Crow's Feet

At 80, Gayle Greene looks back at the accretion of her fine lines, beginning in her late 20s.

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Shocking, the moment I first saw them, tiny creases at the edges of my eyes raying out and down my cheeks, playful pawpats of mortality come to scratch “old” down my face. The jolt was visceral, seared into my consciousness by a blare of horns. 

The noise dates the year—1972, the oil crisis. I lived around the corner from one of the few service stations in the city that had gas. It went on for months, that sound, horns, shouts, bellows, sirens that echoed from 96^th Street all the way to 98^th and West End Avenue, up to the tenth floor, where I stood staring into my bathroom mirror.  

Probably they’d been there awhile but I’d never looked so closely or at that time of day,  when the sun had that wicked slant. After the jolt came a sadness, as for something lost and gone forever. Then a wave of alarm, tidal—oh, shit!  Processes are taking place. Even if I can’t see them and don’t really believe in them, they are happening. And—conceptual breakthrough—if they’re happening on the outside, they’re happening on the inside, too. 

I had a strong investment in denial. I was a heavy smoker, had been for years. Denial has its uses, when you can make it work. But this was…undeniable. Those lines at the edges of my eyes spoke of time and consequence. Attention must be paid. Adjustments must be made. 

You’d think I’d have thought this through before; it’s not so difficult to grasp. But I had a strong investment in denial. I was a heavy smoker, had been for years. Denial has its uses, when you can make it work. But this was…undeniable. Those lines at the edges of my eyes spoke of time and consequence. Attention must be paid. Adjustments must be made. 

 I was 28. I’d just passed my oral exams and was about to begin a dissertation, the last hurdle to a PhD. The job market had crashed a few years before, so it felt fairly futile, and now, doubly futile: at the rate I wrote (slowly) and the rate I smoked (lots), if I didn’t quit smoking before I started writing, there’d be no point. I mean, why embark on something so hard, in hopes of a long-term payoff, when every puff was cutting the long term short? 

Gayle Greene at 28, in 1972.

The bad news about smoking had been known for decades, in spite of the tobacco companies’ vigorous efforts to conceal it. Those of us who smoked did so knowing we were shortening our lives—insofar as the young ever really do understand such things. When I was in my teens and 20s, I was immortal. I knew aging and dying were things that happened, but to other people, not me. But I’d heard my father, a surgeon, describe the smokers’ lungs he’d taken out, shriveled, dark, and dead. I’d seen his struggles: he’d stop, then start again, then stop, till finally, after years, he quit for good. 

 So there was no lying to myself about this. But still I smoked. I’d smoked since high school. I’d logged in more pack years than I’d been alive. (“Pack years,” the number of years you’ve smoked multiplied by packs a day—when I heard the term, I did the math, and sure enough, it came to a higher number than I’d had birthdays.) I smoked when I was writing, reading, teaching, sometimes lighting one off the other.  

After the jolt came a sadness, as for something lost and gone forever. Then a wave of alarm, tidal—oh, shit!  Processes are taking place. Even if I can’t see them and don’t really believe in them, they are happening. And—conceptual breakthrough—if they’re happening on the outside, they’re happening on the inside, too. 

Smoke curling from my nose made me glamorous, a cigarette in my hand gave me confidence. I seemed to feel that I, myself alone, just me, was not enough without some prop to bolster me up, fill me in. I could not imagine myself not smoking. But kicking a life-threatening habit requires a belief in a benefit beyond the immediate gratification, something that makes the sacrifice worthwhile. That kind of leap of faith was hard for me, with my go-nowhere love life and despondency about a Ph.D. getting me a job, when there were no jobs to be had. There was no future I could imagine, let alone a future I could imagine bringing about. 

There’s a story Simone de Beauvoir told about Jean Paul Sartre, who smoked sixty cigarettes a day and held forth on the pleasures of smoking. At some point his legs gave way and he had a bad fall. The doctor warned him that if he continued smoking, he’d lose his toes, his feet, maybe even his legs; if he stopped, he’d regain his health. The choice was his. He said he’d have to think it over. I get that.

“One of these days you’ll find a reason to live, then you’ll be sorry,” my mother nagged. And nagged. I was used to tuning her out, but those crow’s feet were real.  What if she was right?  So, that summer, I went back to her house in California, where there was a pool, and not telling her or anyone, I quit smoking and started swimming, huffing and puffing, humiliatingly, after only a few laps. By the end of summer, I’d worked up to half a mile. The hours I wasn’t swimming, I was eating. And Mother, who’d caught on to what I was doing, though I’d said nothing, stopped nagging and started baking. That whole summer, I lived on pound cake. I figured if ever I did come to see a point to life, fat and alive would be better than thin and dead.  

