Time Goes By
A lot of you think I have a good deal here because 60 Minutes uses reruns all summer and I get to go on vacation.
Well, I’m not denying I have a good deal but how would you like to spend the summer looking at pictures of yourself when you were a lot younger? It’s no fun being reminded every week that you used to be thinner and better looking. You’re sitting in your living room with friends. You come on the television screen and everyone starts laughing—not at what you’re saying but at what you look like.
For instance, in 1979 I did an essay on “Fences.” Fine, but they reran it this summer and I didn’t recognize myself.
Funny thing about age, some people are lucky. They look better than they used to. Walter Cronkite, for instance, is better looking and more distinguished looking now than he was in 1953.
Frank Sinatra is better looking at seventy-four than he was at twenty-eight.
Some people are permanently one age in our memory: Albert Einstein…Winston Churchill…Marilyn Monroe.
Some women hold up very well. Barbara Bush, the First Lady, was eighteen here. Now, she’s grey-haired and overweight and a little wrinkled but she’s more interesting looking now at sixty-five.
It’s hard to put your finger on what makes someone look old. It isn’t just grey hair and wrinkles. The whole body gradually assumes a different attitude.
Babe Ruth showed his age from the back as he said goodbye to his fans in Yankee Stadium years ago.
I’m amused by people who dye their hair or have cosmetic surgery to make themselves look younger. They don’t look any younger. They look different. They look just as old but they look as though they’ve dyed their hair and had plastic surgery.
The actress Jessica Tandy has never had anything done to herself as far as I know. She’s eighty-one. She looks her age but she looks great.
We didn’t look any different to ourselves in the mirror this morning than we did yesterday morning but it’s surprising how different all of us look from month to month and from year to year.
If I had known, eleven years ago when I did that essay on “Fences,” that it would be rerun this summer, I think I’d have dyed my hair grey so it wouldn’t have hurt so much when I watched it in July.
From Andy Rooney, Years of Minutes, pp. 163-164.
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