By John Rodden.
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done….
Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
…for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die….
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses
Not to yield? Well, Lord Alfred, maybe you and Ulysses can stay constantly on the go, but I say: “Yield already! For heaven’s sakes, yield!”
As I ride along, I find that I’ve certainly been heeding that big red triangle in my recent travels. Good thing too, since the old vehicle does not pull out so well anymore into ongoing traffic. And I’m also well aware I’ve slowed down quite a bit as the dial approached “65”—and will likely soon be hitting the brakes even harder.
So odd! It seemed as if, just the other day, I was cruising along, with a full tank at cheap Texas gas prices, zipping in and out of heavy traffic with nary a thought of mortality.
Not any longer. Now I’m hearing the mortality ode all the time. No doubt I’ve been influenced by the fact that quite a few fellow roadsters around me, some of them good friends, got pulled over, or suddenly took the off-ramp somewhere not far back—and haven’t been sighted on the road recently. The Covid pandemic, which has claimed seventeen (!) family members and friends of mine, has also turned up the volume of the mortality ode.
Sixty-five! Impossible as it seems to medical science, the big kid has a lot of wrinkles and is no longer quite the Golden Boy of summers past. I hallucinate the headline:
Eternal Lad Turns 65!
Medical Science Gasps in Awe!
For all the talk about 60 as the new 40, there are days when I shake my fist like Ahab and croak my blasphemies at the New Age Gods (or Goddesses?): “Stop fiddling with the numbers! 65 IS 65!!”
I am especially prone to that methinks-the-professor-doth-protest-too-much fist-shaking when I venture near my local college campus. Nothing is more guaranteed to remind me of my advancing years than kids flinging Frisbees that bounce off my forehead, or pumping iron in front of a ten-foot mirror as I keep my back to it and try in vain to touch my toes. Wonderful as it is to be around the youth of today, the sight does remind me that my sluggish reflexes and sagging muscles are poorly suited to the playground. Whenever I make a cultural or historical reference that elicits a blank stare of incomprehension or uninterest (“Walter Cronkite?! Who’s that?!”), my inner billboard starts flashing:
“Get a grip, old man! The distance between you and them is the same as that between your undergraduate self and the oldsters who rattled on about the pre-Crash days—the Crash! Not 2008, but 1929!! The Great Depression, for God’s sake! For the kids of today, your formative years are as remote as Scott Fitzgerald, the flappers, and the Jazz Age!”
And what about all of my juniors who are running the country? Of course, for years I’ve thought of anyone younger than me as both a sprightly youth and an astonishing overachiever. My capacity to sustain that myth has waned in recent years. Once upon a time it was a distinct insult to my sangfroid that a youngster like Barack Obama seized the gold ring in his early 40s, fully a decade younger than me at the time. Now I am accustomed to the “kids” (such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) who run the country. Still, my ego feels much more comfortable when aging leaders like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Donald Trump rule the roost.
Sixty-Five! Such a strange number! Would anyone really pay it much attention if it hadn’t been declared a milestone decades ago—back when there was just a New Deal and no talk of a Green New Deal? During the prehistoric era of the 1930s (“Were you born when Social Security started?” a student once asked me), the expectation was that very few people would last on the road much past “65,” making it a “safe” retirement age for a government pension plan. Typical of the government, little did its faux futurologists realize, with their ever-cloudy crystal balls, that the system would be approaching bankruptcy long before a century had gone by.
Of course, “65” hardly signifies retirement anymore, now that everyone is expected to work another two or three years anyway—and can’t hope to live on its payouts, so that many people don’t retire until their seventies. Or later. Or never. And of course, the calculations are that the younger generation will be paying into SSN well into their eighties. Will medical science—so miraculous at increasing average life spans—keep pace with improving human health spans? Warning: the current average healthspan among American men is… [Gasp!] 66!! That is, it’s equivalent to the age of eligibility to receive Medicare!
Wow! 66! —13 years less than the male lifespan of 79. Gulp! That’s a big difference.
The idea that one is hobbling along among the walking wounded, and slouching towards “retirement” at 65 (or is it 67 3/4, in my case?) in something less than half-decent shape (or worse, indecent shape), is scarcely considered by the visionaries of Cockaigne, even though the actuarial professionals are well aware of the ticking time bombs inside me. I reflect on friends who punched out long before the age of 65—including of course, one of the scribblers to whom I have devoted many a midnight lucubration, George Orwell, who died at the age of 46 of pulmonary tuberculosis (and, given both his long-standing T.B. and other ailments, was never in any better than indecent shape throughout the previous decade either).
