Renata Singer - Older and Bolder: Life after 60

Renata Singer is a writer who conceived the idea of Older & Bolder when she realised how much she loved talking to old people. Her other books include True Stories from the Land of Divorce, Goodbye and Hello (on the experience of emigration) and a novel, The Front of the Family. With her husband, the philosopher Peter Singer, she co-edited The Moral of the Story: Ethics Through Literature.

Renata likes to get things done. After working with disadvantaged women in New York, she co-founded Fitted for Work, the Australian non-profit that helps women back into the workforce. In earlier lives she was a high school teacher, a community worker, a publications officer for Oxfam Australia and a member of the Workcare Appeals Tribunal.

Renata and Peter have three children and four grandchildren. They divide their time between New York and Melbourne.

Renata Singer

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

1115 Argyle Place South, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

www.mup.com.au

First published 2015

Text Renata Singer, 2015

Design and typography Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2015

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Cover design by Nada Backovic

Typeset by Typeskill

Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Singer, Renata, author.

Older and bolder: life after sixty/Renata Singer.

9780522865950 (paperback)

9780522865967 (ebook)

Older peopleLife skills guides.

Older womenPsychology.

646.79

It all started when I fell in love. With Bel Kaufman. And it was love at first sight. Heres what I wrote in my notebook on that fateful day in September 2011:

Only my sense of duty brings me to the Grand Opening of the new Workmens Circle Building in New York City, where I fidget through three management speaks about the passion for renewal, restructure, and being true to our mission. Yawn!

And then Bel Kaufman is introduced. Completely unexpected. The legendary, the one and only. Ive never seen her in real life before. Of course I know who she isthe granddaughter of the famous Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, and author of the 1965 bestseller, Up the Down Staircase, about an idealistic young teachers first year in the New York City Public School system.

Were told shes 100 years oldit cant be true. She looks fantastic: hair in an elegant upsweep of curls, enormous glamorous sunglasses, a red scarf draped over her shoulder. Even better, shes smart, funny, charming. Last year she taught a course at her alma mater, Hunter College, on Jewish humour. What a thrill, she says, in these days of education cuts to be offered a college teaching job at the age of 100.

Speaking without notes for twenty minutesyes, she has a stick to balance on her red stilettos but hey shes 100she tells stories about her famous grandfather. By his wish he is buried among the workers and poor folk. At one stage she momentarily loses her thread and quips, I would never have forgotten what I wanted to say at ninety-nine.

She loves being old, she says, because, All my life I had to do what I had to dolike we all did. To study, to work, to raise children. And now I dont have to do anything. Its liberating. Whenever anyone asks me to do something I dont want to do I say, No thank you, and when they ask Why? I answer, Im 100 years old. Its the most marvellous excuse.

Were completely in her powerand right there in the front row is her husband looking at her adoringly. He may be a mite youngersay early to mid nineties.

I love her. Now that I have such a role model I want to live to be 100.

Isnt it always a surprise when love strikes? It was unexpected and not planned but when I look back on it I could have predicted it. I wolfed down Up the Down Staircase when I first read it, hoping the heroine would make it through that school year as I was wondering if Id make it through mine. Her experiences mirrored my struggles teaching at Williamstown Technical School, where the boys were punished for walking the wrong way down the oneway corridors.

Lovers often have similar backgrounds and Bel, like me, is Jewish from Eastern Europe, although shes from the Ukraine and Im from Poland. Both of us arrived in our new countries unable to speak a word of English. Her first languages were Russian and Yiddish and mine Polish and Yiddish. My mother, if shed lived as long, would have looked like Bel, although she would not have had the confidence to wear those giant Emilio Pucci sunglasses.

Im still in love with Bel, even though Ive never met her and now never will. She died in July 2014 at the age of 103 at home in Manhattan. The last time I saw her, on stage at the celebration of folk singer Theodore Bikels ninetieth birthday in 2013, she was wearing flat shoes and had to be helped onstage. But she gave a wonderfully warm and witty speech, and still no notes.

If I had seen Bel a few years earlier, I probably wouldnt have fallen for her so hard. I was ready and open to her message because a week after I turned sixty my first grandchild was born. Suddenly I wanted to live long enough to see him grow up, to see what sort of a person hell become. With this unexpected surge of desire to become a nonagenarian, I began to imagine his wedding, his graduationwhy not be optimistic when the kids still a few months oldand becoming a great grandmother. Hey, wait a minute, hadnt I just become a grandmother?

Although I now wanted to get old, before Bel Kaufman my view of ageing was like most peoples. Well creak more and move less as our bodies and brains deteriorate and our horizons shrink. Well get rigid and crabby and people will not want to be around us. Our politics will become more conservative as we resent the young who are pushing us out. And so on But Bel said, Retirement means death. I will never retire from life while Im alive. At 102 she loved to dance the Argentinian tango, told jokes and still felt sexy.

Sensitised and awakened by Bel, I find the media is also on my wavelength. In New York, Eva Zeisel marked the occasion of her 105th birthday with publication of A Soviet Prison Memoir. Portrait photographer Editta Sherman at age ninety-nine had a Thanksgiving Day parade viewing party for more than forty members of her family, including great-great grandchildren at her Central Park South apartment. Tayo Shibata in Japan published her first collection of poetry at ninety-nine. It sold over 1.5 million copies.

The ABC/Flickchicks documentary, The 100+ Club, features Australian women chasing their dreams in the second century of their lives. For 103-year-old Olive Webber, her nineties were the happiest years of her life. And Ruth Frith, 102, flies off to Perth to compete in the Masters Athletics Championships. Although I wasnt consciously looking for role models about how to live, I lapped up all their stories. What most impressed me was that they took up new challenges late in life. Ruth only began competing in athletics at seventy-four and Olive started singing lessons at eighty-nine. Change is not just for the young, you can do something new at any age.