Sam Smith – I have tried to downplay in my writing about how old I was getting to be. But it’s become increasingly an unavoidable fact and so would like to confess that in less than a month I will be 83 years old.
On one hand, this feels somewhat impressive given that I have lived longer than three generations of males in my family with the sole exception of one grandfather who doesn’t count because he was senor warden of his church and so had God on his side.
Further I have kept track of the passing of friends and others with whom I have had connections over the past decade and a half. I have lost 177 of them.
So basically, being still alive, I have little to complain about. Still, thanks to the death thing, you can find yourself mulling over the declining possibilities of the future. This, though, is nothing new. When I was a teenager I learned from my reading that a polar bear might attack you at any moment -- that is if you were living a truly interesting life. This would be tragic -- but in a literary sense a story that others would tell and weep about for years to come. It made me sad to think about it; on the other hand it would be a good story and it was, it seemed, far better and more interesting to die young by polar bear attack in the Arctic than of respectable, stultifying old age.
In a strange way, I find myself back in my teen years – often irrelevant in purpose, pondering unlikely styles of death and uncertain as to what I’m meant to be doing anyway. After all, I have exceeded the life expectancy of a white American male by about 8 years. Neither our schools nor our economy have figured out what to do with someone who does that. And my 16 year old granddaughter just got her first driver license - far more fun than wondering whether your eyes are going to be good enough to get your license renewed for the umpteenth time.
And so I do what I have done all my life. I write about it. Writing has gotten me out of more trouble than anything else I’ve ever done. Even in the worst of times it offers the comfort of an inscription on a gravestone. And in the best of times, it tells me something I hadn’t noticed until then.
There have been other things that have comforted or aided me. Playing music is the cheapest, and one of the most effective, forms of therapy there is. 54 years of marriage has been a godsend. Having two sons who turned out to be as independent as their dad is a pleasure and their children a delight.
I still feel as the wisest course now is to do what I’ve always done, which is to once again do what I’ve always done and hope it still works. Writing this piece, for example, has worked but now that it has come to its end and I have to find something else to do. Wish me well.
