How a good day looks to a curmudgeonness

This month, I turn 59. Technically that’s still considered middle-aged but I feel older than time. The one good thing about it is that I’m one year closer to laying claim to the curmudgeonhood I never realized I’d been gunning for my whole life. Age is coming close enough I can see the silvery-white of its hair roots because, dammit, those hair roots are mine.

I’ve felt old since at least 20, probably because 21 meant legal, can’t-get-out-of-it adulthood while anything after 25 or 30 seemed unimaginably Jurassic. Had I lived in nineteenth rather than the early twenty-first century, my perception of what constituted the beginning stages of decrepitude would have been more accurate than not: at that time, life expectancy in the U.S. and Europe was only around 40. From where I stand now, the decade of the great 4-0 strikes me as fabulously juvenile, the beginning of everything, minus cribs, playpens and parents. You’re on your own, baby: ready or not, here comes life.

Everything I’ve read online assures me I’ve got until at least 65 until society is allowed to call me old. However temporary, that’s a comfort and I’ll take it in lieu of the plastic surgery that’s turned 66-year-old pop star Madonna into an bona fide Area 51 alien. But some people out there insist on pushing boundaries and getting on my one last nerve, like that nice young hairdresser at the local Great Cuts. I love the cute pixie-punk haircuts she gives me; but the last few times I’ve seen her, she’s also insisted on giving me a senior discount. Because I’m still lucid enough to know that maintaining manners is desirable in a public place, I smile and keep my grumbling—along with the extra five bucks—to myself.

Yes, I like saving money. Discounts are, in fact, the great promise of the cheerful red AARP card I carried for five years and never used. Now that I’ve dispensed with membership, I have just this to say: keep your discounts to Denny’s, Joe’s Crab Shack and other havens of the white-haired and infirm. Don’t age me into oblivion because I’m quite able to do that for myself, with a little help from the Neptune Society. I don’t know where they got my name; the AARP mailing list is a key suspect. For the last few years, the friendly people at Neptune have been sending me letters detailing the benefits of cremation when I didn’t even fucking ask.

I suppose I can’t be too hard on AARP. They’ve been lobbying Congress for reforms to help older Americans since the 1960s, so yes, they mean well. It was their monthly magazine that really sent me over the edge (the ugly tote bags they sent with each new subscription didn’t help). Without fail, AARP magazine covers featured fit, good-looking individuals with newly graying hair, airbrushed for maximum presentability. Now to be fair, I’ve been known to use a filter or two on my own pictures. But dammit, where were all the truly old people, the ones with walkers, canes and oxygen machines who are on more meds than they can remember? I’m talking the real real here, not the still-in-middle age people like me. Brooke Shields and George Clooney don’t count.

The companions every curmudgeonness needs

Rather than call myself a curmudgeon, though, I’ve opted on another word: curmudgeonness. It doesn’t exist in any dictionary that I know of which makes it even more delightfully contrarian. A curmudgeon is that old man down the street whose home is more lair than castle. You know the one: the crusty cuss who yells at people to get off his damn lawn and refuses to give out candy on Halloween. From what I’ve been able to gather, the proper term for someone like me who identifies (more or less, depending on the day of the week) as female, is termagant. Since I don’t consider myself a nag, though, curmudgeon is a better fit, especially when tamed and claimed with the feminizing -ess ending.

I do like one of the possible etymologies of termagant, though, which the Google English dictionary suggests is a hybrid word that came from the merging of two Latin ones: tri (three) and vagant (wandering). The GED further speculates that these root words seem to refer to the idea of the moon wandering between heaven, earth and hell under the names of three Classical goddesses associated with it: Selene, Artemis and Persephone. That’s all lovely and poetic until you start wondering what the hell wandering moons have to do with being an unpleasant female. Unless it has to do with ancient taboos against menstruation and Hippocrates’ claim women were the weaker, more hysterical sex because their wombs were prone to wandering. But misogyny is a sneaky thing and anything vaguely associated with female are targets for negative cultural reframings.

All this is to say that etymologists aren’t sure where termagant came from, any more than they know how curmudgeon—which some believe may partly derive from the Middle English “cur” (dog) came into usage. What is known is that termagant was once a gender neutral term. Linguistic evidence shows that before the 16th century, termagant was used to describe overbearing males. Of course, that doesn’t satisfy me. My dislike of the world termagant has nothing much to do with anything except my own quirks. The word reminds me of “termite,” that nasty little insect with a voracious appetite for wood. Anything that sees my house as its next meal gets no respect from me. I still prefer the anti-social grump down the street who yells at kids and delivery people. At least he’s mostly harmless when left alone in his native habitat.

But can you blame curmudgeons—whatever their gender—for how they are? They’ve seen it all so nothing surprises them anymore. They’re too old to really care what anyone thinks of them or their habits. Curmudgeons may be prisoners of bodies that have seen better days. But they’ve lived through and survived enough that they can say and do what they want. Better still, curmudgeons get their very own holiday on January 29, which happens to be the birthday of W.C. Fields, the great Hollywood Gold Age comedian who allegedly hated dogs and babies. He did occasionally own a canine, enjoyed entertaining his friends’ children and doted on his first grandson. But that’s beside the point. Like all good grumps, he was cynical and proud and not afraid to show the world who he was. “A man’s got to believe in something,” he once quipped. “I believe I’ll have another drink.”