Book Review: Mother Goose Tells the Truth About Middle Age

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Mother Goose Tells the Truth About Middle Age

Author: Sydney Altman

Date: 2008

Publisher: Ba Boom

ISBN: 978-0-9707275-3-4

Length: 66 pages

Illustrations: color cartoons by Marty Riskin

Quote: "Said Baby Boom Babies / It's time to take stock, / We're too young to get old."

Said Mother Nature and Father Time: "Hoot." Sydney Altman hooted. Here are 46 merry little ditties, each written to be sung or chanted to the tune of a classic nursery rhyme, about middle-aged people getting older. (In between the nursery rhyme parodies are some rhymes that don't fit any particular tune, but if they fit your life you'll probably find a way to sing them.)

"Have you seen the Lipo man?" a woman sitting down asks her svelte friend. And is she about to offer this friend the platter of sugar-dipped bacon, or has she already served one of those "salads" slathered with oil? A few pages later, she's frowning frumpily over the heads of her children at the ex and the pony-tailed girl in the red convertible: "He got a divorce. / He showed no remorse." But a much older-looking lady sitting between two Bright Young Things advises, "Leave your money alone / So you'll look like a crone: / Rich old women attract younger men." 

Hah. Who wants them? Maybe the gal whose bathroom is packed with books whose titles include Your Sagging Self, Is That Your Nose?,Skin: the Later Years, Luggage Under Your Eyes, and Your Body: Good Luck, who whines to the mirror, "I still have a yen / For sex now and then, / But it's young girls who make the men swoon." (She's talking to the mirror out loud, we learn on the next page, because she thinks she sees her mother in it.) A thinner woman, obviously on estrogen replacement, balance-walks on the fence around a construction site and laments, "Wherever I go / I get nary a stare." This woman's male counterpart gets told "Go watch some porn," and falls asleep watching it.

"This baby boomer plays the market," Altman introduces a balding man,"This baby boomer sells by phone," a greying man, "...But this baby boomer, / Still a child of the Sixties, / Grows weed in his geodesic dome." Which 1960s Things should we cherish and which should we bury, anyway? Altman is not overtly taking sides. "Hippity, Dippity, Rock," laments a dowager holding up an annoy-your-parents CD, "I camped out at Woodstock. / But the songs now in style / Are exceedingly vile." A fat, greying man says, "I now see things in a different light. / I vote for conservative candidates / And refuse to engage in political debates," although one of the protesters he's ignoring has a grey beard, receding hairline, and a cartoonish resemblance to baby-boomer Michael Moore.

Then there's the middle-aged man who remembers a time when pop culture was asserting that every normal woman wanted to be flirted with constantly, to the exclusion of any of that intelligent conversation that's probably always been difficult for him: "Mr. Simon was a thigh man / Now he's in despair." His blue-collar coeval  doesn't have a job to lose, so he just "Stood on the corner, / Watching the young girls go by. / When he was younger / He had sexual hunger..." It's not as if the consequences of all that commitment-phobic "liberation" Hugh Hefner used to preach were especially desirable for men: "Fifth wife sees them to their grave, / And then runs off with the money they saved," Altman observes of a perky, top-heavy widow waving across the coffin to a man with a youthful jawline and barely frosted black hair.

For most baby-boomers I observe, although we're all indisputably and definitively middle-aged, the continuum between "old" and "having been an adult long enough to get it right" is a reliable indicator of personal choices. We all eat reasonable diets, despite the industry-encouraged squabbling about whose food choices are "healthier" than whose; people who really live on junkfood, booze, and drugs do sometimes reach age 50 but are seldom ambulatory. (When you see healthy middle-aged and old people--of whom I'm one--enjoying junkfood in public, your default assumption should be that we eat more nutritious food at home. Celiacs eat nuts, chips, and chocs as an alternative to sandwiches and pastries when we have to eat on the road; active and healthy celiacs eat veg and brown rice when we can.) Walking and physical work seem more important than specific diets, of which choices may be determined by genes anyway. While people stay active, their hair turns white on its genetically programmed schedule, but they seem fit and healthy, "middle-aged" not "old." When they have to reduce activity, old age seems to catch up with them.

However, some other aspects of middle age have fallen like the rain on the virtuous and the slothful. "People, when they're fifty / Don't retire as a rule," scowls a stylish black-haired woman standing in a pile of junk cards with messages like "You'll never be young again," "How are your bones?", and "Join the Grey Army" with which AARP and Conservative50+ try to recruit supporters early. An alumna digging up school gear for the reunion can still fit into her school sweater, although it's not as baggy as it must have been when fashionable--but then she looks back through the yearbook: "I wonder who has made it big.../ I've changed my mind / Won't go at all, / I hated school." A white-haired man "read Robert Bly / And beat drums with some guy, / And felt he'd been took for a ride."

Some of these verses rhyme and scan better than others, but the intended effect is comic anyway so, if the lyrics aren't a perfect fit for the tune, that may be an extra source of chortles. All middle-aged people who like to laugh should enjoy this book.

Although the publisher's and illustrator's web site seem to be defunct, the book sold well enough when new that this web site can offer it for our minimum price: $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment, from which we'll send $1 to Altman or a charity of her choice. Four or five copies of this slim book should fit into one package.