Turning 60 (in 2006)

 This is the first of my birthday posts, back in 2006, just a few years after I started blogging (since blogs didn't exist before.)  It begins a series of  birthday re-posts in chronological order, up to last year's at age 78.  They were originally posted on different blogs, but I wanted to have them all in one place.  And I wanted to see the chronology.  That aspect may also be of interest to others, so I offer this possibility.

  I also assume people about to become 60 and the ages that follow may wish to check their feelings and expectations by reading mine, and they may want to see how those feelings and expectations held up and changed over the years. 

My favorite Magritte, which as a poster has been on a wall of my various residences since the
1970s.  Like many Magrittes, the time depicted could be just before dawn, or just after dusk.
Therefore, it is both.

As I begin writing this, I am 59. When I finish it, I will be 60.

How do I think about turning 60 years old? Some look at how vital we are at this age in comparison to our parents’ generation, and say we’re still young. Or at least in middle-age. You might make a case that these days our youth lasts until 40, and middle age extends to what used to be the retirement age of 65. But as Michael Ventura points out, we’re not living to 120. Sixty isn’t the middle. We aren’t young, in Act I of our lives. We mostly aren’t in Act II anymore.

This is the start of something different. It is early old age---maybe even “young old age” if that feels better. In the theatre of our lives, it’s the curtain coming up on Act III.

This is going to be happening to a lot of people starting about now. When the battleship Missouri was steaming into Tokyo Bay to accept the surrender of Japan, my parents were marching up the aisle of Holy Cross Church in Youngwood, PA. I was born the following June, making me one of the first of the postwar Baby Boomers, and so one of the first Boomers to turn 60. There will be millions more over the next decade.

Turning 60 is a hard thing to admit, even to ourselves. There is a shame attached to it in today’s world. Younger people and even our contemporaries look at us in a different way, and treat us differently. Of course, this happens anyway, whether we admit it or not, and whether or not we announce our identity in this way. Do we say we are 60? Claim the senior discount? It’s scary, maybe even depressing and demeaning.

Part of the scariness is obviously that getting older inevitably places us closer to death. More people we know or know of, people we grew up knowing or knowing about, are suddenly dead. We shudder when this includes our contemporaries, or even those slightly younger. It is hard to accept that we have fewer days ahead than behind. Maybe it’s even harmful to accept it?

Like anything important, both sides of the contradiction are true in some way, and must be embraced, reconciled. There is pain in coming to terms with Act III. But there is also freedom, and purpose.

Michael Ventura

Emphasis is a way of considering one side, before considering the other. Two texts have been important to me in the past few years in this intermittent but intense effort to figure out how to proceed. The first is an essay published in a fairly obscure journal by Michael Ventura, a columnist, essayist and novelist who was approaching 60 when he wrote it in late 2004. The second is James Hillman’s book, The Force of Character, first published in 1999. It so happens that Hillman and Ventura collaborated on an earlier book (We’ve Had A Hundred Years of Psychoanalysis and the World is Still a Mess.) So though they differ on some points, it seems to me they agree on most basic ideas. It’s mostly a difference of emphasis.

In his essay, Ventura emphasizes loss. This is natural for one approaching 60, and a necessary initiation. When I stumbled onto this essay (in a magazine I’d never seen before, called Psychotherapy Networker) I was jolted. It took me awhile to accept its premises. But in my own 59th year, I came to embrace it, guided by my own life to the truth of Ventura’s words.

The article is called “Across the Great Divide: Middle Age in the Rear-View Mirror.” It begins when Ventura realizes he must make a major change in his life. He can no longer afford to live as he had been in Los Angeles. He must find a new place to live. At the same time, he’s thinking about turning 60, and arranges to meet an old friend in Las Vegas. He drives there, taking a long and thoughtful route.

The statement that rocked me was simple: “When you’re pushing 60, the rest of your life is about saying goodbye.

“Your greatest work may yet be demanded of you (though odds are against that). You may find more true love, meet new good friends, and there’s always beauty (if you have an eye for it) and fun (if you haven the spirit)---still, no matter what, slowly, you must say goodbye, a little bit every day, to everything.”