I am finding that I have trouble keeping up with the times, not only with the digital revolution, but also with some changes in social practices. I recently attended the wedding of a charming younger relative, and not only were the vows written by the bride and groom themselves, and the lady in charge of officiating the ceremony a proud holder of an Internet license, but the entire event occurred on a golf course, though the ushers took care to place our lawn chairs outside the putting green. I wondered what her grandfather, if he were alive today, would have said about such things. He was one of those old Irish Catholics who still believed in church weddings and the sacrament of matrimony.
And what about the technological revolution, quite apart from the social revolution? Am I still trying to keep up? I confess that my un-with-it-ness does concern me, because I realize that, even now, I have trouble uploading or downloading, and that I sigh in despair when I realize that I must go to a website and “navigate” with an endless series of clicking and scrolling—which becomes a challenge greater than Ulysses weaving his way between Scylla and Charybdis.
I have (reluctantly) Zoomed into the twenty-first century—and I concede that, like it or not, the virtual is the reality. Somewhere in his journals, John Henry Newman remarks on the idea that he will turn 70 in 1871—more than 150 years ago! —represents “a ridiculously far-off date.”
I have long felt that way about “turning 65” in 2021. I can recall as a high school or college student, just beginning with my little summer jobs and depositing a few dollars in a bank account when I was earning $1.50 per hour at Arby’s, in 1973.
“Just think!” I’d say, looking proudly at my pay stub—with perhaps $9.66 withheld that week for “social security taxes”—“in a half-century I will be getting all this money back in Social Security.”
Speaking of Social Security, do I worry about retirement and having enough money to live on? Having lived as a freelancer, a scholar gypsy for more than three decades now, I can confidently report that life comparable to a penurious graduate student has left me with few anxieties about the future on that score, with the exception of a sudden health breakdown that would probably exceed my resources.
Still, what a blessing it has been to have simply acknowledged the bizarre fact that my material and physical needs are quite modest, and yet my intellectual and spiritual needs are extravagant and even outrageous. Having lived my entire life among undergraduates in a quasi-dormitory situation (shared bathroom, no kitchen) for as long as I can remember, my fixed costs are low. So I can shift my attention to my real needs, and at least begin to satisfy them by a combination of literary activities and personal friendships that have enriched my life beyond measure.
Little did I imagine, when I departed from the academy in my early 30s, that I would never return and would have instead made a go of things as an independent writer.
But there you have it: Lifeball is a game whose rules you never figure out. As I look back from the hilltop of 65 down the winding decades-long footpath at that timorous thirtysomething, I can readily admit to some less-than-ideal trade-offs. But overwhelmingly what I feel toward that boy of 35 is gratitude. Krapp’s Last Tape this is not.
At 65 I feel grateful to him for making the leap. I don’t know that I’d have the same courage—or was it innocence? —to do the same. Whatever the case, I have no big regrets about stepping away from the academy. Yes, just a large step that separated the wheat from the chaff—all my beloved friends and dearest colleagues and former students retained, and indeed those relationships were enriched by the newly available time and energy. And all the grand-standing meetings and petty politics relinquished, at the (mere!) cost of a regular income and health insurance.
Whether rational or rationalized, I remain forever grateful that my junior self escaped the golden handcuffs just in time. Reflecting still further on the timing of it all, I rather doubt that I would have had the strength of purpose, not to mention the self-trust, to have made the leap if I’d hesitated and waited another ten or fifteen years in the name of “security.” After having become quite accustomed to material comforts far “in excess” of my graduate student minimalism, I would probably have made my peace with the beneficent sinecure that a tenured existence in academe vouchsafed me.
“Old age hath yet his honour and his toil,” proclaims Tennyson in “Ulysses.” Old? Me?! “Old age?!” My trusty truthteller Falstaff does not mince words: “What is honour? A word. What is that word honour? Air.”
At 65, I continue to look forward more than backward, and that is a relief, though I am struck by the fact that I am now on Journal #179, which I have faithfully kept across four decades. So, I cannot deny that a fair number of my leisure hours, sometimes more than an hour a day, are lavished on looking backward. I try never to wallow in the past or to ruminate about missed opportunities and alternate scenarios.
Instead I consult my Inner Sage (a much wiser fellow than the chap on full-time regular duty) as to whether there are some patterns out of which I am automatically acting. Such as… imagining some wonderful new relationship, and then noticing in my journals that I have simply gone from blonde to redhead to brunette, with each of the lovely (and apparently so different!) ladies reacting in near-identical ways because the common denominator in all cases was—moi!
