Love was a star, a song unsung,
Life was so new, so real, so right
Ages ago last night.”---Frank Sinatra
Sometimes I feel like a scout sent out by slightly younger friends to gauge the landscape, look for Indians, find a pass through the mountains and report back. Octogenaria, we are warned, is a prickly place full of highwaymen, dense forests and strange diseases where crusty humans go to die, but they said that about Septuagenaria, too, and here we are.
When one is old and wise to the ways of the trail, he is expected to pass down what wisdom he has accumulated in his time on this mortal orb to less experienced hikers coming up the mountain. That doesn’t mean anyone is likely to heed his advice, but some of us are traditionalists who believe time-honored rituals must be adhered to. Nobody cares, of course, what a piccolo player thinks about raising nutria for fun and profit or what a priest thinks about marriage, but there are some common suggestions which apply to everyone, and among them is this:
Listen. “Listen to the sound, listen to the sound, listen to the tune that the wind brought down. Listen to the old time sound of the fiddle telling of a place you never have found.” (Dillards)
The world is a chattery place, full of nonsense and distractions, generic advice you don’t need, advertising you don’t want, self-serving simpletons who just want to bend your ear, fill it full of fatuous fripperies. It makes a person wish for invisible ear plugs or the arcane ability some people claim to let things go in one ear and out the other. But just when it seems safe to drop out, a true gem passes from the lips of another, something that will rescue you from confusion, steer you in a better direction, teach you how to operate your tractor more efficiently, and it might come from unlikely sources.
Most people would rather talk than listen, but nobody learns much when they’re talking. Listen with the intent to understand, not with the intent to reply, like most of the talk show guests on television. Bernard Baruch famously remarked, “Most of the successful people I’ve known are the ones who do more listening than talking.” And Doug Larson correctly told us that wisdom is the reward we get for listening when we’d have preferred to talk. Sometimes the rewards are incomprehensibly great, like that moment in 1968 when my cosmopolitan early girlfriend Claudine Laabs told me, “Bill, you just have to stop wearing big white undies.” A whole new world opened up in just seconds. So pay attention. You never know when the next Claudine will come along.
Do What You Say You’ll Do
Your word is a contract with someone else, a compact that you will perform as agreed to at a certain time or place. It begins with small things like being on time or agreeing not to buy any more potbellied pigs. Reliability is the precondition for trust. Do not make excuses like, “But I’m only five minutes late, that’s virtually nothing” or “Petunia was lonely so I had to buy a Porky.” Wrong. You broke your contract and revealed you could not be relied on in the future. In addition to keeping your word, you should also hold others to the same standard.
In Subterranean Circus days, I didn’t have a ton of rules for employees, but one I did have was that noone could be late. The first time a worker was late, he or she was sent home with the admonition to cogitate on how much they valued the job. The second time, they were gone for good.
Now, virtually everyone who worked at the shop was appreciative of just being in such a place, let alone being paid to show up, so there were exceedingly few rulebreakers. Alas, there’s always that ten percent. One feisty young lady turned up a few minutes late on her first day and was shocked to find herself sent home to reevaluate her priorities. After a week of adhering to the rules, she found herself waking late on a Monday morning, still stoned to the gills with about ten minutes to get to work. She roused her roommates in a blind panic, they sped across town breaking speed limits left and right and shoved her in the Circus door one minute early. She staggered up to me and croaked, “No rules about being marginally unconscious, right?” Surprisingly, the girl worked there for several more years and was a big asset. More surprisingly, in 23 years no one was ever fired at the Subterranean Circus for being late.
Just Do It
When you’re old and rickety, there’s always an excuse for stasis, like “The weather outside is frightful, but in here it’s just delightful.” The old sacroiliac is acting up again, driving at night is a crapshoot and you never know what you’ll run into west of Jonesville, so better not take any chances, right? Not right. Whatever happened to that guy who set the record for consecutive days streaking down University Avenue? It may be a jungle out there but that doesn't mean you have to lock the doors, pull down the shades and wait for the clip-clop of the Grim Reaper’s pale horse. If you can travel, do it, and no whining please. Daniel Levine, the pride of Savannah, Ga., is 80 with Parkinson’s and he’s running off to Amsterdam. Last year, it was Italy. So what if somebody occasionally has to pick you up and steer you in the right direction? That’s why they invented the Boy Scouts.
