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From the top of Trinidad Head June 30, 2025. My birthday climb dedicated to my
friend Mike and to the memory of Jim Harrison. |
On one of his birthdays, writer Jim Harrison pointed out that he was
exactly one day older than he was the day before. That’s one
interesting perspective on a birthday’s significance, and here is
another: for the next year after my birthday I will give my age as
79, but in fact that birthday marked the end of my 79th
year of life after birth (or as adherents of some belief systems
would say, of this life). The moment after the anniversary of my
birth, I will be living in my 80th year.
So it’s not too early to consider this threshold. For all of my
childhood and adolescence, I did not know anyone as old as 80. All
but one of my great-grandparents were dead when I was born, and the
last great-grandfather died when I was 4, and he was 79. (Though he
lived nearby, I don’t believe we ever set eyes on one another.)
My three surviving grandparents and those in their generation I
always thought of as old, but they were mostly in their 50s and 60s
when I was a child.
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| My grandmother and me in 1972. She was 76, I was 26. |
My grandmother Severini turned 80 the year I turned 30. She’s my
only real experience with that age. I happened to be nearby for most
of her 80s, and spent a fair amount of time with her. The family
stories she told me (or repeated from earlier years) I used much
later in my Severini Saga.
That was my last frequent, sustained contact with anyone in their
80s. I saw my Uncle Carl on visits to PA a few times in his 80s, and
was in touch with him by email especially in the last year or two of
his life in his early 90s. I was in touch by phone and email with my
Uncle Bill in his last year—he was 96.
Most of the conversations with all of them involved them talking
about the past. It was fascinating first of all to hear what they
remembered and what they didn’t. But the information, the feeling
of their time, added depth to my life. It was I think an important
and a satisfying experience for both of us.
For our past and what we recall, what we’ve learned from our
experiences and observations are reflected in our stories, and our
stories are increasingly what we have left to give as we grow older.
But the young (a category that now encompasses almost everybody) have
to be ready to receive those stories. I marvel with some chagrin how
uninterested I was in my parents’ lives, and then it was too late.
It seems we must ourselves have a past we recognize as such, before
we become interested in the pasts of others.
My grandmother got through some of my cognitive blindness by being a
beguiling storyteller. And I was in a sense a captive audience. She
did not hesitate to evoke my guilt and shame to ensure that I visited
her often. She arranged endless memorial Masses for my mother so my
sisters and I would dutifully attend, and of course go by her house
afterward.
I am too distant from the younger generations of my family and too
diffident to insist on their attention. I’ve taken on the work of
telling my stories, of writing what I remember and what I know, to
pass on to younger people by making them available, mostly on the
Internet, so they can find them whenever they are ready to receive
them. That’s as much purpose as I can find that gives me pleasure
enough that I actually do it, however incompletely.
Of course at this age it is more comfortable to spend time with the
past than to focus on the future. Apart from the mysteriously timed
but inevitable denouement, we face at minimum a gradual decline in
health and energy, so our days—and nights—can become at best a
less than predictable adventure. So the present demands its
attention—bad moments definitely, but with effort, good moments,
too.
In these times it is good to have old friends to talk with about the
new things happening to us. Besides my very-slightly-younger life
partner, I have an even more slightly-younger friend I’ve known
since high school. Our phone conversations are becoming paradigms of
old people cliches in the greater proportion of time we spend each
successive year on comparing health notes. At least we’re not
competitive about it (“you think that’s bad, the pain in
my...etc.”), the basis of comic bits about old people from at least
vaudeville times.
And we are aware of the increasingly strange and threatening context
around us, a world that no longer seems to be ours. He and I were
partners in high school debating something called “medical care for
the aged,” around the time that early Medicare began in 1965. Now
not only Medicare and Medicaid are needlessly and cruelly endangered,
but the generation-older Social Security. This being only the most
specific anxieties, as we are forced to watch a painfully built
protective context being angrily dismantled, with cruelty, brutality
and contempt for the non-rich as official policy maniacally pursued.
It’s hard also not to notice that this society has blithely
accepted (by blithely forgetting or denying them) over a million
deaths of mostly older Americans from Covid, which continue with
thousands a month. You might get the idea that what old people are
expected to do is die, as soon as possible.
Assimilating the past adds depth to the present, but telling our
stories from our past can also be a link to the future, and to the
young. I usually have a book or two that inform my birthday thoughts.
This time it is
Horizon by Barry Lopez, which is the summary
and final of his many books.
I’ve read several of his earlier books in the past year, including
the best known: Arctic Dreams. Though I’ve had some of his
books around for years, I did not appreciate until recently that he
is one of the best, the greatest writers of my times. (When at the
age of 80 Bill Moyers decided to retire from TV, he carefully
selected his last interview for his Bill Moyers Journal. It was with
Barry Lopez.)
At some point I grazed YouTube for any interviews and events Lopez
did that might be preserved there. The first I came upon was at the
end of his book tour for Horizon in 2019, and he began his talk with
an urgent message. “Hell is coming,” he said. “Not hell with a
small h, not something we’re going to solve with technology, or
certainly not an election. It’s coming, and we have to figure out
how to take care of each other...and provide for our children and
grandchildren, so that they have the opportunities to exercise
imagination that we have had. Then maybe we have a prayer.”
“If you’re looking for something to do in the time of climate
change and ocean acidification and methane gas pouring out of the
tundra, and [the Sixth Extinction]: Make common cause with young
people.”
They can use the experience that their elders can communicate to help
them tell the stories and find greater imagination to apply to
addressing what’s coming very soon, he said. They need to imagine
not what is pushing us into the future, but what is calling them into
the future.
Others reaching my age have grandchildren and perhaps even
great-grandchildren with whom they have ongoing personal
relationships. I do not. My grandmother in her last years had a
mantra: “We do the best we can.” Partly because I didn’t know
anyone past 80, and partly because—thanks to the hydrogen bomb, the
military industrial complex, the poisoning of the planet and its
effects on health, as well as my dubious earning ability—I never
expected to reach 79. But I have, in relatively good shape it seems.
So even with what seems like fewer good hours in my day, and more
time and attention taken by health matters, an old introvert night
owl hermit like me can do what wants to be doing. In my case it’s
the same old, same old. I make sentences.
