Another Circle Around the Sun

Did Emerson really say this? If he didn't, he should  have.

Once upon a time there was a five-year-old boy who spent summers on his grandparents’ farm. When he got older, he’d help with chores, but when he was young, he had the whole day to toss a rubber ball against the shed wall and pretend to be a baseball player. When he got tired on that activity he’d lie in the grass and imagine shapes in the clouds. Once he asked his grandma how old he’d be in the year 2000 and she told him he’d be close to 50. He returned to lying on the grass to contemplate being 50, but he couldn’t. He concluded that no one was actually that old.

A fairy tale? Nope. I was that little boy and when 2000 came around it seemed unfathomable that my grandparents had been dead for many years and I actually had only a few years until I reached the half century mark. I’ve heard it said that time speeds up as one gets older. Intellectually I know that’s not true. A day is still 24 hours and it still takes 365 ¼ of them to add up to a year. Yet, before I knew it, I was 60, then 70. I remember turning 40 because I was a high school teacher monitoring a study hall, a task akin to telling dogs not to chase squirrels.  A funny, delightful 8^th grade sprite named Julie bounded up to my desk and asked me if I knew that Paul McCartney “was in a band before Wings.” Tremulously I asked, “Do you mean The Beatles?” Her answer stunned me: “Yeah, that’s the one. Ever hear of them?” I was gobsmacked and told her to return to her seat, that I was depressed and would explain the next day, but I just couldn’t that moment. I felt ancient.

That’s the only reason I can remember 40, but if you ask me what happened on other birthdays, things get hazy. I recall thinking of my grandma at 50, but I haven’t the slightest idea about 60 or 70. Those blanks have nothing to do with being older per se–though it does freak me out to think of myself as a bona fide “senior citizen”–it’s that I’ve reached that awkward time in which my mental outlook is out of whack with my body’s age. I see myself as 28, until I try to grab a word or a name that’s not perched on the tip of my tongue, lift something heavier than a baguette, or try to keep pace with my speed-walking wife. I even took a memory test and pretty much aced verbal recall. (I was hopeless with shapes and drawing, but that didn’t faze me as I was always a person you’d never trust with a building or art project.) For the most part, all the knowledge I’ve acquired is still somewhere in my brain, though it takes me longer to retrieve things. A common phrase I use these days is, “I’ll think of the answer five minutes into my drive home,” and it’s usually the case.

But I can’t pretend that my body hasn’t changed. I try not to whinge about that as there are lots of people who have it worse than I–friends with cancer, heart problems, or Parkinson’s, those who’ve lost spouses, or have died. Another of my running jokes is that I awake each morning and check my pulse to make sure I’m still here. I try my best to deny it, but the reality is that my future is behind me. Another reality is that the 70s often hurt. I have a terrible back that aches all the time unless I’m too distracted to cry “ouch!” Compacted discs have robbed me of over two inches of height and I have neuropathy in my right leg resultant of having had only a partially successful laminectomy. Once I tripped over a tree root and smacked face down on the sidewalk with blood coming from my mouth. I feared I would lose my front teeth, though luckily, I had only a condition I had never heard of: sprained teeth. I also had a brain bleed a decade ago that, luckily again, was not an aneurysm or stroke. But enough with the organ recital. Again, many people have suffered more. I can’t recover my 28-year-old body, but I can be grateful for each new day.

Today is another birthday. It doesn’t end in five or zero, so it’s not a birthday that gets labeled “a Big One.” I’ll have my free Herrell’s sundae, a meal of my choice, and a slice of my favorite birthday dessert: carrot cake. Please hold the jokes that begin, “Wow! That’s a lot of sugar for an old dude like you.” Hold them because the other thing that will happen today is that many of you will send me fond birthday wishes. The best thing of being in my 70s is that I have collected a lot of friends, former students who still say in touch, and professional associates who like me. And that, my friends, is the best birthday gift anyone my age could ever wish to have.

Peace,

Rob