If you want to live to a ripe old age, find things you look forward to, like your monthly tryst with Sadie O’Grady, the first week of football season or the Flying Pig Parade. Head off trouble at the pass with the annual physical exam, CBC, lipid profile and the rest of the long grey line of medical revelations. Walk. Swim. Join Richard Rahall’s Bicycle Rangers. Lonely? Buy a large, economy-sized lifetime membership to Heartwood and you’ll always walk on, walk on with hope in your heart and you’ll never walk alone. If you’re lucky, you might even find a sympathetic broad to butter your toast in the morning, like Will Thacker did.
Finale
I don’t mind admitting I’m irked aplenty by the physical limitations old age imposes. I can’t roll boulders uphill any more like that 72-year-old guy in the photo above. The fifteen-mile uphill hikes have leveled off by two-thirds and those clever trekking sticks are looking better all the time. But I can still walk my morning mile in fifteen minutes with the original hips and knees intact, climb up the stadium ramp to my 54th row seats unaided and keep the fields mowed at the farm. Strange women have stopped calling me on the phone as in Circus days, but I tell myself it’s only because they’ve lost my number. I celebrate things like having made it to 84 with nary a single intestinal polyp and driving through Alachua County at night without killing anyone. And I confess to snickering to myself every so often that my wife has yet to discover what a terrible mistake she made taking up with me.
When I was a young lad, I aspired to sweeping Kathleen Carroll off her feet, becoming a professional baseball player and living in sunny Florida, a magic land revealed to me by radio announcers and sports writers covering the Red Sox at Spring training. One out of three’s not bad. I’ve experienced the many charms of 49 states (sorry North Dakota) and despite its yokels, hurricanes and paralyzing summers, still prefer this one.
If you’re 84 and tell me you’ve never experienced a near-death experience, you’re either a big fibber or the luckiest person on Earth. I somehow made it through high school with only one car crash, escaped college with only a few cuts and bruises after jumping off the back of a moving truck, avoided being shot during Circus days when a paranoid maniac aimed a shotgun at me, barely evaded death by heart attack and at the hands of irate Knoxville, Tennessee football fans. When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me speaking words of wisdom, like “You know you’re not ready to die. You want to know what happens tomorrow.”
She was right, of course. Fifteen years ago when I was lying sick as a dog on a cold hard hospital table with a heart rate of 20 beats a minute, the doctors came in, told me I had a bundle branch blockage (which I already knew) and asked if I wanted them to insert a lifesaving pacemaker. Despite my condition, I couldn’t help being amused. “Well, what do YOU think?” I answered.
While I waited, I considered my situation for an instant, thinking oh, so what if I die, what’s the big deal? One of those momentary flashes quickly dispersed. Almost immediately I was struck by the realization that I needed to hang around to find out what happened. To Siobhan, friends and family, the country and Gator football. Shallow, perhaps, but enough to snap me out my lethargy. Perhaps this momentary indifference is why some people survive and others cash in their chips.
With that, the implant crew zoomed in, slapped the shiny new Boston Scientific device inside my upper chest and pressed down hard on it for about a week, or so it seemed. Voila---fait accompli! Life goes on, and with few compromises until the last couple of years. When you’re this old, thinking about death is inevitable. It’s an obsession with some people, which is where the meditation devotees have something to teach us. When the night is long and sleep fails us, uncomfortable thoughts climb up off the floor and into the bedcovers and start poking around. Don’t let them in. Slam the doors and close the windows. The moment will pass and you’ll be back in Salisbury Beach, six years old and riding the carousel with your mother looking on. Hold on tight, she’ll yell to you, and you do. You’re a good kid. You always do what your mother tells you.
That’s not quite all, folks….
