The Penultimate Frontier
Silvia A. Brandon Pérez


Modern culture has erected frontiers which separate the in from the hopelessly out. These include, of course, financial status, skin color, gender, and physical appearance. But the penultimate frontier is that of age.

When I was a child, living in La Habana, I would ask Abuelo Gerardo, my father's father, when he was finally going to be old. Every time I asked, he would respond, "In ten years." I remember asking him in his sixties and again in his seventies... Each time, the onset of old age would be ten years in the future.

Abuelo Gerardo was still active, both physically and mentally, through his eighties. In La Habana, he was the official translator for the Swiss Embassy, and oversaw the translation of documents from the Spanish to English, French, Italian... It never occurred to him that he could not perform his job because he was "old." He had married Abuela Inés when she was 18 and he was 36, and still wrote her poems until he died in his mid-80's. He taught me to play chess and Scrabble (he cheated in several languages...) He taught me to make mayonnaise with a fork (I am lazy, I use a food processor) -- He taught me to love words, palabras, paroles...

Now that I am 54, which he would have considered infancy, I have noticed that I am becoming invisible. In the larger society in which I live, women in their fifties cease to be important, unless they are very wealthy or very famous. And even for the famous, such as movie stars, roles are quite simply less available when you have entered that fifth decade.

I come from a longevous family. Abuela Pura, one of my maternal great-grandmothers, lived to the age of 106, and would frequently clean her kitchen floors with a hard brush, in her nineties... Abuelita Adela, one of my paternal greatgrandmothers, died peacefully at the age of 99, her faculties intact, still reciting lines from favorite poems with perfect memory.

I had the wonderful opportunity of listening to Don Pablo Casals lead the orchestra for the Casals Festival when he was 96 years old. He was led to the podium on a cane, a cape over his shoulders, and he was given a chair to conduct. When his first violinist, Alexander Schneider, had taken his seat with wife Marica, age 36, Don Pablo threw off cane and cape, and then got rid of his chair. Before our eyes he grew in stature, and became years younger. He proceeded to conduct Beethoven's Seventh in such a way that orchestra and conductor seemed a seamless being from another realm. The end of the concert brought repeated standing ovations; the audience, myself included, was so moved that men and women were sobbing...

This, then, is what we need to remember. Age is just one factor, and an insignificant one at that. There is an old Spanish saying, "Más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo," which translates more or less to: "The devil knows more not because he is the devil but because of his age."

As our baby boomer generation grows into that penultimate frontier, let us do so proudly and with verve. We have nothing to lose but our dependence on that scourge of modern life, the belief that only young is beautiful.