The Inner Sage—with no lack of Falstaffian directness—is an umpire who calls balls and strikes as he sees them, that is: accurately.
Yes, at 65 I still find that I haven’t had nearly enough of life, and each morning I wake up and am delighted to see that it is a New Day Dawning.
Part of my good fortune has been my health. “If you have your health,” my father used to always say, “you have just about everything.” Right again, Dad!
Fortunately, despite a heart attack at 62 and a stroke before the decade was out, he had a pretty good run of things up until the age of 84. His last four years were tough, but he would have been the first to say that he had had a good run.
One adage that he did not repeat, however: “You’re not getting older! You’re getting better!” Nor did my mother. They very well knew they were getting older—and it was decidedly not better—even though they felt an obligation not to burden their children with complaining and instead try to be “of good cheer.” (My father managed to be cheerier than my mother.)
I find myself often asking friends and colleagues, if you knew then what you know now, what would you do differently? I suppose I’m trying to reassure myself when I ask such a question, and certainly I pose that question frequently to myself. But here again, I don’t believe I’m ruminating excessively, let alone wallowing in the past, but rather pondering the matter carefully in order to gain greater awareness of the patterns that I might have, some of which I want to build on and others that I must break. I like to think that that is another way of looking forward, with much more intelligence and maturity than I might otherwise muster, since it reflects an awareness of the pastness in the present.
And the shortness of our days.
If Mephistopheles were to visit the ex-professor tonight, I would have no trouble sending him away to drum up business elsewhere. I wouldn’t trade my life for anyone’s, and I wouldn’t trade my present in order to relive my past. I remember the movie Cocoon, in which the retirees on vacation realize that the hotel pool is the Fountain of Youth. Should they stay or return home?
Odysseus himself was offered immortality by the nymph Calypso—and refused it. He chose instead to return to his wife Penelope, a mortal woman who would age. He chose to return to a finite life marked by loss, memory, and longing; and in that choice, I have always thought, lies his greatest courage—and his deepest wisdom.
I hope and I believe that I would have made the same Ulyssean decision as all those in Cocoon who decided to return to their daily lives, albeit in their late 70s and ’80s and beset with all of the health challenges typically witnessed in those advancing years.
How lucky I was to go to a wonderful Catholic school taught by the Immaculate Heart of Mary nuns! How fortunate I was to meet the Holy Ghost Fathers and my treasured debate coach and cross-country and track coaches in high school, and to have formed some friendships that still endure to this day! What a revelation it was two years ago, to go to the fiftieth reunion of the debate and forensics team that we had formed, which included all of the boys who had participated in the 1970s under this beloved teacher and coach, with whom I am still in close touch. One of his children is my godson, and my distinguished ex-coach is a grandfather several times over by now. I exclaim, “Thank God for all that—and so much more!”—and my Jewish friends intone the Hebrew Passover chant, “Day, Day, Dayenu, Dayenu!” Yet both of us are just expressing gratitude for the munificent surfeit of the Creator’s magnanimity.
Yes, and above all I have been blessed by so many wonderful people who have entered my life. I have befriended and been befriended by comrades whom I cherish, and whom I miss.
Regrets? I would assure Frank the Crooner that I have had very few, yes indeed too few (or too minor) to mention—particularly when I am mindful of the probable tradeoffs that they would have entailed. Do I regret not having a spouse? Do I regret not having a family?
Scarcely, for how many of my favorite roads might I have never travelled? All those unlived lives and alternate scenarios would have likely altered or foreclosed the adventures I’ve known. No, I have no regrets about the little life that I have built. Could I have been a much greater writer, and a much better teacher or professor? Perhaps perhaps perhaps.
But how lucky I’ve been!
The most difficult thing about aging is time. The obvious fact is that I am running low on it. Past 65, I keep pump faking though well aware that it’s already late in the third quarter, and a closer glance at the clock tells me that the game may be into the fourth. No doubt about it, it is ticking down—and no timeouts remaining. Plus I already have some fouls—and am in danger of fouling out at any time. What’s more, my ability nowadays to score three pointers is vastly reduced. I just don’t have the energy to hit from that far out. Nor do I have the will and courage to drive the lane.
Instead I glance rather uneasily at the so-called Irish Sports Pages, our fond term for the obituaries. Irish people used to build their lives around Irish wakes, and that phrase is perhaps the single remaining legacy of that hallowed and hilarious tradition.
