From One Old Man to Two Old Men

Two old men are hobbling and stumbling and stalling and rambling incoherently along again for the presidency of the United States, the same old men who “ran” four years ago, the oldest pair of has-beens in our history, now older still, and both visibly diminished as candidates. If is it ageist, as an old man myself, I don’t think it unduly ageist to wish that both of these guys retire gracefully—which will never happen, but only because one of them never does anything gracefully. Yet, it would be wise and for the greater good of the country for both, or either, even at this late date, to step away from this clash of antiquities and occasional if increasing senilities. You’ve had your day. Move along.

With my sincere appreciation for your service, Joe.

Old Friends

Selfie credit: Dave

Visiting my old friend, Dave, after forty years, I found it both perfectly natural and utterly amazing how easily we reconnected. Nothing of the bond, nothing of the chemistry between us has changed—only our entire lives. A curious style of male friendship, not fan boy or man crush or biweekly poker player/bowler/golf buddy, this vintage affinity is my preferred mode of friendship, old friendship. Henry David Thoreau observed of society that “We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for one another” and that “less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communication.” Granted, forty years may seem an extreme interval, but for an introvert and a bit of a lackluster homebody like myself, it can take forty years to accrue new value or enough life worth talking about. We talked for four days. I trust I will see Dave again before another forty years pass, but if we don’t see one another, our bond and interaction would be the same at 105. I cannot feel friendship any more deeply or perfectly.

The great drawback of old friends is our age, more specifically, mortality. We lose old friends, one another, with increasing frequency. (R.I.P., Fabian) The ranks of old friends must inevitably thin, and new friends can never really replace them. An aged new friend (rare but possible) can become an old friend with sufficient time, but a young or a middle-aged friend can never become, and thus never replace, an old friend lost. Survive long enough and you run out of old friends. When the old friends are gone, it’s time to go.  

Year One Done

I have reviewed my first full year of retirement. It was a year of living leisuredly, of domestic maintenance and improvement, reading, writing, thinking, guitaring, some travel, socializing and familiarizing, and spectating upon the universe. Watching the world go by, passing the time, not in either a trivial recreational way nor a determined scientific way, but moderately, suggestively, impressionistically. At times I hear the call, faint though it may be, of a greater ambition, of doing something, and I genuinely wonder if the something that I think I’m doing is actually something, anything at all—that is, you know, this: reading, thinking, and scratching out in electrons some evidence of consciousness, gratitude, and charity. It’s all been said and done before, all that matters anyway, but one has to say and do as much of that all as one can oneself, live it, enact it, if only imaginatively. Perhaps that’s how the objective universe holds together, in a weave of consciousnesses. Yours, mine, theirs, living and dead. It’s how my subjective universe does.

When I feel that nervous edginess to do something bigger, to be someone more than myself, to inflict some good upon someone else, upon the world, I lie down on the couch, to nap, and it often goes away. Or I smoke on it. And maybe get around to it.

 

Estate Sale

Books and books and more books. Mostly paperbacks. Some quite good texts, but mostly popular, pulp editions, faded, yellowed, moldy. Dishes, dishes, dishes. How many different, partial sets all a clattering? How many cups and mugs does a person need? Bric-a-brac out the wazoo. Vintage Christmas stuff. Twenty plus St. Nicholases, Father Christmases, Santa Clauses. Old vinyl records. Old, but newer CDs. An old woman’s clothes. A 1950s era case of August Schell beer bottles (New Ulm, Minnesota). Why would you hold onto a case of empties for 70 years, beginning almost 50 years before Ebay was even invented—and can now fetch a handsome $50 thereon. All that crap remained, even after it was overheard that half a dozen of her children had already laid their claims.

And in the garage, the walkers, the wheelchair, the plastic mattress, which triggered my sympathy. For an estate sale to happen, someone has to die. An old lady, and here her stuff. My old lady would never permit such accumulation, such a seemingly redundant, indiscriminate congeries of global detritus. She’s rather an avenging angel of minimalism—though she carried off some salad tongs and a pillow. The crap that posthumously becomes someone else’s crap is evidence, I suppose, of having lived and read—and shopped. But it is a melancholy legacy at best. In the basement among the clutter of dingier relics I encountered this timeless wisdom:

 

So true. There’s no room in the afterlife for all that stuff.

 

LXV

As of this November, I’m Medicared for, officially recognized by the government as an old man: 65—and now universally eligible for those senior ticket prices. Woohoo. I do not subscribe to the notion that we are 65 years young, that we are only as old or young as we feel. Happy talk. However our individual circumstances, we are in decline and slouch toward death. Average lifespan of an American male is 77 years and a few months. The Bible allots threescore ten. Family demographics suggest mid-80s; the Old Man lived to 95. So according to various permutations, I could live 5, 12, 20, or 30 years longer. Five, even twelve years, is not a long time. Gives one pause. Or I could throw a clot and fall off a ladder tomorrow (upstairs/outside window sill repair). Better folks have suffered worse. But here, at this moment, I’ve survived the first five years of seniority, advanced beyond the atrium of old age, and move now relatively freely in its chambers.

The outside world in which I dwell as an old man seems, at the moment, in dire straits, seemingly more dire than my own personal straits. Barring some kind of apocalyptic tipping point, the planet should outlive me in spite of our climatological woes and crimes, that is, the biosphere at large. Of civilization as we know it, I’m less sure. AI, pandemics, UAPs, social media and Bigfoot loom and lurk and threaten. Global geopolitics—Russia/Ukraine, China, North Korea, Israel/Gaza—are not encouraging. Thoughtful persons think that we, humanity, are at our most dangerous time in memory. And the future of the American Republic remains a serious question mark, if not a profane abbreviated aberration—WTF. That Donald Trump continues to exasperate the body politic with a singular virulence says much about the immunological state of the union. We are not just old, we are old in troubled times, and weakened.

 

But while we have never been quite here before, we have been here before, or someplace like it—one of the uses of old age: experience. Not that we know what to do in this case, under these circumstances, but that whatever we do, we’ll likely survive, until the day we don’t. Which is a resolution of a sort.

 

Still content to be here. Still curious.

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.