Ventura’s examples are painfully familiar: you’re saying goodbye to your own face as it was in your youth; to how you drove a car (he mentions reflexes; I’ve noticed night-vision—my eyes don’t readjust from glare as fast as they did), to life without aches and pains, perhaps to certain strengths, and to access to your memory. “Alzheimer’s? ‘A senior moment’? You get used to it and hope for the best. Ain’t nobody can do a thing about it anyway. Goodbye.”

Yes, I know there’s advice out there on strengthening mental agility, and we can all be heartened by the research showing that brain cells continue to be born as well as die all our lives. But the basic point is sound.

Ventura is also saying goodbye to where he’d lived in the prime of his life. Though he isn’t saying goodbye to his career exactly—he writes a column these days for the Austin Chronicle--there is a sense that in some ways he’s doing that, too. Many of us at 60 are facing such a change. For those of us in a position to “retire” (leave our jobs and collect retirement benefits) it is also a time of taking stock of accomplishments, and saying goodbye to having any more, at least in that job. Financial retrenchment has its own set of goodbyes. In many ways, these all imply saying goodbye to possibilities, and perhaps to dreams unfulfilled.

To accept this element of turning 60, I had to come to terms with my 50s. In some ways, my 50th birthday was the best of my life. I’d been living in Pittsburgh but was preparing to leave for California with my partner, Margaret. After years of cobbling together part-time teaching and writing jobs, she’d landed a good full-time position teaching dramatic writing at Humboldt State University. I was attracted to what I learned about the place—an academic environment, in the redwoods, near the ocean, with a temperate climate year round (the increasingly hot Pittsburgh summers were making me edgy), close to indigenous Native American tribal areas, and not far from real wilderness. Yet not terribly far from San Francisco, Seattle and Vancouver, three of my favorite cities in North America.

I would be giving up my Pittsburgh life—the infrastructure that worked for me, the city and neighborhood I was fond of, and especially my apartment, the best place I had ever lived. It was a commitment to our relationship, but of course I had to think about my own life and livelihood. My local career in Pittsburgh had stalled, and I felt I could grow into a new one in California, but mostly I felt poised to come into my own on a larger stage. I felt strong and at the top of my writing game, yet with knowledge and experience I hadn’t had when my first book was published in my 30s---especially the hard-won experience of my 40s. My fifties, I felt, would be the fulfillment, the justification of everything in the past. They would also set the pattern for my future, for my culminating accomplishments and at last my proper place in the world, with access to the means to be creative and productive. My fifties would be my redemption. It seemed worth the risk.

For my family birthday, my sisters surprised me with a more personal and elaborate celebration than I expected. They assembled photographs from my childhood. And their gift was unique: an assemblage of objects under a glass dome that represented my life, in the form of a room. There was a desk and bookshelves, a computer, a guitar case on the floor, running shoes and a baseball glove, etc. But the detail was amazing and personal: for example, the tiny books included facsimiles of my book and a few others I treasured.

There was a sense of elegy to this, and of honoring, which was moving. Yet I was looking towards the future. I didn’t see anything ending, really. If I were successful, I could come back anytime.

The move to California was much more wrenching than I had ever imagined. Though I reveled in the soft air, cool until heated by sunlight, I mourned the loss of my apartment and what I had to leave behind. I also quickly discovered that while Margaret had a place in this world because of her job, I had none. The downside of the isolation became apparent. Nobody was much interested in me, as a writer or as anything else.

In some ways I was lucky in early encounters. I worked on writing a video concerning local forest issues, and worked for awhile with a Native American organization. I learned a lot from both, but neither led to anything lasting. And that became one of the characteristics of my 50s: a lot of beginnings that led nowhere.

By some measures, I was enormously productive. I researched, wrote proposals and wrote drafts of chapters on several nonfiction projects, often returning to some aspect of the one I’d been working on when I left Pittsburgh. I wrote fiction. I wrote plays, including a musical for junior high students about smoking, which included the songs: music and lyrics. I wrote and rewrote a screenplay, I wrote and rewrote a young adult novel. I used a new electronic keyboard, a 4-track tape recorder and a computer program to arrange and record songs I’d written.