Will I also head for the locker room before reaching my late 60s? I do confess, as they say in County Donegal, that I am not quite ready to rest in peace in Fiddler’s Green.
I can reaffirm the meditation of fifteen years ago, as I wrote on turning 50, that I have no hopes (or pretensions) of being remembered beyond my own lifespan. I am no George Orwell, and his posthumous fame has been a bracing example to me: he set the bar very high. So: scribble scribble, if you so choose to spend your days (yes, there are worse preoccupations!), but no intimations of immortality, my boy. Resist the promises of Calypso to live forever, or to relive the past—seductive though they be!
When I think about “aging gracefully,” the model whom I honor is my old Doktorvater, Walter Sokel. Not just graceful, however, but positively audacious, even Ulyssean. Walter took his long-dreamt-of two-week cruise down the Nile as he was approaching 93. He had not been in tip-top physical health, and a younger companion had just cancelled plans to accompany him. He phoned me a few days before the San Francisco to Cairo flight that would kick off the cruise. Should he go?
Sensing his hesitancy, I asked him:
“Do you want this trip so much that you would rather die than give it up?”
Silence. Then he answered in a strong voice:
“Yes. It’s the trip of a lifetime—this lifetime. I’ve always wanted it.”
He returned in great spirits, tickled to report that he had been the celebrity guest of the cruise from beginning to end.
Walter! I miss you.
As Walter was turning 96, I visited for a week, stayed in his nursing home, and we went out every night, oxygen tank attached to his mammoth wheelchair, racing up and down the streets of San Francisco to enjoy his favorite oyster restaurants. With a rapture for eating oysters that exceeded the Walrus and the Carpenter, Walter—a man of five feet, eight inches and a trim 140 pounds—would sometimes down thirty (30!) oysters in a single evening. Ebullient in spirit from the first through the fifth course (“Another half-dozen!” he would announce), he’d hold forth (in Viennese German) through the evening on topics ranging from the epicurean pleasures of his oyster diet to the genius of his beloved Kafka. (Walter was the doyen of Kafka scholars.)
The rapturous lectures would continue with undiminished exuberance until we closed the place down at 1 a.m. And then a new topic would be taken up for the wheelchair ride home. Rising at noon, he would plot course for the evening to arrive at the next restaurant that we would invade that night. As Walter surveyed both the restaurant choices and directed me in how to negotiate the Scylla and Charybdis challenges of wheelchair logistics through the hilly San Francisco streets, never was a captain more engaged with an upcoming mission or audacious in pursuit of his goal—or more inspiring to his navigator. I imagine him now, standing tall on deck—having risen magically from the wheelchair—to proclaim the night’s Ulyssean adventure:
How dull it is to pause, to make an end….
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees
And so the wondrous week kept on, night and day, a final grand and glorious parting seminar from my Doktorvater: a lived example of the Kafkaesque mystique of audacious aging with Falstaffian gusto.
That unforgettable week was his birthday week, and one of the nicest sidelights occurred every time that I informed a new restaurant about the date and that they should prepare dozens of oysters for their hungry guest. A large delegation of waitresses and cooks came every night during “birthday week” with a big cake, dotted by a single candle. Walter was a celebrity, “Kaiser for a week,” as he said. The only shadow that falls in my memory had to do with my plan to revisit him again a few months later. One night he called me, but I missed the call and figured it was too late to ring him back. When I did so the next morning, his daughter informed me that he had wanted to speak to me because he was dying. He did not make it through the night.
I was inconsolably sad for days, but his daughter and I agreed that, at least for his birthday week, he had become the Kaiser. How I wished that he had been granted just one more night of culinary ecstasy according to his own eccentric criteria for gourmet living. One longed for more, and yet…
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
For ever
And yet: Had Walter not more likely gone on to his greater reward? And was he not at this very minute feasting in Oyster Heaven (which was in fact the name of one of his favorite oyster bars)?
Perhaps.
So yes, Lord Alfred, perhaps you are right after all. ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world! Perhaps one last Ulyssean adventure remains beyond the sunset, and perhaps some work of noble note may yet be done. True, the physical vehicle, made weak by time and fate, no longer moves earth and heaven—and some days barely moves at all. But the old engine is still strong. And somehow the chassis hums along, with the old eight-track blaring away. All the while, the stooped, greyish-white-haired navigator sails through the night, blessed with nonchalant certitude that the gas gauge is far from empty, and that there remains still fuel enough in the tank—as the western stars unfurl before him—to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
John Rodden has taught at the University of Virginia and the University of Texas at Austin.
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