Navigating the Golden Years

Those who advertise the “golden years” as the highlight of human life must be very young. Here you are trying to navigate a staircase with the twinge and pinch and shudder and shimmy of the fifteen bones you managed to break as a young man and people tell you that the age of mobility has finally been reached. You are lucky. No longer strapped to a desk after retirement, you can venture along the scenic highways and byways of rural America at your leisure. You may even manage to park the car at one of those great “overlook” cul-de-sacs in the Smoky Mountains. Of course when you exit said car, the hike to the telescope is impossible because you were afraid to get that hip replaced a year ago, or maybe the health insurance that was supposed to follow you into your pensioned-era of leisure has been cancelled as a result of the pension fund decreasing due to mismanagement by coke-snorting Wall Street hedge fund managers, and you can’t afford the operation.

Those who believe anyone past sixty is living the dream must be under forty and unfamiliar with the word “dream.” However, this complaint has nothing to do with being alive. There are thousands of little things to recommend life at all ages. I’m merely pondering the probability that living, in and of itself, is not necessarily one of them. I would argue that fear has more to do with our inability to let go than joy, along with the irrevocable human quality that Americans cultivate so well, competitiveness. What directed my mind to this paradox was the memory of Warren Spahn and Johnny Unitas, two great athletes and two of my boyhood heroes.   I’m not completely sure why I suddenly thought of a baseball player like Warren and a football player like Johnny in the same connection of my own frayed joints and fried synapses. I have never been a world class anything, unless—and according to my wife—there exists a category for assholes.

Maybe it had something to do with both of them throwing things, even if they were very different things. Maybe it had something to do with the poached egg I was eating when I remembered them, or the humid summer air, or the smell of fresh coffee, or a pain in my elbow, or the fact that my pension check is late and I need to come up with three hundred bucks to license the car. Where in the hell am I going to find three hundred dollars today? I’m certainly not going to dip into my whiskey savings account just to obey the law.

See, that’s called digression—the way your mind goes from one innocuous thing to another like a junk yard dog in a butcher shop. It happens as you age and can be called poetic enlightenment or wisdom by politically correct fops who want to be included in your will, if you had one, or senility by your honest relatives.

Anyway, here’s Warren, a Hall of Fame pitcher who won twenty or more games in thirteen of his twenty plus years in the majors. His record at the ripe old age of forty-two was twenty-three wins and seven losses, a phenomenal statistic considering most pitchers are washed up by their mid-thirties. One of the greatest of all time, Warren made a mistake that many of us make as we age. He didn’t know when to quit. Just because your mind feels thirty doesn’t mean it can fool your body. He pitched one more year and instead of going out like a Caesar on the shoulders of his teammates, he limped into the shadows and a record of four wins and twelve losses. I’m not blaming Warren for wanting to go on. It’s a common geriatric delusion. The adulation of the fans and the rush of competition infect us all, even if our only fans are grandchildren and the only game we can physically manage is checkers.

I could say the same things about football hall-of-famer Johnny Unitas as I just did about old Warren. Johnny’s nickname was “golden arm” and he set a whole bunch of football records in the NFL. Like Warren, he is believed to be one of the best that ever played his particular sport. As a child, I saw Johnny play his last season at the age of forty-four. It was unheard of for a football player, even a kicker, to play that long. Sadly, this great quarterback slipped quietly into mediocrity on my black and white TV set instead of ending his career as a champion.

What’s the point, here? It has to do with two things I believe. First, our obsession in this country with quantity above quality motivates us as a society to increase everything, years at work, money, buildings, education, marriages, etc.  You name it and we want more. Even medical science searches for ways to extend life primarily, rather than make the life we have better in the short term even after we’re sure the short term is all that’s possible.

Secondly, we fear what we don’t know. All Warren and Johnny ever knew were their respective sports. The game had nothing to do with career and everything to do with the essence of who these men had become. Warren’s identity, his self, was baseball and Johnny’s was football. It’s incredibly difficult and often terrifying to give up who you are. Therefore individuals cling to the life they know until disease drags the very last breath from collapsing lungs. It’s better to be something than nothing.

But I have begun to question that traditional wisdom as I age. What’s certainly true most of the time does not have to be true all of the time. I have no desire to die right now or the way I feel right now, ever. My aches and pains depress me sometimes as does my lack of ability to drink and screw all night. I’d like to be able still to run ten miles and smoke a pack of Lucky Strikes every day, climb Goose Pond Mountain and do a hundred pushups on the summit, fall in love constantly without guilt and travel the world with a sleeping bag and knapsack. However, these are all considerations that have been traded for other skills and proclivities that I also enjoy. The main consideration for many of us in this age of medical marvels is a more basic one. How will I feel when everything is gone except my life? Will I still want to go on simply to be able to take the most breaths possible?

I don’t know if I will have the courage to say no. Most people can’t answer these questions absolutely and for the future. Even people who create “living” wills often question the wisdom of those documents when the time comes to exercise them. I do believe we are all inclined to play a season too long because of the reasons discussed earlier and that inclination, in many cases, is based on hysteria more than wisdom.