Living Dead

My brother, Alex, received this fascinating and highly amusing fax last week regarding my untimely death and an official invitation to benefit therefrom. 

 

Good brother that he is, Alex inquired after my health; I replied that I was feeling fine. And actually, now that I reflect upon it, somewhat flattered in the error, or more precisely, the scam. Two of my favorite writers, Mark Twain and Henry Adams, were mistakenly identified as deceased in their early old age, so heady company, indeed.

The specifics of my alter ego’s life and passing raised a smile

The transaction pertains to an unclaimed “Payable on death” (“POD”) savings monetary deposit in the sum of Eleven Million, Five Hundred & Fifty Thousand, and One Hundred United States Dollars ($11,550,100.00). The policy holder was one of our clients, Late Dr. Charles BOROWICZ who was a real estate investor and precious stone dealer. He was a Covid-19 Victim. Who died about 2 years ago. Since His death no one has come forward for the claim and all our efforts to locate his relatives have proved unsuccessful.

and the thought “who thinks this stuff up?” Someone with more imagination—and effrontery—than intelligence, I suspect, unless, of course, this ruse actually worked. But that would speak more to the victim’s lack of intelligence than the grifter’s.

Still, one is tickled to have been done away with so casually and so deviously. But for the record, this report of my demise has been greatly exaggerated, as has my net worth, alas.

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.