Playing On

 

Moreover, in his old age he learnt to play the lyre, declaring that he saw no absurdity in learning a new accomplishment.

                                                                        Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

Like Socrates, I see no absurdity in taking up the guitar in old age. Not necessarily to learn or to accomplish something “new.” Certainly not to master the instrument sufficiently to play to an audience—heavens, no! (Performance anxiety, and I don’t think I’d get anywhere near the ten thousand practice hours necessary for minimal expertise.) Not really playing as a hobby, either, quite, to pass time in my retirement, though it will do that, mark time and even keep it. Nor as some AARP-recommended cognitive aid to stave off dementia. Rather, I strum and pluck about in hopes that music—that ineffable vibe—reveal something about itself to me, particularly my own generation’s popular music, which was dominated by the guitar. And reveal something perhaps about my self and my sad song preferences.

Photo credit: K. Sylvie Moon

Just as live music provides a thicker experience than recorded music, striking a chord as opposed to hearing or
watching a chord played live, crafting that sound, alone, at home, connects one tactilely and kinetically to this great acoustic mystery of life in a post-rock and roll generation, a rhythm and blues universe: how does sound do that? Enchant? Neuroscientists and evolutionary psychologists, even musicologists, last I looked, don’t have a very good answer to this question, partial at best, and I have my doubts that it can be explained in language in any but the most general terms. Still, one must ask, and it is best researched manually, at the fingertips in a single subject study. Which, consider me now doing.

Among my early findings is that my lifescore, I think, has something to do with A minor, maybe the key, definitely the chord, which shows up in every song in my top ten, or almost every, though never in the first position, always shifted to, from almost everywhere else on the fretboard, melancholonizing all, more than just a bit, to the very edge of despondence, yet not despair. Hammering down on the second string.  

A Poke in the Eye

I learned this week that while not technically macular degeneration, my visual malady, retinal edema, will get progressively worse unless I begin a series of eye injections. Injections . . . into one’s eye, in this case, my right eye. A series thereof, lasting “several years or even for life.” The idea of having a needle inserted in one’s eye, and not just once but routinely, focuses attention on the aging body and its maintenance. (A brother just replaced his hip, his second.) Such maintenance cannot be cheap, and while I can appreciate, at least in the abstract, the high value of vision, I’m not sure I’m worth it. And this is not low self-esteem or false modesty speaking. When do we become an undue burden on our system and our loved ones? We’re always a burden, sure, but when do we become undue?

Okay, maybe not yet. But the question will remain open. 

$$A

The first wages of old age were deposited in my bank account this week after a brief delay, owing to an error on my part (senior moment, diminished eyesight?). The monthly stipend approximates my monthly expenditures averaged out over the year, at least as they stand now. Barring catastrophe of various stripes, I should be reasonably comfortable for the foreseeable future, as comfortable as I am now. Barring catastrophe, that is, which lurks in the shadows of our collective future but befalls individuals pretty much singly and without mercy—and sometimes remedy.

The numbers behind one’s Social Security allocation fascinate me, who has never attended much to money beyond the rudiments of making sure I had enough to pay the bills. Good to know that someone is keeping track of things in a larger way. SSA tallies that over my lifetime, I’ve earned $1.5 million, a staggering amount to me in its totality, but parceled out over many years, a pretty average annual salary in the U.S., and only about half of what the generic Ph.D. has been estimated to earn. I don’t complain. Mine’s in the humanities, which is its own reward, its own return on investment, priceless actually. 

 

I observe that the taxes paid into the system by me and my employers would seem to only cover about the next eight years of benefits. Assuming I live longer, this calculation represents, of course, the primary problem for the long-term solvency of the system. I don’t propose any specific measures to address this impending margin call. As a Late Boomer I sympathize with the younger generations in their fears and resentment of Boomer economic and environmental excesses, but I trust this looming deficit will be equitably addressed. If not and forced to return to work in my 70s, I will at least have had a significant sabbatical. As for the emotional costs of supporting us geriatrics, I am reminded that my own generation’s efforts subsidized the retirements of The Greatest Generation and their Silent offspring—my father’s, for example, a retirement of unlimited golf, shrimp scampi, and Fox Lies. Their later achievements (Vietnam, Ronald Reagan, the Iraq War) did not inspire affection. We protested, rolled our eyes, and paid. They were old, and now am I.

Bill of Health: Not the Physical Throes of Job, but . . .

As I ponder Medicare and the health insurance bridges thereunto, it is time to take stock of this body in its sixth and penultimate age, not yet “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything,” (Shakespeare, As You Like It,) but, alas, well on its way.

Teeth are in decent shape and of full number (sans one canine), though they have required some patching and capping over the years. The front uppers and lowers reveal a flatline across my bite, indicative, it seems, of grinding. This old man has known some stress even in a quiet academic life—usually having to do with university administration and collegiate athletics—with the lowers ground down almost to the pulp. One trusts that retirement will arrest this development.

“With spectacles on nose”

In my forties, my eyesight began to decline, perceptibly and steadily. From readers, + 1 to +2.5, I degraded to bifocals, then an inelegant and constant switch-out from bifocal to readers (for computer screen work) and back, lapsing into “progressive” lenses, which rather indicates the regression of one’s visual acuity. And now at 64, my eyes host cataracts and a retinal edema, both age-related, which will likely require increasing attention, including, possibly, eye injections and surgery. Yikes. While far from blindness and hardly unusual, this loss of dynamic focus, this blurring of outlook, like living in an impressionist, sometimes kaleidoscopic diorama, reminds me that vision at any age is a gift and not a given, and prone to depreciate.