I sent things out to agents, publishers, theatres, etc. I had conversations and correspondences with several agents and editors on various projects. Nothing came of any of it. The projects closest to my heart got the least response.

I got into grantwriting and picked up freelance jobs writing and editing reports, to generate income. I was already saying goodbye to writing on certain subjects (like popular music) and for some publications (I was no longer in, or in touch with, their younger demographic). But I continued to be published—in one year, my work appeared in five separate sections of the San Francisco Chronicle: the book review, Insight section, the daily and Sunday arts section and the Sunday magazine. Several of these pieces could well have led to books. None of them did. None of them led anywhere.

Thanks to digital technology, I did finally get my one book into paperback—when I did it myself. As that book’s author, I was filmed for three separate television documentaries, any one of which might have led to enough interest that I could get a contract for a new book (or so I thought.) But I never found out. Though I’d been interviewed in films before, and was very successful as a public speaker, none of my footage was used in any of these new projects.

Suddenly my fifties were three-fourths gone. I was applying for full time positions here and in the Bay Area and elsewhere for which I thought I was well-qualified. I got a few interviews, nothing more, and usually a lot less. Still, I kept trying and some cause for hope would turn up. In 2004 I got an assignment from the New York Times to write on a subject I wanted very much to write on, that was central to the book project I’d been vainly trying to put together since before I left Pittsburgh. It was a dream, and worked out very well. Everyone loved the resulting article—my editors and the people I wrote about.

But it led pretty much nowhere, not even to another assignment. I was told that the Times wasn’t taking freelance work for the arts section for awhile, and neither was the San Francisco Chronicle. My financial situation was getting desperate. There were no resources for reasonably frequent travel home, or to the wilderness, or anywhere.

For all this time I had gambled on the next step---the book contract, the book or movie sale, even a play production. Then on the good job that would set things right. Redemption.

But then, as I approached 60, I began to say goodbye to all that. In part it was now simply a matter of looking at time. I sacrificed a great deal to remain true to my dreams, even if that sacrifice wasn’t always intentional. I had already said goodbye to the possibility of having a family. That time had passed me by. Now I was saying goodbye to aspects of my dreams that would never come true, not in the time left to me. I’m not going to have a career as a novelist, a playwright, a screenwriter, an author with a flow of books. It could happen that I’ll have again what I’ve tasted before, like the speaking engagements I had as a book author, or the buzz of seeing my play performed even on an obscure stage. But it won’t be a career.

A career is about movement; movement with its oscillations but generally up and outward. It is about an identity and a livelihood created and recreated in the process. Over time. But much of that time is over.

This is sad of course, because it’s a kind of failure. But at this point, like a lot of failures or changes that come with age, it is also a relief. It is also liberating. I no longer have to look at anything I do as leading to anything else. Everything is what it is.

I don’t discount the possibility of more accomplishment, even of some kind of redemption in the eyes of others. But I’m saying goodbye to the need for it. Success and failure, what do they mean at this point? In comparison to other aspects of growing old, or to the vagaries of existence that take more control, not very much. They may cause me pain, but pain is now a regular part of life. There are famous people with great financial resources who wind up with incurable diseases. There are people with great health insurance who die as a result of bad medical practice. Having money increases your odds of having a comfortable and productive life, but it doesn’t guarantee it.

Like a lot of young writers, I used to sweat over the passing time, mapping out the years against the number of books I could write and publish, the necessary steps to the destiny I craved. Now those calculations show there isn’t enough time left. That anxiety is over. Nothing leads to anything else. But that also means that I can devote my full attention to whatever it is I manage to do in the present. That becomes its own reward. Nothing leads to nothing.

I know that few people get hired for good jobs at my age until they are already established in the higher ranks of that occupation. You either get a job as a CEO, a college president, or something much less. Maybe not only a greeter at Wal-Mart, but not a job that somebody considers part of a career. And there are occupations in fields of my interest where nobody over 50 is even seriously considered. So nothing I do is going to necessarily lead to anything like that.

