An elder contemplates the treasure beneath the tarnish.
There are several antique stores on Piedmont Avenue. Some of them I would designate as “shlock” establishments, but such places often conceal a worthy piece of merchandise to a practiced and sensitive eye, one that can look past dust or faded color or even grime to post the genuine article. In the smarter establishments, the antiques are brushed and polished and handsomely presented, and customers, or clients, as the case may be, handle them with care. Age has something to declare—a style, a time, a history, a life.
My favorite store on Piedmont is Black Swan Books. Books of all sizes and vintages, some of them out of print, some of them first editions, all of them somehow exotic, catering to a variety of taste and nostalgia, are on display among really interesting tchotchkes—Christmas trees made of glass, for example. The proprietor of the store is a solid lady and solid citizen of Piedmont Avenue. She knows her clientele and respects their tastes. They like old things but they want to live with them, not put them away in a glass cabinet or on a shelf that says, “Handle with Care.” She does not cringe, when I enter her space with my walker, lest I should mishandle an object or drop something or suffer a fall myself.
I don’t mind being handled with care, nor do I mind that I dwell in a retirement community. Nor do I mind being an ancestor to the kids from a local school who come to sit with me and attempt to interview me, one of the ancients. But I do mind being shlock once I move outside my shelter. Largely it is the fault of the pavement on Piedmont Avenue. It is not fit for human ambulation. Thus, I am in the way of baby carriages, working mothers escorting the kids to school, journeymen on their way to trucks, paramedics on their way to ambulances, people on their way to lattes. Not that anyone pushes me aside. Some just walk around me, some stop to let me pass. Some even smile. The ones who give me the shlock treatment are those who refuse to see me. They don’t want to look. “This is not going to happen to me,” is written all over their haunted faces. Or else they look ahead to traffic lights or the thin air, or they study the pavement.
Perhaps I tell them what life is going to be like when their own joints start to buckle, and the pavement gets really uptight. Perhaps they are wondering about their parents. Perhaps nothing, if their denial is absolute. But here’s the thing. Shlock doesn’t have to be handled with care. Antiques do. Antiques break, and there is nothing like seeing or hearing a real antique hit the floor. So, when I am not being treated like detritus, everyone appears to be afraid I am going to hit the floor and break. Really, it would ask too much on Piedmont Avenue for people to come pick up my pieces, although ambulances of several sizes and shapes are everywhere in sight. Paramedics need their coffee breaks, too.
So, this is what I do. I climb Monte Vista hill instead, where the pavement is just as treacherous, but people are not terribly in a hurry to make it to their nearest watering hole. On the hill, people are very nice. They walk around me with care. They stop. They look at me. They say, “Good morning.” They have a sense that history is walking, that I have something to teach.
This is my lesson. People who don’t want Granny to die never ask Granny herself how much she likes hanging on, not being neat and polished and shining like an antique, unless the family is coming to visit. Or whether Granny or Grandpa, who is in even worse shape than Granny, likes being dragged around in a wheelchair on Piedmont Avenue. Or any other place. Taking care of Granny is becoming an industry. Nursing schools have waiting lists. Physical therapists are in demand, not only for sports injuries. But even if we establish universal health care, the real pain of being a human antique is that we are not attractive enough to be treasured or put on display like Jeremy Bentham, who, mummified, may still be sitting in the lobby of the London School of Economics.
No, Sarah, there are no death panels. Many oldies would welcome a chance to die in dignity and not spend their last months in a state of shlock, waiting for the family to turn up now and again. But lack of dignity stalks us as soon as we start to shuffle or move like snails. It may even be that the usual blandness or blindness that hovers around us old folks has nothing to do with age. It may be just “the apparent collapse of civility in all areas of our dealings with strangers,” as Lynne Truss has it in Talk to the Hand. But nothing is as strange as an antique, as a human one. Old is old, baby.
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A resident of Oakland’s Piedmont Gardens, Flossie Lewis uses a walker to investigate the scene. She taught English at U.C. Berkeley, and at Lincoln and Lowell high schools in San Francisco. In her 70s, she went back to school and earned a Ph.D. in English.
