Two years ago, filling out my passport renewal application, likely for the last time, I stumbled on my height. I’ve been getting shorter in the last twenty years – since my back surgery, kyphoplasty – and I hate that. I wasn’t tall enough to begin with. When a nurse or PA is taking my medical history and asks my height, should I claim the 5’8 ¾” that I maxed out at or guess lower? 5’7”? I hate that.
I go to hair color on the passport application and write “brown.” I have to laugh, cross out “brown” and write “gray.” Still laughing, I tell Dee the story, worrying that my cross out may delay the renewal. Dee laughs too. “You better go back and cross out 'gray.' White,” she says.
I have a full head of hair. My mom’s genes. She had no hair loss. Her beloved older brother died in his 90’s with a full head of hair. I’m grateful for those hair genes. My father was balding before I met him. His dark hair exists only in photos from overseas, but even then, his hairline was creeping up.
I noticed my hair graying around the temples for the first time as the millennium approached. I was managing outpatient programs at the new Brooklyn Children’s Hospital, the first state children’s hospital in Brooklyn, and frequently joined the treatment team in meeting with the parents of a child who wasn’t doing well. I was engaged in real clinical work again after a seven-year hiatus at the Staten Island Family Court Clinic during which time I’d plunged into Zen practice. I had softened. I was less judgmental, more compassionate. Parents were taking in what I said differently, were hearing me. Was it something that one of the parents said that triggered my awareness? Yes, Zen was changing me, but I was also graying. Parents were looking at me now as something of an elder, a grandparent perhaps.
What a contrast from my earliest experience working with parents. I was 25 years old, in my first job in psychiatry, at the Brookdale Community Mental Health Center. The Center had opened only the year before, and I was the only clinician on the team who was trained in group work. So, I got the groups, even the mothers’ group. What did I know? What did I have to offer? I listened, and I’ve been retelling a story which one of the mother’s told ever since, the story of her first birthing. She’d been to her older sister’s house for dinner and had overeaten. She’d eaten a whole salami. Within a few hours, her stomach pain was excruciating; she was cramping. It was so bad that she went to the ER. The next thing she knew she was on a gurney being wheeled down a long hall and then she was in a room with very bright lights, and she knew it was an operating room. “No, no,” she screamed. “Don’t cut me. You don’t have to cut it out. I’ll vomit up the salami. Please.” The next thing she remembered she was holding her son. She hadn’t known she was pregnant. What did I have to offer? I would laugh when I told the story. “What was I doing there?”
And I keep getting grayer, whiter, but it was not until ten years ago that I realized I was looking older. Shaving in the morning, it seemed that more and more frequently my father was looking back at me from the mirror. I had his face, even with my uncle’s hair, and I was looking older and grayer. I was trying to raise the money to expand our school facilities – my goal was to raise $3 million from my personal network – when it occurred to me that potential donors wanted to believe that I would see the expansion through to completion and not retire any minute. At the time, I felt that retirement was five to ten years in the future. I should look the part. I let the fancy hairdresser who was doing Dee’s hair and Morri’s as well as mine dye my hair. I did look younger. Would I have ever gone gray – white, actually – had it not been for Covid? Who knows? I was working from home. We weren’t going to restaurants. I certainly wasn’t going out to get my hair done. Morri cut my hair at home, and I went gray. White.
There’s still a tiny bit of brown left in my beard, and I am reminded of a Yiddish joke from The World of Sholem Aleichem which opened off-Broadway in 1953. It was the high point of my Jewish education, three one act plays, two based on stories by Sholem Aleichem and one by I.L. Peretz. A young man asks the rabbi, “Why does the hair on a man’s head go gray before his beard?” And the rabbi answers, “Because the hair on a man’s head is twenty years old than the hair on his chin.” I look at my beard in the morning and I wonder if I will live long enough for it to go completely gray. White.
My journey to elderhood began that day at Brooklyn Children’s when I first appreciated my gray hairs. When a few months later I retired for the first time, the future stretched ahead. Morri was only a year and a half old. I needed me to work until she finished college, another 20 years, and, having already done 20 years with the State, there was no way I could do 20 more. Besides, I wanted to see where the peacemaker path would take me. I was heading out on a new adventure while many of my peers were going fishing or going to the track. I was conscious of difference, aware of my age.
As we built our charter school network – with the exception of our trustee meetings – I was always the oldest person in the room. How much older? When one of our rising leaders was honored at an annual breakfast celebration of the Staten Island Not-for-Profit Association, sitting at the table with her and her family, my peers were her grandparents.
Putting together the grant application for our first visiting Arabic teacher, I looked at the resume of the teacher who would serve as a mentor for our Egyptian guest. I was surprised to see that she graduated from Sacred Heart University where I’d taught for two years. Did she know any of my former colleagues from the Sociology Department? Then I checked the dates. Our teacher hadn’t yet been born when I taught at Sacred Heart.
As we built our charter network, I came to realize – although I wouldn’t have called it by this name – that my job was to “elder” the young people on our team as they took on leadership roles. I wasn’t telling them what do; I was telling them stories. When I first noticed this, I was embarrassed. Was I getting senile? Was I rambling? Was I talking too much? It’s taken me a while to embrace my elderhood, but now, retired for the second time almost three years, maybe I’m beginning finally to settle into it.
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