“the lean and slipper’d pantaloons . . ./His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide/For his shrunk shank.”

Once an athlete, I no longer push and pound the body in old age in some effort to reprise my youth or even to excel within my age group. Those days are long gone, nothing to prove.  That long discipline has, however, left me fundamentally sound and confident physically, with a good training sense, along with memories, both muscle and cerebral, of competencies, some now lost and of questionable value to regain. Flexibility has diminished along with balance. Putting on my socks and taking off my pants can require conscious effort, frequent exterior support, and sometimes planning. Plantar fasciitis spikes the soles of my feet from time to time. MyChart records lumbar degeneration, arthritis, and bone spurs. I’ve suffered benign situational vertigo, an inner ear affliction not uncommon to my young ER doctor’s “older patients.” And now, Dupuytren’s contracture, a condition associated in my case with heredity, ethnicity, sex and age—“male over 40.” 

The Bard noted not the deterioration of our largest organ, the skin, in his roster of aging maladies. Once smooth and sun-bronzed, I now pay a price in sarcomic and melanomic lesions, actinic keratosis, tags, moles, erythematous scaly macules, lentigines, and cherry angiomas speckling my crepey epidermis, but, thankfully, not the highest price. The damages are mostly cosmetic at the moment.  All in all, my body has remained more than serviceable.

At the gym I encounter my elders, really old guys, in the seventh age. Flaccid-armed, pale, pot-bellied bodies shuffling about, their flat asses awattle from the shower, their glutes shriveling, but not as yet fully shriveled grapes. Live long enough, I become thee, old, old man. A bald, gray grizzled, deeply lined, almost blind, dizzy, splotchy, arthritic assembly of bone, stringy muscle, and webby skin. 

 

I can still hear pretty well, though, my wife saying “You’re all right”—for an old guy.

School’s. Out. For. Ever.

 

Specific last days of school I cannot easily recall, none without photographic documentation, and these tend to be graduations, not, strictly speaking, last days of school. So, for the record, I document, this, my last day of school.

‘Twas an unusual work day for me in this COVID era in that I actually went into the office and worked, pretty much the entire day, with little time for reflection on its lastness. Only one other person in the suite, and when she asked how it felt to be wrapping up my work, I had to cut short the conversation to wrap up my work. A few loose ends remain, but enough of the leave-taking has been accomplished over the past week to seem final enough. I’m done and gone.

I must confess that that last few days clearing my office and cleaning out my desk have prompted some wistfulness. Strangely subdued and pensive moments, I try to remember the faces of the names on my class list and cannot, easily, even those who have written unsolicited evaluations and appreciations, warm ones. Which make me feel as if my efforts have not been wasted or lost, much as I play them down, and preserve me from an all too false modesty. Okay, I did some good work, maybe more than I give myself credit for.  

For almost sixty years, I’ve looked forward, annually, to the last day of school, to the vacancy, the vagrancy of summer, the unclocked passage of time, the succession of mornings that sometimes  requires a conscious pause and momentary mental effort to establish day and date, and even, identity. One can get lost in that vastness. One can wake up in places one has not seen before in morning light, has not yet recorded in long-term memory, and ask, Where?... and then, almost spookily, Who?...before returning to self in real time. Here I stand on the last, the very last, of those last days, in the midst of a Minnesota winter, with all its discontents, both local and worldly, yet at the threshold of glorious personal summer.

Sung to the tune of

 

Now that I’m older, lost all my hair

All those years ago,

While you write me birthday cards and valentines,

Don’t you tire of dropping me lines?

 

Flattering me that I’ll be your guy

At least for one year more,

Hope we survive it, to sixty-five it,

Now I’m sixty-four.

 

In a month you’re here.

And if you think it through,

There’s not much to fear.

 

I have been handy, cementing front steps,

Tearing out the sod,

watering the evergreens, the boulevard,

making ours a bee-friendly yard.

 

Biking to market, farmers to back

Who grow organically,

Will you still need me, will you still feed me

No longer sixty-three.

 

Anniversaries we hike the northland

From the cabin by the lake—that’s Superior.

The future who can tell?

Grand-daughter by your side

Pela Moon-Casselle.

 

Doing the rhumba, follow my lead,

All else, otherwise.

Curse the drivers on the road, those idiots.

My wants and needs I’ll try vocalize.

 

Your health care agent, I, you be mine

Mine for evermore. 

I will still want thee, I will you still need thee.

Now I'm sixty-four.

One Hundred Days

I began university work forty-one years ago and will wrap up in one hundred days. Let the countdown begin.

While I have been attending to my advisees as fully as I have in the past, I must confess to attending less and less to the policy issues concerning the wider university and my own college and unit. Having studied our learning community at length—the universitas magisterium et scholarum—I’m quite confident that the rearrangement of academic deck chairs on this particular vessel will not significantly affect the cruise. I have been asked to consider and, as much as possible, inscribe “my legacy,” but it has been modest at best, merits no especial mention, and will likely endure or expire for reasons entirely beyond anyone’s control who cares. I am, in the current parlance, quietly quitting.

So my next hundred days I’ll attend largely to closing up shop: setting up my current advisees as perfectly as possible, coaching my successor colleagues, and saying good-bye to professional, by and large younger, colleagues. (Oh, and napping.) Having been here so long, many of my former colleagues are already retired, and more than a few, deceased, Alice, Phil, Susan, Laurel, Jim, Cindy, Judith, Vicki, Lois, Bev, Tina, John, and some whose names are not coming easily to mind. One has to focus . . . Ted. And Christine. My friends, we have done good work.