Greene in her 50s.

I returned to New York in the fall, thirty pounds heavier, not at all sure I’d be up to my life, seeing people, writing, teaching, without a cigarette in hand. But I discovered it was me doing these things, not me dragging on a cigarette that made life possible. There was a hotel across the street that had a pool, swampy and cockroach-infested, but it would do. In a year, I’d worked up to four miles. That took four hours, twice a week. My friends were marching in the streets for social justice and against the war, while I was in the basement of the Hotel Paris, swimming. It was as though I needed to get control of something primal, primordial, to find my land legs—I was starting that far back.

Aging requires many sacrifices of present pleasures for future benefit, though the benefit may be nothing more than buying time. It seems unfair, when aging cuts short whatever time you’ve bought, yet there’s no end to the pleasures it requires you to give up. Coffee was not easy; nor was sugar binging. Drinking had to go, and I did love it, the taste and tingle of it, the boldness it gave me. And I was good at it, could knock back a bottle of champagne or Baileys’ or single-malt scotch, no problem. “But I never drink alone,” I’d say—which was true. But I was rarely alone. For decades I could cite Winston Churchill,  who claimed he was taking more out of alcohol than it was taking out of him. But then I couldn’t— hangovers took the form of an all-day depression. I was on a roller coaster of lift and let-down. I had to get off to find out who I was. 

Aging requires many sacrifices of present pleasures for future benefit, though the benefit may be nothing more than buying time. It seems unfair, when aging cuts short whatever time you’ve bought, yet there’s no end to the pleasures it requires you to give up. Coffee was not easy; nor was sugar binging. Drinking had to go, and I did love it, the taste and tingle of it, the boldness it gave me.

I did not, however, summon the willpower to stay out of the sun, crow’s feet and all. It went against my every instinct to fear the sun. One summer I went out with a man from Calcutta, and I was so tanned that his friends assumed I was Indian. I’ve never understood why white skin is so prized, when there are so many ways it can go off, turning splotchy or freckly from the sun, red and spidery-veined from booze, gray or mottled with age or illness. I wanted to be brown.

“You’ll be sorry when you’re fifty,” Mother nagged about this, too. “You’ll look like a prune.”  

“When I’m 50, I won’t give a damn what I look like,” I hurled back.  

Did those words actually come out of my mouth?  Yes, they did. Fifty was unimaginable. Mother being “the wrong side of” 60 at the time (hateful expression, as though the years put us wronger and wronger), rolled her eyes: If you only knew. But whenever I was asked to consider the future, it was as though a thick dark curtain came down before my eyes. I was well into my second year of full-time teaching when the dean called and urged me not to let more time go by without signing up for a retirement plan. Retirement?  That would never happen to me. And if it did, I’d be past caring. 

Greene a few years ago.

Old age belongs to the category Sartre calls “unrealizable.” Along with death. As we age, of course, these things become less unrealizable. “If the young knew, if the old could,” goes the saying. But the young do not and the old cannot; nor can we communicate. We can try, of course. I recently told a student, “Those spike heels look great, but your knees may not thank you when you get older.” She looked at me like she wanted to kill the messenger. I know that instinct; it was that instinct that made me snarl and snap at my poor mother. Sometimes I think it does no good to tell anybody anything, not a happy thought for an educator. But, no— Mother’s warnings lodged somewhere.

In a way I’m glad I wasted no time anguishing the prospect of age, when my 70s turned out to be better than my 20s. And when I turned 50, that unimaginable age, I’d just met the man I would marry; I still had four more books in me. I cared what I looked like, and still, when I was 60; and still, at 80. 

Ashton Applewhite

urges, in This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, that young people ought to consider themselves old persons in training. Really? Practice imagining ourselves old? Probably any effort we make to imagine ourselves other than we are is a good thing, insofar as it exercises empathy. But in a way I’m glad I wasted no time anguishing the prospect of age, when my 70s turned out to be better than my 20s. And when I turned 50, that unimaginable age, I’d just met the man I would marry; I still had four more books in me. I cared what I looked like, and still, when I was 60; and still, at 80. 

So I’ll say what Mother said, “You’ll see when you get older.” And I’ll quote Florida Scott-Maxwell in The Measure of My Days: “I want to tell people who are approaching and fearing age that it can be a time of discovery. ‘Of what?’ That you must discover for yourself.”  

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You can find more from Gayle Greene at her website, Gaylegreene.org