Memento mori

I am happy to report that I have survived my first year as an old man. K and I observed this milestone in the company of the oldest living things on the planet at Humboldt Redwoods State Park in California, among coniferous beings of sublimest age, silence, and elevation. Up to two thousand years old and almost four hundred feet tall, Sequoia sempervirens represents the closest life gets to eternal on this earth, before their root network detonates and they crash to the forest floor and exist in ruin as long as they did in majestic life. Astonished, awe-struck, agape, I admire, but short mortal that I am, I do not aspire. I survived and survive, but not so grandly and silently, and not without comment. I consent to pass on soon enough.

That is, while seemingly healthy and relatively resilient, I experienced more medical intrusion and observation this year than in any other year of my life. Some persistent, at times excruciating back pain, eventually required an x-ray, which showed some vertebral and disc degeneration and bone spurs, but nothing out of the ordinary for a person my age. I sit up straighter at work, which seems to help. Later in the year, an equally persistent cough, an unshakeable bronchitis, mandated a lung x-ray, which proved negative for pneumonia. My lungs have cleared in time without any treatment other than hacking and suffering.

But, most alarming, at least to my optometrist, during a routine eye exam, some ocular bleeding was detected. Such bleeding could be symptomatic of a number of things, two of them serious—a cranial blockage or diabetes—and one, the most likely of the three, trifling. Owing to some family history with atherosclerosis and diabetes, it was thought prudent to run some tests, a blood draw and a carotid ultrasound; the latter was of particular interest to me because of my long-term, slightly elevated cholesterol and, of course, my age. How clogged do the arteries of a guy actually get in sixty years? Otherwise healthy and fit, I granted that the slow accretion of plaque in significant arteries can appear like a thief in the night to dispatch the seemingly healthy and fit. So I had my carotids sounded. The results showed no cause for concern, satisfying my physiological curiosity even more than they relieved any anxiety. And the blood work showed my total cholesterol fallen, rather inexplicably, into the average range. However, another indicator showed me pre-diabetic. I have been flirting with a pre-diabetic blood sugar count for many years now, so that my refined sugar jones has finally caught up with me. It probably didn’t cause the hemorrhaging in my eyes—I recall bench-pressing earlier that morning—but I can no longer ignore my dietary sins, especially with K monitoring my vitals with the eye of a health professional. Partnered people, it is said, live longer than the single. If so, in my case, it will be because I respect her too much to die early and on her watch. So, out with the white sugar and the simple carbs. I will miss them. 

Colonoscopic thrills are scheduled soon, and K requires that I prepare a Health Care Directive. Memento mori. Here’s to my continuing slow decline.

The future

Walk, Don't Run

I used to run. In my youth. And not badly. A 4:56 mile once, a 9:54 two-mile. A 36 minute 10K. A single 10-mile run, but never a marathon (that’s crazy). I hated running mostly, the oxygen debt, that completely arbitrary left-side rib stitch, and, seriously, the pointlessness. At least now, for an old guy. Even in youth, I never experienced the mythical “high.” In middle age I stopped running with any regularity, a recurrent, persistent calf cramp would lock me up at about the 1.5 mile mark. My brother, the PT, chalked it up to “athletic deconditioning,” and so the deconditioning continues, happily. Now I tread the treadmill and ellipt at the gym for exercise and quietly, to myself, mock runners and running, the ridiculous gaits, the obvious labor of unrunnerly bodies, runners’ naïve hopes, and their burgeoning, misplaced self-righteousness. I make exceptions; for example, for Bill, a friend who sports a greyhound like physique, and a former graduate schoolmate of mine, Fred, who, with 100,000 miles now behind him after thirty-seven years of consecutive daily runs of at least 2 miles, among others. Which is not to say that I understand them or share their enthusiasm for that particular form of masochism, but I grant fetishists a bit of leeway.

Last week, for reasons I won’t elaborate upon—senior moment—I experimented with a return to running, beautiful weather for it and a lovely course along the river greenway. After lacing up, I made it about a mile before the slightly winded tedium of soulless exertion set in, long before any calf-cramping or the serious build-up of lactic acid. I slowed to a walk. Walking felt about right. I tried half a dozen times over the next 5 miles to pick the pace up even to a jog, but to no avail. Why run? Whereto? And I had to pee. Twice. A young man breezed past me on the bridge in a shirt that declared oxymoronically “Run and Fun.” He passed me again on that loop at the same pace (little fucker), but I was not convinced. I have already arrived at old age, to stroll, saunter, ramble, loiter.

Borland's

It’s Father’s Day, and I’m watching the final round of what used to be known as the Bing Crosby Golf Tournament at Pebble Beach, a landmark course celebrating its one hundredth year. I’ve mowed the lawn and will smoke my pipe on the stoop this evening on the lookout for the full moon and brood just a little on the passing of time and the unequal fates of landmarks.

The summerscape of my childhood is gone now to wrack and ruin, the remnants of the par-3 built by my father and my avuncular godfather in 1960. Uncle Dickie died years ago. Many now, most golfers of those days are dead; long extinguished their cigarettes and their occasional victory cigars, King Edwards, R.G. Dun, Dutch Masters, White Owl Invincibles. They’ve all been vinced, vanquished, except my father, whose handiwork now passes away. Golf is comatose here, though the course is strangely more alive than ever. Nine fairways are wildly overgrown with clover, broad leaf, cinque-foil, thistle, hardwood seedling. Nine greens preserve only faint outlines among these prolific new meadows. Eight flags lie flat in perfect disuse, marking nothing but demise. Number 1, alone, remains upright, but slanting irrevocably earthward. That landscape, once of seemingly endless and objective summer, is ending, with only its inscape surviving in memory. Though more than a little sad to me, its return to nature nevertheless has real beauties. If Borland’s becomes real estate, alas, sections of a bedroom community, those beauties will disappear as well—for me anyway. But perhaps, children, or a single child, will find their own edenic garden here on the lawn in what will become their own backyard.

Old Man Goriot

I was in Paris last month, browsing in the Shakespeare and Company bookstore for something appropriate, something French, when I came upon Honoré de Balzac’s Old Man Goriot. And bought it. I bought it to see what Balzac had to say about old manhood, old men, this old man. I bought it because my own old man, my father, I think, read Balzac as a young man. He doesn’t read books as an old man. He does, however, use the author’s name, “Balzac!” as an expletive on occasion. So, I took that as something of a recommendation. It’s a good novel, though it ends unhappily for old man Goriot. Not that he dies in the end, which he does, but then all old men do, eventually; rather, the specific unhappiness of his dying is Balzac’s point about this particular, titular old man. (I won’t spoil it for you.) Balzac doesn’t generalize about old manhood and old men, as I had hoped. He buried old man Goriot in Père Lachaise cemetery, where, sixteen years later, Honoré de Balzac, was himself interred. A hundred and sixty-nine years after that, I visited Père Lachaise, the final resting place of Abelard and Heloise, Marcel Proust, and Oscar Wilde, among famous others—and neglected to visit Balzac’s tomb. Next time, if I make it till then.

Only transcendentalish

Here’s a thought, prompted by HDT’s employer and landlord, R.W. Emerson: “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius.”  While reasonably self-reliant, I don’t think Waldo’s right on this point, or, if he is, “genius” is a suspect quality, a quite possibly narcissistic begging of the question, not to be overly encouraged.  Long experience inclines me to think rather that in my private heart “nothing but the tritest of truisms is true for all men, much less for all others: tritest of all—that humans are mortal.” And before our mortality, divining the truth of our own individual private heart is work enough for many, perhaps most, of us. I’ll leave that all-believing genius to someone else.