, no one there to caution them, “Don’t touch!” It was their place and they were free to touch and turn the pages and exclaim their delight when they found Waldo.
The store manager and I often chatted about what we were reading. She invited me to events where I met authors promoting their new books. One day, as I was checking out a purchase, she put a job application in my hand and invited me to join her staff. I accepted her offer and only later did I remember that she hadn’t asked my age before making it, and I hadn’t told her. It just wasn’t relevant for either of us. She was looking for a reader and she knew she’d found one. What she didn’t know at the time was, she had also found a writer. After a year on the job, it was my book that was being introduced at the store. I was the author the packed room had come to meet. I was living a dream.
When she offered me the job, she had said, “We can only pay you minimum wage.” Something else she didn’t know: I would have worked there without pay.
Some of the women in my book club, which I had started as a way to find friends, thought I was crazy to go back to work. Others thought I was lucky. So did I. I had retired twice before and twice had succumbed to the pull back to a part of my life that I loved. But I knew this would be my last appearance in the workplace and I couldn’t have asked for a better finale. Today’s world is vastly different from the one I graduated into so long ago, but here I was, late in life, working a part-time job in what may be the last bastion of humanity. I felt safe here, renewed. Everything I needed to enhance my life was within easy reach.
Once again, I was the oldest member of the staff, but that was not an issue. My friend’s mantra didn’t apply here. There was no age box that would define me as unemployable. Being welcomed back into the workplace after a ten-year hiatus, knowing that I still had something to contribute was a major turning point in making peace with my move. I was no longer in transit, I was home.
The ultimate test of my being in-sync with this world before I move on to the next, came when I participated in an Age March organized by a friend who was starting a Boomer-Hottie movement and invited me to join. My San Francisco friends simply will not allow me to go gently into old age. Marching would never have been an option for me, but this new friend had a mantra, too: “It’s never too late to do anything.”
And we proved it when we not-so-hot Boomers gathered one Sunday morning on Union Street in San Francisco’s Marina District, home to the young, well-heeled slice of this city’s population who were riding the wave of the technology boom. The upscale cafes and watering holes that line both sides of the street were bustling with brunchers chilling out with their peers.
Motorcycle cops cleared our way, but it was the booming brass sounds of the New Orleans jazz band leading our troop of Baby Boomers down Union Street that knocked the Millennials off their bar stools. They abandoned their mimosas and omelets and trickled out onto the sidewalk, bewildered looks on their faces, as we marched by waving banners declaring in big, bold, neon letters, “Anything Is Possible at Any Age!”
And that Sunday morning on Union Street in the Marina, I believed it. I marched side by side with men and women I had never met before. We swayed to the beat of the Dixieland band; we made being old look like fun. The sidewalks became clogged with on-the-way ups applauding on-the-way outs. They smiled, they waved, they gave us the two-thumbs-up sign of approval. All along the route, their phones were raised, their cameras clicked. When a twenty-something woman shouted, “Go, girl!” as I marched past her, I did feel like a girl again.
When I married and moved to the suburbs, that hotbed of frantic mothering, the women who had children my children’s age were tennis-playing Barbie dolls with whom I had nothing in common but our kids. My preschool son had no one his age to play with in our neighborhood. He became a moving-van chaser, investigating every new family as it moved in, hoping to find a boy who would be his friend. One day he came running home, excited. “Mom, there’s a boy for me in the new family!”
Needing a friend myself, I asked, “What’s the mother like?”
“She’s a teenager,” he said.
My son and that boy became best friends and that “teenage” mother and I are still friends. This was one case where age wasn’t a factor for either of us. However, at a Christmas party she gave, I was introduced to another mother of a four-year-old boy. “You’re Bobby’s mother?” she asked. “I can’t believe we have a child the same age.” I felt more like Methuselah’s mother than Bobby’s.
I volunteered for every school activity. I was always the oldest mother on the bus that took the class to the Bronx Zoo or the Museum of Natural History. I baked carloads of cupcakes for fundraising sales to pay for more bus rides to places that I didn’t want to go. Though city-bred and not attuned to the wonders of nature, I went camping with my daughter’s Brownie troop to prove I could do anything the young mothers could. I couldn’t. I answered all future calls to sleep in a tent with, “Just tell me how many cupcakes you need.”
When at last both my kids were out of kindergarten and in school all day, I begged the workplace to take me back. I needed to return to a world that was a better fit for me. It had been ten years since my last job; I was ready to rejoin my peers in a profession I loved. Alas, the publishing world I returned to was awash in young interns just out of college. Once again, I was out-of-sync.
My boss and mentor at Parents Magazine gave me sound advice on aging which, for the most part, I’ve followed. “A woman should never tell her age,” she said. “It puts her in a box.” When she first passed that mantra on to me, I didn’t understand it. As I aged, it became quite clear: The world defines a woman by her age, socially, as I was defined at that Christmas party, and more important, professionally, which can result in denied opportunities. I was between publishing jobs and not yet ready to seek another permanent position when I registered with a temporary agency that placed office clerical workers. I thought being a receptionist for a few months would be just what I needed before plunging into another demanding job. I prepared a resume listing my earlier clerical jobs and, dressed carefully in my Ralph Lauren blazer over a crisp white shirt, I presented my best professional self to the receptionist at the agency. I was interviewed by a recruiter who assured me they would have no trouble placing me. She kept my resume and my ID to pass on to a second recruiter, then asked me to wait until that recruiter was free to interview me.
