Growing up at 54
My father is 75.
A couple of days ago as we were having lunch together, he sat opposite me in our favorite Chinese restaurant, blinking back and forth between eyes like someone trying to see the subtle differences in either side of stereoscopic vision. I wondered what he was doing when he said, “You know, I can’t wait to have my other eye done. You wouldn’t believe how much better I see with that cataract gone.”
He had the surgery yesterday. Afterward, I talked with my brother about the procedure over the telephone and he said, “That tough old bird was given a choice between having it done with or without sedation and he chose without. Said he had to much to do to lie around in a stupor all day.”
Tough old bird is right. If they had asked me, I’d have told them to put a little Demerol in both hips. I’m no fool. But my father? No way. He has too much to do.
We have an unspoken rule in my family. You get to whine about your birthday one day of the year — on your birthday. The rest of the time you’d better be too busy to whine.
I was an Air Force brat, and as a kid visiting my grandparents was a huge treat, since I only got to do it about once a year for a week or two. Sometimes we went three or more years without seeing them. It made us a lot more aware of the passage of time.
But what I remember most about my father’s father was his vitality. He was a copper miner, and a tougher old bird you’ve never met. One summer I sat on the porch of his house, waiting for him to get home from the mine so I could run down to the well house and surprise him. When his ride dropped him off I hurried down shouting, “Hi, Grandpa!”
“Hello, little boy,” he said. (He called all his grandchildren “little boy” or “little girl.”) He shed his coveralls and his miner’s helmet and hung them on the door of the shed. Then he bent over a basin with a bar of Lava soap and scrubbed the grime from his face, hands and arms. He smelled of sweat and cordite.
After he dried himself with a coarse towel he squatted down and crooked his arm, making a muscle. His biceps stood up from his lean arm. He said, “Feel that. Tough as Superman’s.” His arm was as hard and brown as a knot of chestnut. I was awed.
“I’m 54 years old,” he said, “and I can still whip any man in the county.”
I reminded my dad of the story over lunch, because I it was my birthday and I was 54 and I understood exactly what the old fellow meant. My father said, “Well, hell, I’d go a round with any 60-year-old.”
I think that’s the key to growing older — you’ve got to be willing at any age to take on all comers.
Would I be 18 again? Hell, yes. In a heartbeat. I like being alive and there’s a lot I want to know and explore. I suspect I’ll draw my last breath wanting to do and know one more thing. But if I had to go back without my 54-year-old memories and experiences and learning, you could keep 18. I’ve been there before.
This is the beauty of the internet.
There is no place else in the world where you could read this. Maybe a literary magazine, if there are such things anymore. And nobody really read those any way. Literary magazines were collected by people who had an essay published in them.
This is writing at its purest, most honest form.
I love this little essay.
I hope it lasts forever.
