Act Your Age
Joe Kagle

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Recently, I celebrated my 73rd birthday in Houston with my daughter, whose birthday is one day later than mine. She is 35. I played most of that day with my 5 year old granddaughter, who will be a maturing 6 later this year. At one point my grownup daughter said to me as I played at imagination games, “Dad, do you ever act your age?”

My grand daughter, Erin, who thinks that all the world, except her 2-year old brother and a few neighborhood friends, is old and wrinkled (a sure sign of age, she tells me, as she examines my forearm) asks me: “How old are you, Grandpa?” “Ten,” was my answer, “on the inside: seven plus three!” My wife smiled and confirmed that seven plus three is ten. “And on the outside where you are wrinkled,” was Erin’s open-ended question? “On the outside, I am a little bit older.”

“How old are you on the inside?” I asked. “59,” was the snappy reply. “That is good,” I said, “you have been having troubles in kindergarten where you are not listening to your teacher and keeping your hands to yourself in the past two weeks. The inside YOU can control that just as the outside ME controls listening to those around me.”

Again, my wife shook her head in agreement.

Actually, since I was born in 1932, the year of the monkey, I am without age. The character of Monkey in Chinese mythology is the mischievous imp who defies the gods, ate the “fruit of immortality” from the garden of the gods which he was tending for them (the fruit that Adam and Eve missed when they ate the “fruit of knowledge”), lives with his friends under the magic waterfall, and can only be controlled by a band around his head which the gods tighten when he acts up and battles them. He has boots that jump around the world (probably the prototype for Puss-n-Boots in the West), a stick that can he can make as large as he needs to fight the demons (the “bad guys”) of the Buddhist underworld, and he can take hairs from behind his ear, bite them into small bits and they become his army of fellow monkeys to help in his campaigns against his foes. Monkey is Prometheus, Mickey Moose, Superman and the child in Everyman, all rolled into one. Monkey is “the ME” on the inside, a perpetual Peter Pan of ten. I have two small statues of Monkey from Taiwanese temples, where he is given a place beside Buddha and the lesser gods, which I keep close to my side of the bed so that I see them the first thing when I awake.

Have you noticed so-called grown men when they make a hole in one or witnessed them making a hand in poker on the last card or see them attending a game of their super-favorite professional football team? What age do they act? Have you noticed US Senators when they play at conservative and liberal or the Republican and Democrat game? They act like children in a playground fight, drawing lines in the sand with their toes to mark their pre-established territory?

Sometimes, when I act as the “inside ten-year old” instead of the 73 year-old grandfather with “wrinkly skin”, I am just doing what I am told. I act my age.

I remember in history, during some of the wars between Athens and Sparta, our Civil War and World War I, which I was required to read about in college, the participants would stop the war at one point and administer to the wounded in the field and bury their dead. It was the mature, civilized age that they were acting, not the barbarian, spoiled, child-like one whose only cry was “Mine. Mine. Mine. Kill. Kill. Kill!” As someone growing up in Pittsburgh’s inner city, I was taught to open doors for older people and women. I thought that it was acting my age to do this and called anyone older than me, “Mr. or Mrs. Last Name (never using a first name).”

As an older artist (on the outside) and an child-like small boy (on the inside), I make sure that when I need maturity to see many points of view, I use one of my older personalities, and when I need to see the potential of a person or situation, I use the wonder that I find in the eyes of the ten-year old inside me. Freud said it about his research, “I am only trying to find man’s inner core, his deepest dimension.” Freud saw that man was like a tree with layers around his core of the child. Most of us do that. I just know it and have fun with it. I act my age.

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