Old friends, old friends
Sat on their park bench like bookends
A newspaper blown through the grass
Falls on the round toes
Of the high shoes of the old friends …
Can you imagine us years from today
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange to be seventy
-- “Old Friends,” Paul Simon
How terribly strange, indeed.
If that doesn’t stir me out of my mortality-induced melancholy, I can always pick up the latest AARP Magazine and its inevitable cover shot of a seemingly ageless Susan Sarandon or Smokey Robinson accompanied by the cheery (and obligatory) “Sixty is the New 40” headline.
For many, that sense of certitude is hard to come by. Toward the end of her life, the indefatigable humanitarian Eleanor Roosevelt said, “I don’t know whether I believe in a future life. I believe that all that you go through here must have some value; therefore, there must be some reason. There is a future, that I’m sure, but how? That, I don’t know. I think I’m pretty much of a fatalist. You have to accept whatever comes, and the only important thing is, you have to meet it with courage and the best you have to give.”
The noted thinker David Brent, (whose day job was manager of Wernham-Hogg Paper Merchants in the original UK version of The Office) mused, “A philosopher once wrote you need three things to have a good life. One, a meaningful relationship. Two, a decent job of work. And three, to make a difference. And it was always that third one that stressed me, ‘to make a difference.’ And realized that I do, every day. We all do. It’s how we interact with our fellow man.”
I think he had it right. I sometimes think of life as a massive Venn diagram – we are all circles, overlapping other circles, and the degree of overlap is the measure of how meaningful our existence has been.
One could even say that, before the eye-opening revelation from the angel-in-training, George was to – borrow an expression – seeing his life “through a glass, darkly.”
And, even though this moment was decades in the making, still, it seems to have come on with an alarming suddenness. As the Stage Manager in Our Town noted, “You know how it is. You're 21 or 22, and you make some decisions. Then, boom! – you're 70.'”
Boom! Seventy.
It’s not like other landmark birthdays have passed by unnoticed. Or, at least they haven't been unnoticed by others. Exactly ten years ago, the date was marked as I was co-chairing the annual meeting of a statewide legal organization of which I was the outgoing president. The incoming president and I happened to share the same birthday. At the Saturday dinner where both occasions were noted, she made it a point of telling the group, “Dave’s is a little more significant than mine. His ends with a zero.” Thanks, Peggy.
For some, attaining septuagenarian status can be almost liberating, on a certain level. As Mark Twain observed sagely, and not a little impishly: “Before 70, we are merely respected at best, and we have to behave all the time. But after 70, we are respected, esteemed, admired, revered, and don’t have to behave unless we want to.”
Still, the official marking of 70 trips around the sun is a sobering moment. For one thing, it is the traditional biblical formulation (I hesitate to say “cutoff”) for the completeness of a lifespan:
“The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” – Psalm 90:10 (King James Version)
The writer of Psalms, of course, was laboring two millennia ago, without the benefit of the Social Security Administration’s life expectancy tables. These tell me, at least on an actuarial basis, that I still have a few miles of tread left on the old tires. According to the SSA, an American male who has managed, somehow, to stumble along to the three-score-and-ten-yard-line, can expect to live another 15.3 years. That puts my projected demise at July 28, 2036 – on paper. This scarcely constitutes a written guarantee; a footnote points out: “The estimates of additional life expectancy do not take into account a wide number of factors such as current health, lifestyle and family history that could increase or decrease life expectancy.” Now they tell me.
Of course, whenever I begin my “swiftly fly the years” lament (to orchestral accompaniment), I become painfully aware of the masses of humanity who never reach this milestone. A few years ago, watching Ken Burns’ The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, it dawned on me I had outlived both President Roosevelts: “Teddy” (60) and Franklin (63). For all the extra years I’ve been given compared to them, I’ve no Panama Canal or New Deal to show for it.
Among my own “cohort” – those born in 1951 -- the Social Security H-A-L 9000 computer tells me about 25% have fallen by the wayside during the last seven decades. Among my classmates were auto accident victims (at least three during my junior and senior years in high school), crab fishing fatalities, and – of course – Vietnam War casualties.
As the years passed, the causes of death expanded to include the catch-all term we used in Daily News obituaries for persons under age 50: “natural causes.”
When I hear that term, I’m often reminded of a fellow University of Washington Daily staffer, Debby Lowman, who I stood next to at graduation in June of 1974 and who jumped right from journalism school to the Seattle Times. She was a pioneer in the field of consumer reporting.
But a few years later, on a holiday visit back to Seattle after starting on my own career, I learned from a fellow alum that she had died, still in her 20s, of leukemia.
What was “natural” about the death of a talented, vibrant young woman at the dawn of a promising journalism career? (In her honor, the Times established the Debby Lowman Award for Distinguished Reporting of Consumer Affairs.) I never went to war, but I still experience a twinge of “survivor guilt” when I think of my classmate and colleague and the decades of living she never had a chance to experience.
The only answers seem to be platitudes: “Those are the breaks;” “life is unfair.” Those who insist on framing it in religious terms frequently offer cliches – “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away” – that I defy anyone to find even mildly comforting.
Don’t try selling that line of thought to Stephen Fry. The Brit author, comedian and avowed atheist once said in an interview if he discovers he was wrong and does meet the Almighty face to face in the afterlife, his first question will be, “Bone cancer in children? What’s that about?”
Even those who profess a faith in a personal deity would probably be curious about the answer to that question. For some, it is enough to say, as did the Apostle Paul, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” (1 Corinthians 13:12).
In my younger years, I was firmly in the no-nonsense Paulist camp. For a multiplicity of reasons, I no longer view those questions – or others related to our purpose in life, and our eternal destiny – in a strict binary framework: off/on; up/down, yes/no; saved/unsaved.
Now, seven decades into this exercise called sentient existence, I can very much identify with Mrs. Roosevelt’s ambivalence about what it all means. “There must be some reason.” I agree. I trust some day – whether it’s in July of 2036 or the day after tomorrow – I will find out what that reason is.
As Clarence tells a disbelieving George Bailey at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life when they visit the Pottersville cemetery: “Your brother, Harry Bailey, broke through the ice and was drowned at the age of nine.” George’s response: “That’s a lie! Harry Bailey went to war! He got the Congressional Medal of Honor! He saved the lives of every man on that transport.” Clarence sums up the movie – and, for some, the meaning of existence: “Every man on that transport died. Harry wasn’t there to save them because you weren’t there to save Harry. You see, George, you really had a wonderful life.”
To see our existence in a new light, some require a revelation – a “thunderbolt” or a visit from an angel. For others, enlightenment is more of an ongoing process, a series of incremental steps toward wisdom that may take decades – say, three score and ten? Maybe with another 15.3 years tacked on for good measure.
In the meantime, while I continue down that path, I will very much embrace the oft-quoted (and frequently memed) guidance of spiritual teacher Ram Dass: “We’re all just walking each other home.”