Right now I have three small jobs that don’t add up to either the income or the demands of a full-time job. They require some diligence, creativity and applications of skills, but their challenges are modest, as are their results. Yet they all have their modest pleasures. So here I am. Say goodbye to redemption. Say goodbye to great expectations. Say goodbye to all that. The intense humiliation of my 50s has led to modesty. It has led back to the moment.

Windsurfer at nearby Clam Beach.  BK photo

I think I did some good work in the past decade, including published work I can be proud of. I may remain puzzled and sad about the work that didn’t go anywhere, that was ignored or scorned, and I have to deal with the work that was never completed, that may never have a completed form, let alone a life outside the rooms of their making. But as long as I have memory, I’ll remember the excitement and experience of making them, or the struggle and yearning and the promise of their potential, however bittersweet those memories may be.

But this modesty, cooling in the release from the crucible of humiliation, is not the whole story. The dearth of time ahead, and the ashes and annihilation at the end of it, are only part of what Act III is about.

Ventura writes about more goodbyes: as older family members die, we say goodbye to family history we don’t know and now will never know, and neither will anyone else. We say goodbye to the last people who knew us as young children.

The common denominator of many goodbyes is death. He even says that the changes in our faces as we age marks the approach of death. “Call it whatever you like, but that’s what it is, that’s what we politely call “aging.” As we lose capabilities forever, we are moving towards the final loss of everything, which is death.

Some of these goodbyes aren’t too difficult to deal with gracefully, once they finally come. The anxiety over the years about losing my hair (which given my maternal grandfather, was all but inevitable) was far more intense and difficult than the acceptance of its reality (at least so far.)

But Ventura points out that the bigger losses are harder to deal with, and require a quality he calls fierceness. “It takes fierceness to grow old well. It takes a fierce devotion to the word goodbye—learning how to say it in many ways—fiercely, yes, but also gently; with laughter, with tears, but, no matter how, to say it every time so that there’s no doubt you mean it.”

This is a kind of tonic to the anxiety we’re bred with in this society to keep up, stay young, and fight off any sign or recognition of death, to the point that people never say their goodbyes at all. The denial of death—the rage against the dying of the light-- may be in some sense noble and courageous, but it can also be just plain denial.

I was present for the last months of my mother’s final illness; I was there at the moment of her death. I helped take care of my father during his last weeks. But I learned most about dying from Tess, our cat, two summers ago. There were no layers of social complication, of her dealing with the emotions of others, with nurses etc. There was just her instinctual confrontation with growing weakness and onrushing death. Some of her behavior was not according to the book. She didn’t hide herself away as cats do, she stayed near us, perhaps responding to our involvement. In the end our companionship was strong.

But some of what the cat books describe was there: the helpless insistent purring, the hovering over the water dish without drinking, and the faraway look in her eyes. Without hesitation, she did what she could of what she used to do. She went outside and surveyed her garden, taking rests. She was in the world as fully as she could be, and yet she was looking far beyond it.

Being aware of the relative nearness of death as well as new aches and pains, failing vision and so on, does focus the goodbyes. Goodbyes are present experiences, though. They include being as fully as possible in the world of now. This moment that will never come again.

Yet in early old age, at the beginning of Act III, and perhaps through it all until the final scene, there is living, and contributing from one’s unique perspective, experiences, talents and character. When we were trying to be successes, we had to emphasize one or two differences, and otherwise be (or pretend to be) the same as everyone else. Now we have no choice. All our differences are on display. They are our character.

Character is the shape of soul. Without the inflation of early ages, we are forced to accept ourselves, good and bad, with consequences pleasant and painful. We are no one’s ideal. “I walk through life oddly,” Hillman writes. “No one else walks as I do, and this is my courage, my dignity, my integrity, my morality, and my ruin.”

There are characteristics that come with becoming an elder. We must take responsibility for the past and we feel the responsibility of the future. In the role of grandparents (actual or metaphorical), we set our sights on the future we will not see.

“Before we leave,” Hillman writes, “we need to uphold our side of the compact of mutual support between human being and the being of the planet, giving back what we have taken, securing its lasting beyond our own.”

