No to "aging gracefully": 4 Friday thoughts

Plus: travel lessons with an elderly parent; why "mattering" matters; being a patriot in today's USA

My mom and daughter in Landshut, Bavaria, my mom’s hometown.

Greetings, dear readers!

I’ve returned from my 18-day expedition through Austria, Switzerland and Bavaria with my 82-year-old mother and almost-10-year-old daughter. A few pointed “aging with strength” lessons learned from that experience, below.

But first, a few words from today’s sponsor: the opinionated voice in my head that can’t stand the phrase “aging gracefully” and its two dumb correlates, “Power Cream” and “Power Wagon.”

1 | I don’t want to “age gracefully”

With apologies to those of you who like it, and specifically to those who have used the phrase in conversation with me, can we please just stop it? It feels like a euphemism for “please sit quietly in a corner until you’re ready to leave this world.” As if older people are an arrangement of dried flowers that nobody bothers to throw away because, eh, they don’t smell bad yet.

I don’t know what aging gracefully actually means. But I do understand what companies that use the phrase want us to believe it means: how to be old without being repulsive, needy, costly or pathetic. This is a false but effective marketing device. Media stories about aging gracefully, which tend to repeat the same conventional aging advice, almost invariably show an attractive, radiantly joyful older woman in mid-reverie over the state of her gracefulness. Who actually does that?

The rapidly metastasizing “cosmeceutical” industry is also now fully committed to selling us an array of “aging gracefully” pseudo-products. Such as the idiotically named Hyaluronic Acid Power Cream (which, if you read the ingredients list, includes the rather ungraceful ultraprocessed chemicals cetearyl alcohol, sodium glucongate, postassium sorbate, sodium benzoate and the industrial food thickener xantham gum).

And as long as we’re talking about empty words, a brief thought on “Power Cream.”

This phrase seems to be straight-up pandering to an aging, mostly female audience who are the main targets of the “aging gracefully” schtick. Not that there aren’t male equivalents of “Power Cream” easily found in the wild. One prime example is the phrase ostentatiously branded onto the sides of oversized pickup trucks: “Power Wagon.”

Remember back in the 90s when, in an act of unintentional Jungian self-mockery, legions of mostly younger men pasted “No Fear” decals in the rear windows of their cars? “Power Wagon” is the corporatized “No Fear” of the 2020s.

What if it said “Power Cream” instead?

2 | What I learned traveling with my 82-year-old mom

After nearly three weeks in Europe with my mom and daughter, here’s what I learned about traveling with an older parent. I could write a small book, but these are the bullet points:

• Plan your itinerary to fit your parent, not you — my mom was a gamer in almost every facet of our travels, including longer walks with a petulant right hip and also fighting through an oppressive Continental heatwave. But taking her to the Jungfraujoch in Switzerland — a glacier at “the top of Europe” — an overcrowded industrial chalet obnoxiously filled with boutiques selling high-end Swiss watches and chocolates, was a mistake. Walking much at 10,000 feet above sea level was not realistic for her (or several other people I saw staggering around looking for somewhere to sit down).

• Know what will cause a parental meltdown (and avoid it) — My mom can walk miles over cobblestones through her chronic hip pain without complaining…because she was taught, she said, not to complain. But hot weather is her kryptonite, and during the last 8 days we limited her exposure to outside activities, including restaurants, as the daily temperatures rose into the high 80s. How to keep cool is something to think about in the age of global warming when traveling with mom or dad.

• Have a plan to diffuse inevitable frustration — My mom routinely second-guessed whether I’d gotten us on the correct bus, the right train, or the proper path to wherever we were going. Annoyed, I would often answer her questions with an edge in my voice. About halfway through the trip, over beers one afternoon, we played a game where we imitated each other doing what annoyed us most about the other. My daughter joined in the fun. It was laugh-out-loud hilarious, and it was the steam valve we each need to trundle on together for another 10 days.

• Plan on riding your rollercoaster — My mom can, to her immense credit, adjust to unexpected changes, unpleasant surprises and missed opportunities better than most people of any age. But what also helped set her up for success amid the days of changing trains three times, dragging luggage through Vienna for 30 minutes and trying to cool down by fanning herself with laminated restaurant menus, is the brief talk we had before the vacation started. “Things will go wrong at some point,” I reminded her. “You’ll get exasperated and wonder why you agreed to do this. That’s part of traveling in a foreign land and culture.”

Mom, and my incredibly even-tempered, resilient daughter, were excellent travelers and companions on the road. I’m extremely grateful for their willingness to put up with me. To test your recollection of the “Love Boat” cast: imagine Julie, Gopher, Isaac and Captain Stubing all rolled into one commanding, cajoling, hyper-organized, beer-delivering and occasionally cloddish (but ultimately endearing) character.

That was me with them in Europe.

3 | “Mattering” makes a big difference

I read a lot of media articles with advice on aging. Most of them are insipid, asininely obvious or written like a pat on the head. Today, I found one that is worth sharing. It’s a first-person op-ed by a 96-year-old former professor emerita, sharply and strategically reflecting on what keeps her and those like her healthy and vigorous.

Midway through her piece, she wrote about the need for “mattering.”

“The late sociologist Morris Rosenberg coined the idea of "mattering" to describe a universal and overlooked motivation. He pointed out how critical it is to believe that we make a difference in other people's lives.”

The need — not a desire, not a duty but a need — to make a difference to other people: This struck me as such an important and necessary reminder today, given the current state of American political culture that increasingly rewards insults and acrimony, bullying and brutishness at the expense of decency.

Mattering matters — to people on either side of the equation. I don’t believe we need to know or even be acquainted with either people that matter to us or to whom we matter. But we need to actively cultivate more mattering in our culture.

4 | “We should all be patriots”

Today, July 4, is Independence Day in the United States, when Americans celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence, 249 years ago, with displays of fireworks — garish, technicolor re-enactments of the country’s violent dissociation from its British colonizer.

This year’s celebration exists in the context of extreme hurt, anger and division in this country, mostly because of people who bizarrely find purpose and reward in exploiting tension and division. The hurt and anger make the joy of celebrating today, for many folks, tough to conjure.

I’m not a flag-waver by nature, and as the first-born American in a family of war-displaced refugees who came to America speaking zero English in the 1950s, we as a family culture are simply not steeped in generations of Americana, including the powerful strain of American exceptionalism that permeates a lot of the least genuine, most manipulative forms of patriotism.

But this year, I find myself wanting to find a reason to believe how much better my country can be and should be. Not by joining a political party or personality cult that dictates to me what patriotism looks like. But rather by imagining the country I want this one to become, and by waving a flag — if only in my mind — to support that idea.

So, when I read “We should all be patriots,” a July 4 post by a really thoughtful, smart and dryly funny college professor writing on Substack under the pseudonym Hilarius Bookbinder, I thought: Yes. This is right.

Let me know what you think, of any of the above.

We should all be patriots