Paul Simon once sang, "How terribly strange to be 70."
Of course, now that I am 72, it's even more strange. One almost never imagines being this old, especially as a teenager or at 20 or 30 or 40. And yet, before you know it, not only are you way over 60, everyone you have known for years is that age, too. Along the way, all of your beloved grandparents departed. And then your uncles and aunts and parents left, as well. Even worse is when your contemporary cousins start to check out. Media personalities of all types transition at the same time. Soon, some of your favorite movies or TV shows feature an entire cast that is long gone, or is very, very old and barely hanging on.
Someone famous appears in a role or in your thoughts and you ask yourself, or someone else, if that person is still alive because so many have died throughout your existence that you cannot be expected to remember when each and every one of them expired.
Your own memories or recollections of personal events in your life still seem quite fresh until you remind yourself that they happened decades before, often a half century ago and more. You vividly play out the night you and your family moved into a new house, along with all the other WWII veterans and their families, to a brand new cul-de-sac development in Whittier, CA. Your parents leave the hall light on and your new bedroom door ajar so you can find your way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. But then you realize that was 1953, and you weren't even 5 years old at the time.
You start to equate life with high school dodge ball. On the rare occasions when it rained in Southern California, and your PE class could not participate out of doors, the staff gathered you all into the gym and divided the mass of boys into two, competing groups. Half to one side of the court and half to the other side as they hand out the balls. Almost everyone soon surges this way and that, colliding with one another and attempting to avoid as long as possible getting taken out of the contest. Of course, it always seemed that there would be a Richard Meyers, a friend who calmly stands there and gets hit right away, accepting the momentary pain, to avoid the expected--and often embarrassing--ritual of those masses trying to avoid the inevitable and getting it over with right away.
On an album track on BOOKENDS by Simon & Garfunkel, Art interviewed old people in a Jewish retirement home. One of them prophetically admitted, "I have to be an old man."
Yes, I do....But yet I don't have to act like one.