James Hillman

In living past the age of procreation, when physical growth is long past and physical pain is a closer companion, we feel differently about our relationship to the world. We no longer feel only one purpose in life—our own preservation, and that of our offspring. And we want to know what it’s all been about. “In later years feelings of altruism and kindness to strangers plays a larger role,” Hillman writes. “Values come under more scrutiny, and qualities such as decency and gratitude become more precious than accuracy and efficiency.”

What we say goodbye to as we age reveals some hellos: hello perhaps to some sharper memories from the distant past. Hello to insights as well as embarrassments. Hello to other worlds. "Discovery and promise do not belong solely to youth;" Hillman insists, "age is not excluded from revelation." Indeed, if the theatre is any guide, Act III is when it's more likely to happen.

Hillman was one of the first since Jung to introduce concepts of soul in psychology. (For Jung, “psyche” and “soul” were virtually identical.) I find the relationship of character, aging and soul most comprehensible, at least intuitively, when I think of soul as not something in the body (as we were taught in Catholic school) but the body as being enclosed in soul.

We do things to do them, we live in the moment and work for the future of what we will leave behind. Character and contribution to the future are the final adventures. "A certain kind of reasonableness is its advocate, and a certain kind of morality adds its blessings," writes Carl Jung. "But to have soul is the whole venture of life..."

Part of what this has meant for me is represented by this site and its companion, the Boomer Hall of Fame, as well as my other ongoing projects (Captain Future’s Dreaming Up Daily, Soul of Star Trek, Blue Voice etc.) Here at 60’s Now I hope to explore issues pertinent to my generation, our present, past and the future we won’t see.

That’s something else important about Act III-- the character has lived through Acts I and II. We carry our history and the history we’ve experienced, not only in the weight and reference of our words, but in ourselves. I am all that I am, including the heroes of my youth, and those that gave me the imagery of my middle years, and those that inform me now. So that is also why I hope to build a kind of database of those influences from the past in the Boomer Hall of Fame.

I expect all this to happen slowly, fitfully, cumulatively. These aren’t the text-messaging kind of blogs, lots of short items off the cuff and often. Sometimes they will be. And while they won’t often be as long as this, I will take some care with them. I hope you’ll come back. Don’t be too disappointed if there’s nothing new. Your expectations should be modest, too. But our intentions don’t have to be. My name is Captain Future. I’m here to save the world.

Now We're 64: From 2011

It's 1/1/11 and the first official baby boomers turn 65 this year, including me.  There's a wearily and maddeningly cliched piece on the subject on the front page of the New York Times. Here's the online link, but don't bother unless you click on to the comments as well. There you will see the hostility behind the supposed irony of the piece expressed directly as generational resentment, with the promise of generational war. But more often you'll also see booming self-defense, a lot wittier and more trenchant than the piece itself.

One would have to be a fool not to note the practical considerations of this milestone--the relationship to Medicare and Social Security being paramount for many. Whatever the historical circumstances of our generation, we have lived these lives in these times, and it's everybody's right once they actually reach this age to think about every possible aspect of this past and our lives, as well as our relationship to the present and future.

Turning 65 is a milestone, but so is being 64 ( which I still am for another 6 months)--at least for the Beatles generation.  When that song came out on the Sergeant Pepper album in the early summer of 1967, I was weeks short of age 21.  Sixty-four seemed impossible old, as it probably did to the slightly older than me, Paul McCartney. 

 The illustration above comes from about 1969, probably in Rolling Stone, purporting to show the Beatles as old men. It scared the hell out of me, but I put it up on the inside door of my room at the University of Iowa the semester I was at the Writers Workshop there, though I was mostly trying not to be sent off to kill or/and be killed in Vietnam. I suppose it was to scare myself into making good use of my time then, to not wait to accomplish something. Time's winged chariot sort of thing.

(But being disappointed that we didn't accomplish more in our lives is according to the Times piece another characteristic of our "self-absorbed" generation. Maybe this guy should have been in the car with me when I was 20, listening to an older farmer in Illinois talk about how little he'd done with his life. Regret--or as Richard Ford put it, "searing regret"-- is not exactly a boomer invention.)

