Old White Guys, One Still Living

In my old age, I am rereading the Letters of Henry Adams, who, at the moment as I read, is my age in 1901, sixty-three. His observations of old age are mordant and unsentimental, “At sixty one is running one’s last ounces [of reserves]” and “You need not waste sympathy on us people of sixty. We are not worth it.” (v. 261-2) While he often claimed to be living posthumously anyway and predicted his own demise with blithe frequency, he lived another seventeen years and quite fully. Which is not to discount his sense of loss and world-weariness, which fueled in many ways the fullness of his later life, but rather, perhaps, to recognize that much of life at our age is loss—parents, siblings, old friends, acquaintances, colleagues, our generation’s celebrity heroes, and others, even perfect strangers, many of whom were nicer people than oneself. All the sadder. And, if there are gains, they are gains gathered in an age of loss, making them all the more precious.

“There is a little mild light about it [old age],” Henry could admit, “a sort of Indian summer, which has a certain kind of repose and tone, if not much color.” (v. 261) I see it illuminating my own retirement, the not working, the travel, the loving, the caring and thinking, the reading and writing: “it occupies me to write; which is something—at sixtythree.” (v. 202)

Announcement

I have decided to retire. Without yet setting a specific date, I will terminate my university “career” at the close of fall semester, 2022—a year or so from now. Forty plus years of university life and work will come to an end, and I shall achieve emeritul status.

Retirement has been on my mind in a speculative way these last couple of years, a relatively certain eventuality, but at the same time, somewhat fictional, contingent, even fantastical. But in these last couple of months, the idea has ripened, seemingly rapidly, to fullness. My circle has inquired as to reasons, but no new reasons have been revealed; only all the many older ones have matured at last under an autumn sun. Perhaps some gathered nascent impulse to free oneself from the school calendar has emerged, that schedule which has governed so many of my years. I will redress the balance with a second childhood, not without its cares, but with many less adult responsibilities, most of which have been met as well as they are going to. I have been more than content with my workplace, my colleagues, and my work—helping students to discover, author, and enact their future and hopefully better selves. But there are other things to attend to.

What will I do? I can only say at the moment, “Not work.” Oh, and “think.”

Superannuated Man

My career at university began forty years ago. For quite a long time now, I have been teaching and advising students for much longer than most of my advisees have been alive. I’m three generations or more removed from them. (And now, I have been advising longer than some of my advising colleagues have been alive.) With the passing of those generations, I have been encouraged to familiarize myself with the pop-cultural worlds of Gen-X, Xennials, Millennials, Gen-Y, and i-Gen, as a form of professional development. I don’t, in part because I’m not the keenest of “professionals.” That orientation to the world has something mercenary and bureaucratic about it, necessary, no doubt, but unfortunate. But more importantly, young people’s worlds, like my own, are infinitely complex and not to be rightly felt and understood by interloping geezers. Instead, I’m quite resigned to becoming naturally irrelevant and increasingly uncool—not unhappily. And then retire.

They, on the other hand, are sometimes fascinated by the fact that I have lived in what they know only as history and seem to appreciate me as a sort of mystical animatronic survival of days long gone by. A living fossil, a coelacanth, a long-lived passive drift-feeder—whose primordial habits I’m inclined to admire.

One trend of the current generation I have not been able to avoid has been the film adaptation of old-time comic super-heroes. They’re everywhere these days, righting wrongs, salaciously filling out spandex, snarking on their colleagues, and saving the universe, all the while subverting cinema for older generations. I didn’t pay much attention to these graphic narrative busybodies in my own youth, but I cannot escape them now. One has even been asked, in a professional training icebreaker, to imagine oneself a superhero and identify a superpower: I, Superannuated Man, not giving a shit.

Okay, much.

Rock On

 

 

 

Nothing says “old man” like a rocking chair, which I purchased last weekend—and began to rock. It’s not a new rocking chair, in fact, rather an old one, an antique actually, Stickley, circa 1910s. Vintage, classic American, if you will. Not unlike its latest owner. It creaks a bit, and the leather cushions wince and gasp age appropriately. A little pricey, but even as he gets old, a man can show a little style.

 

Conception Day

If you march back nine months from my birthday, you arrive at Valentine’s Day—to the day. Which suggests that if my father, never the most visibly romantic of men, was romantic at all, he was conventionally romantic. And given that my brother Jon, elder by exactly one year, has the same birthday, we can surmise that my father was not only conventionally romantic, but predictably, even punctually romantic. My generation is better no doubt at expressing love, but mostly because we cannot easily be worse. Hurrah! then for the passing of time and the slow progress of generations. From zygote to old man is plenty of time to learn to love and to express it, but you do have to pay attention and work at it.There is work involved. Including baking.

 

Inauguration Day

One of the consequences of moderate longevity is the chance to bear witness not only to history, which is always ongoing, but to witness events considered historic. For good and for bad,  9/11, for example, bad. The presidency of Donald Trump represents another one of those potentially historic moments: his election, for bad; and for good, his electoral defeat and eventually peaceful evacuation. He was, with little question, the most incompetent, the most corrupt, the most ignorant, the most divisive, simply the worst president in the history of the United States. Which is not to say that his was the worst presidency, it wasn’t—thank God, for his laziness and incompetence. (Compelling cases could be made for that of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush in my lifetime, but I would digress.) Rather, I hope and trust that he will be forgotten for the vacuous media phenomenon that he genuinely was, and that in time he will languish in relative chief executive obscurity with James Buchanan, heretofore historically recognized as the worst.

The historian Henry Adams once identified Ulysses S. Grant as the nadir of presidential performance and satirized him in the novel Democracy—though the true villain of that fiction was a senator, Ratcliffe, who stole an election! My point being, that we do not remember President Grant, but General Grant. His political reputation, slightly burnished by recent scholarship, remains superseded by his military and even his literary reputation. However bad historian Adams found Grant politically and administratively, Grant’s historic place is not lost, while his presidency has been largely forgotten. And more importantly, the Republic survived. And survives yet, in spite of the worst president I’m likely to see in my lifetime and in my long study of history. President Trump deserves to be forgotten; however, we should remember the lessons of his presidency.

God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlefolk

 

I have been grieving my parents somewhat these last couple of weeks, reflecting on their quiet isolation out at All Saints, away from the activities of the living, such as they are under COVID, remembering our old holiday life. Wistful, I called Nelson’s Flowers to order a wreath for their tombstone and got the last fresh one, the one my mom used to order for Stevie’s grave. I was brought to tears by the thought that I had gestured rightly, that my sense of loss connected to my mother’s so perfectly, coincidentally, and so timely, and that I spoke with someone who knew my mother and her floral taste and preferences, who approved and, perhaps, was gratified to learn that my mother’s practice would be carried on. These attenuated vestiges of past life, whose provenance is lost, or will be in due time, faintly echo the beauty, mysterious and fragile, that makes our life singular, worth living, and, alas, necessitates our dying. Last week I hung the Christmas bells in the front window. They are not identical to the bells that tolled in our front windows in West Middlesex and Mercer, but they do the job, and, a gift from Karen, a new one as well. An old man with much to look back upon fondly, I look forward as well, though perhaps less avidly, to this world without parents.