That Was Yesterday, Wasn't It?

I hit the big seven-oh today. I remember waking up on my sixteenth birthday (“Hey! I’m old enough to drive”) and on my twenty-first (“Hey, I’m old enough to drink legally”) and wondering why I didn’t feel any different.
Actually I don’t feel any different today than I did yesterday when I was a much younger sixty-nine. But one really should take note of a biblical birthday like three score and ten. That was supposed to be the length of a man’s life—but actually, during most human epochs, 35 to 40 was more like it.
Bismarck and Franklin Roosevelt picked age sixty-five for retirement because they could be reasonably sure most people wouldn’t live long enough to collect. I can honestly say, that without modern drugs and surgical methods, my wife and I both would have been dead a decade or two ago.
Now people are fairly routinely living on into their eighties and nineties. That’s starting to play havoc with the actuarial tables the government and private companies us to compute pension and Social Security payouts.
The bigger fear today is not whether or not you will live through the next winter but whether or not you will be lucky enough to die before your savings run out. If the genetics of my immediate forbearers run true, I could be around to sponge off the rest of you for another twenty years or so.
These kinds of thoughts hang out in the further recesses of most peoples’ minds, but they come forward into plain view on days like today. I can now legitimately call myself an “old crock”. Even though most people are kind enough to say, “Gee, you don’t look seventy”.
I resist the urge to blush modestly and reply, “You really should have seen me at forty”. However youthful I may look to some, there is no question that another Biblical phrase has become meaningful to me. When I was in my twenties, the phrase “the infirmities of age” had no meaning to me. Today, I could write you a book.
Talking to other people my age, I find the same thing has sneaked up on them. Oftener than I like I go to my physician only to have him or her say, “That’s just something that happens as people get older.” Easy for them to be complacent about it—some of those kids could be my grandchildren.
Another thing I understand now—when my parents and their siblings reached their seventies, they kept remarking on how they didn’t feel old, didn’t think of themselves as old. I’d look at them and think, “But you are”. Now I understand what they were saying.
Looking in the mirror is almost a shock. That old fellow with gray hair and a face that more and more looks like my dad’s can’t be me. We used to sound alike; now we look alike. There’s just some very basic part of my brain where that just doesn’t compute.
What’s astonishing is how quickly it has all happened. I can still hear my secretary screaming, “The President has been shot!” and that whole afternoon while Kennedy died replays vividly in my mind. I recall conversations I had with a girlfriend in 1956. I remember what I wore.
I remember being so upset the noon I found out that Truman had really won and the Dewey we had all cheered for lost. The radio broadcasts of the Army McCarthy hearings of 1954 remain vivid to me. And, of course, it was only a couple of years ago when somebody took a shot at Reagan. How about the year when Mantle and Maris raced each other to a record 61 homers in a season.
It was so recently that I watched Bill, Hillary and Chelsea walk out of Madison Square Garden with the nomination—or watched the CNN broadcasts of explosions over Baghdad as General Schwarzkopf drove triumphantly north into Kuwait Wasn’t it just last season that my favorite shows were “Alias” and “Jag”?
Reality check: It’s been almost two years since I went to my 50th high school reunion. Lots of very healthy, tennis playing contemporaries were there—but there also accounts of how this one or that had died. The kids in the 1957 Yearbook sure dressed funny. And we all wore nametags because the sponsors were aware that we were unlikely to recognize old friends.
I did once, when preparing for a lecture on World War II, find out that something significant had actually happened on the day I was born—May 4, 1939. Stalin, faced with endless rebuffs, had give up all hope of forming an alliance with France and Britain to stop Hitler.
On the day I was born, he reversed his policy and decided to make a pact with Hitler that would buy him a hundred kilometers or more space that the Nazis would have to cross before reaching Russia. He dropped Maxim Litvinov, who had good relations with the West, from the Politburo on May 4 and replaced him with Vyacheslav Molotov, who could deal with the Germans.
The Pact Molotov signed with Ribbentrop on August 24, 1939, did as much as any one thing to win World War II for the Allies, us included! It bought Stalin his hundred kilometers, it left Churchill cheering: “Thank God the Russians are there” (in Poland). It left the German general staff fuming at Hitler, realizing he might have cost them the war.
How important were the hundred kilometers that resulted from events on my birthday? I have personally spoken to a panzer commander who ran out of fuel in the suburbs of Moscow. He could stand on his panzer turret and see the Kremlin with his binoculars. What if he had had a hundred fewer kilometers to cover?
So much for my day of birth. So much, as the sun goes down, for my birthday. Tomorrow I shall go pottering on, not thinking too much about how old I am. (Until one of those “infirmities of age” gives me a good twinge.)
It was appropriate to think about mine today. With God’s blessing and a few pills that didn’t exist sixty years ago, we’ll all see one.