Today of course this image means other things. First, most obviously, is that two of the Beatles didn't live to get that old. A second might be that the surviving two don't actually look like that. We do have a different sort of 60s (the age, not the decade), and gauging that is part of our task now.

Still, we are acutely aware that we're not here for all that much longer. And of what we may face between here and there. This image of the boomer generation holding all the cards is less than laughable, it looks like part of the problem. We're watching pensions disappear for those who predicated their lives on earning them. We're watching medical care costs skyrocket and insurance falter. And that generational resentment added to a more general callousness. A resentment that seems to hold a lot of projection. No, we probably can't expect much, not even what used to be called decency. We're dealing with the luck of the draw at each significant moment.

And the idiocy of our drug-dependent, for-profit and perversely regulated health and care systems puts us in the way of cruelty masked as care. Another Times piece today--the one with the most hits--is about "new" approaches to caring for Alzheimer's patients. Care that is little more than common sense: well-lit rooms are more cheerful, especially when they allow old eyes to see. Instead of drugs and feeding tubes, give them food they like, with good feelings attached. Chocolate works better than Xanax.

Care along the lines of Beatitudes--what a great name, too--is proving more effective and also costs less. It helps patients and caregivers. And it's loving. I'm sure everybody who reads this piece sees its wisdom. But when chocolate is substituted for Xanax, drug companies don't make outrageous profits. Thoughtful and courageous administrators and caregivers may cost more than minimum wage workers--although rules (by for-profits as well as government) probably prevent even badly paid caregivers from doing what they know is better. So while the Beatitudes approach may spread, there's a lot of power likely to be marshaled against it.

While it did take a certain creativity to discover that emotional memory may last even in those whose cognitive memory is eroded or short-circuited, it also takes the kind of close attention that family members give, as well as formed the basis for many of the insights of early psychology--Jung for instance. Today psychology is all about drugs and administering clever little tests to undergraduates and making big claims for the findings.

Paying close attention to others is not the opposite of paying close attention to yourself. It can be part of the same process. For example, a writer who doesn't precisely divulge her age--and how could you, at Salon--offers an observation that older people are nicer to each other, and she offers an opinion as to why that is, which is, if I might summarize it thus, we know to what extent we're all bullshit.

To which I'd add, we know to what extent we're all vulnerable. But there's another reason, an additionally heartening one. I saw my uncle at my niece's wedding last month. He's now in his late 70s, and he told me (as he did the last time I saw him, more than a year before) that he thinks about my mother a lot. She was his oldest sister, there was about 14 years difference in their ages. He says he doesn't remember a lot anymore, but he remembers her acts of kindness. It reminded me of the last conversation I had with his other older sister, my aunt, who was the middle child. In talking about her father, she remarked on how kind he was.

So kindness is remembered. And we can all accomplish kindness, and so be remembered for that.

On Turning 65 ( in 2011)

me and my grandfather, my First Communion.  Ignazio Severini was around 60. 

Again, in terra incognita for baby boomers, the 60s generation.  Though since turning 65 at the end of June, a bunch of others have done it, including Bill Clinton and George Bush.  So obviously it's different for all of us.

It's been a more ambiguous and perhaps a more sobering milestone that 60, which may have something to do with the fact that I've waited almost two months to post this. Emotions specifically around this birthday were definitely muted. It was no big deal, and that in itself says a lot. 65 used to be retirement age, when you got a retirement dinner and a gold watch. It was a rite of passage, acknowledged and celebrated by family and friends. None of that happened.

Besides the fact that I’m not “retiring” in the sense of quitting my paltry-pay jobs, there was no retrospective beyond what happened in my head, which actually wasn’t much.

In the weeks and months leading up to the day I did feel some sadness and even anger about the lack of honor and recognition for the good work that I’ve done. A feeling of being taken for granted, or more specifically, of being ignored. I have no place—let alone an honored place—in this community, or in any other. And even though I have acquaintances of varying degrees here, I can’t say I have friends. I don’t think there was anyone here who even knew about my birthday, unless it was a friend of Margaret’s.