While I sat in the waiting room, a young, gum-chewing woman, sloppily dressed, hair flying, came in and went directly to the office of the recruiter I had just seen, where she was loudly called down for not showing up for an assignment the previous day. She was sent out on another job immediately. This is going to be easy, I thought. Then I heard the second recruiter call into the first, office to office, “Didn’t you notice—she’s 58?” My interviewer came out to the waiting room and returned my driver’s license ID. “We have nothing for you today,” she said. “We’ll keep your resume on file.” I never heard from them. From that day on, I told my age to no one but my doctors.
In-Sync
I was retired for ten years when I got my last chance to be in-sync with the world I live in. We had moved to San Francisco from New York and I was desperately lonely. Everything was new and everyone was young and I was not. I would never fit in here. I longed for the porch in that suburb I was so anxious to leave. As I had always done in times of stress, I sought solace in my local bookstore. Two or three times a week, I sat in a bottle-green leather chair that wore the slits and stains of others who had needed the comfort of being there. It was next to a window that looked out on San Francisco Bay. With each visit, a feeling of well-being washed over me. I had a book in hand and a water view, who needed friends?
This bookstore had something for everyone. Some days my browsing brought me back to Left Bank Paris and I sat again at a table at Les Deux Magots when two sparrows swooped down and made off with pretzels in their beaks. This being the Bay Area, home to Alice Waters, sustainable greenmarkets, and a restaurant for every food preference, my foodie obsession was well fed in its cookbook section. I especially enjoyed watching the children in their corner nurturing what I hoped, for their sake, would become a lifelong reading addiction. Sitting on miniature stools, stretched out on the brightly colored foam alphabet mat, pulling books from the shelves at will, no one there to caution them, “Don’t touch!” It was their place and they were free to touch and turn the pages and exclaim their delight when they found Waldo.
The store manager and I often chatted about what we were reading. She invited me to events where I met authors promoting their new books. One day, as I was checking out a purchase, she put a job application in my hand and invited me to join her staff. I accepted her offer and only later did I remember that she hadn’t asked my age before making it, and I hadn’t told her. It just wasn’t relevant for either of us. She was looking for a reader and she knew she’d found one. What she didn’t know at the time was, she had also found a writer. After a year on the job, it was my book that was being introduced at the store. I was the author the packed room had come to meet. I was living a dream.
When she offered me the job, she had said, “We can only pay you minimum wage.” Something else she didn’t know: I would have worked there without pay.
Some of the women in my book club, which I had started as a way to find friends, thought I was crazy to go back to work. Others thought I was lucky. So did I. I had retired twice before and twice had succumbed to the pull back to a part of my life that I loved. But I knew this would be my last appearance in the workplace and I couldn’t have asked for a better finale. Today’s world is vastly different from the one I graduated into so long ago, but here I was, late in life, working a part-time job in what may be the last bastion of humanity. I felt safe here, renewed. Everything I needed to enhance my life was within easy reach.
Once again, I was the oldest member of the staff, but that was not an issue. My friend’s mantra didn’t apply here. There was no age box that would define me as unemployable. Being welcomed back into the workplace after a ten-year hiatus, knowing that I still had something to contribute was a major turning point in making peace with my move. I was no longer in transit, I was home.
The ultimate test of my being in-sync with this world before I move on to the next, came when I participated in an Age March organized by a friend who was starting a Boomer-Hottie movement and invited me to join. My San Francisco friends simply will not allow me to go gently into old age. Marching would never have been an option for me, but this new friend had a mantra, too: “It’s never too late to do anything.”
And we proved it when we not-so-hot Boomers gathered one Sunday morning on Union Street in San Francisco’s Marina District, home to the young, well-heeled slice of this city’s population who were riding the wave of the technology boom. The upscale cafes and watering holes that line both sides of the street were bustling with brunchers chilling out with their peers.
Motorcycle cops cleared our way, but it was the booming brass sounds of the New Orleans jazz band leading our troop of Baby Boomers down Union Street that knocked the Millennials off their bar stools. They abandoned their mimosas and omelets and trickled out onto the sidewalk, bewildered looks on their faces, as we marched by waving banners declaring in big, bold, neon letters, “Anything Is Possible at Any Age!”
And that Sunday morning on Union Street in the Marina, I believed it. I marched side by side with men and women I had never met before. We swayed to the beat of the Dixieland band; we made being old look like fun. The sidewalks became clogged with on-the-way ups applauding on-the-way outs. They smiled, they waved, they gave us the two-thumbs-up sign of approval. All along the route, their phones were raised, their cameras clicked. When a twenty-something woman shouted, “Go, girl!” as I marched past her, I did feel like a girl again.
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