But when the day came, I was happy to spend it quietly with Margaret, hiking by the ocean, enjoying this quiet life. I am aware every day—in fact, it worries me how aware I am—that all of this can turn on a dime. The last five years have been notable for nothing happening—nothing earthshaking or terrible. In our families there have been births and marriages and a break-up, but no deaths except for one of Margaret’s aunts. A week or so before my birthday, her mother visited. She’d just turned 90.

My family in Pennsylvania is healthy. Margaret is healthy. I am healthy. Pema the cat is healthy, though a worry. So far our lives haven’t been economically threatened. But any of that could change at any time, and all of it will change at some time. That (along with regrets about the past that emerge from dreamtime) wakes me up early with anxiety at times, and at times postpones my falling asleep.

Part of life has become the lived ironies of being this age—all the cliches, of always being young in dreams and in my head, to the point of seeing people who probably are younger than me as older. Of never knowing how people will react or respond—person to person, or person to the paradigmatic old person. Individuality disappears from our persons as we all start to look alike: men with white beards, red cheeks, no mouths; small, tentative, distant eyes.



James Hillman


When I turned 60, my touchstones were Michael Ventura’s essay on “saying goodbye” and James Hillman’s book, The Force of Character. Saying goodbye is a continuing process, though it is saying goodbye to possibilities. I just watched a DVD about the reunion tour a few years ago by Sting and the Police. I must always be saying goodbye to the dream of enthralling an audience like that, let alone leading to their ecstasy after more than 20 years of their devotion. Not that this is a new thought, but it is renewed, with different emotions each time. Which of course is not to negate the fantasy, while playing into the silent night.

I’ve already said goodbye to much of contemporary culture, though that is a continuing and not complete process. And anyway, much of it has said goodbye to me. I have entered more fully that melancholy area where you know you have perspective to contribute, but no one cares to ask for it. I guess it’s a fairly common observation of “elders.”

I don’t know what to say goodbye to in my work. In the past year I began to say goodbye to even completing another book, but now this summer I’m not so sure. I’ve got focus and energy for a project that seems clarified.

Which leads me to my touchstone this year, and it’s James Hillman again. But this time it’s his work on Puer and Senex. I came across a moment on YouTube from a seminar he gave just last year about it. It spoke to me, so I looked up what’s available. It turns out his definitive edition of his Senex and Puer work was published in 2005, and is already out of print. The university library, notoriously buying few if any books these days, has no Hillman past his early work. There were DVDs for sale of this seminar, but they were pricey. Still, as a birthday present to myself, I ordered them.

I have some of the essays, notably in The Puer Papers from the late 60s, and a key one in Picked-Up Pieces. But I wanted to see what he had to say now, now that he is of Senex age, and he’s out of the puer paradise of the 60s.

Though the DVDs have too little of him, too much of the crowd’s questions and comments, it was worth it. He’s still vital, and though showing his 80s, his voice is strong. Puer (Latin for boy) is a particular archetype of youth, as Senex is for old one. He championed the Puer in any age, and talked about the union of puer and senex. He talked about the puer flights, the longing that is its own reward, and how that must be honored even in the senex age.

I was a pretty classic puer type, leavened with some senex (the melancholy, the seriousness, and some need to be organized, etc.) but clearly the women in my life saw the puer dominance—the impatience with ordinary life, the anxiety, the looking down on it all from an imagined height. The devotion to the dream, and to the vision that was too far, too high, too big. Plus all the wounds and failures.

The puer inflated ego is no longer a problem for me. The outside world has injected plenty of humiliation over the past 15 years especially, with little compensating affirmation or confirmation. Together with aging and the receding of dreams, the weakening and diluting of visions, and given my status and precarious and vulnerable position in the world, I’ve been humbled.

So combining my particular circumstances with the senex qualities that naturally emerge, a certain fatalism adds easier vulnerability to hopelessness. Given the human prospects as made clear in just the past year or so, the larger world of time only adds weight to that side of the scales.

Hillman offers just about the only straw to grasp, in his idea of the senex and puer union. He points out all the similarities in the two archetypes, and says (as I interpret it) that the senex qualities of organization and discipline, and even the depths of soul (the sadness and the perspective) can be applied to the puer vision, to be true to the calling.

To paraphrase Hillman: The recovery in the senex is the recovery of the puer—the freedom that was once there...the recovery of the range of thought, of imagination. But the senex can have the greatest range of all, like Beethoven’s last quartets. “He recovered something in the midst of disability by letting his imagination go. But that imagination had spent many many years working his gift...staying faithful to the original vision. That’s the important thing—it isn’t being related to your partner, or to all the things we use relationship for and drive the puer man to a frenzy of anxiety, but related to the calling, whatever that strange thing is, that wounds him and names him.”

The calling, the vocation is one article of faith I retain from my Catholic schooling. So I respond to this idea. Even if it’s more about soul-making than destiny, unless they turn out to be the same thing.

I’m monitoring my abilities and except for a sometimes unpredictable fluctuation in energy (which is perhaps different in quality from the fluctuations I’ve always experienced), I don’t have a lot of disabilities of age. I’ve kept my writing sharp through use, if only with moronic work for hire and these bolts into the nothingness on my blogs. But I don’t know how deep I can still go anymore, or how high. That’s the challenge. Even there it may not be a matter of ability as much as why put in the effort, why turn everything else upside-down (as I did often enough in my puer years to disrupt my life, leading to financial vulnerability now) to try and once again fail? And what would success be anyway? As a writer in the marketplace, I may as well be already dead.

But I’ll grasp at any straw I can find that can convince me even for part of the day, so I’ll take Hillman to heart, in my 65th year.

Being faithful to the vision is an end in itself. Whether something comes of it is not entirely up to me. Pretty much nobody accomplishes anything as difficult as writing a book (let alone publishing it) without help. Without the faith of others, there’s only a faith in the future—as part of the vision, if it is such—that motivates towards expression or completion. That, and for the fun of it. Of having done it.

On Turning 69 (2015): Success and Failure

A birthday post from 2015, originally on this blog. This was the first of my annual treks up Trinidad Head on my birthday.

On and around my 69th birthday recently, I had three birthday thoughts.

 The first was on the day, when I hiked up Trinidad Head. Unless you know the Head (in Trinidad Bay, far northern California), the thought may not mean anything, so I've included some photos from a subsequent walk, on a sunnier day. On my birthday there was considerable fog blowing in from the sea. Still, I wish I'd taken my camera that day.

 The thought was simple: my birthday present was that I hiked Trinidad Head--the experience itself (I even got quite close to a young rabbit on the trail) and the fact that at 69, I could still hike up Trinidad Head. That's the best gift.

It's not a climb in any mountain-climbing sense, it doesn't require equipment or training--it's not that kind of accomplishment. It's an ordinary climb--rigorous enough especially at the start, and a workout as the trail winds up. I've been hiking it for about 19 years, though not often enough. And I still can.

 It overlooks the Pacific on one side, and Trinidad Bay on the other. It's quiet and beautiful, and for now, it's available to me.

 That was first thought. The second thought, which came the next day or so, was more complicated. It had to do with success and failure.

 "One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake," Anton Chekhov wrote in a letter. Maybe, but for an American man the basic criteria for success are pretty clear.

You're a success if in your life you make a sufficient living to raise a family, or if you produce work that receives honors and earns you a recognized place among peers as well as some more general community, or preferably both. You can be a success in your life, or a success in your work, or both. You are failure if you accomplish neither.

 I have accomplished neither. The failure is not absolute, I did accomplish something in each area. But not enough really to count me a success by these criteria.

Yet looking back, I have some satisfactions. So the second thought was: if I failed, at least I failed big. That is, the failure (however complete) was not spectacular, but my aspirations were big.

 I was remembering an acquaintance I'd once worked with who I last saw a long time ago in southern California. He showed me a script he'd written for a sitcom then on TV. I never saw him again. Though it appears he had some achievements in the movies and TV, it wasn't as a writer. There are other similar cases I know.

 I made compromises in my working life. But at least I did not try to write scripts for sad sitcoms or pathetic or loathsome movies, and failed. I failed trying to write the most ambitious works, the best works I could dream up, in whatever form. What I failed at was big.


The third thought is perhaps a corollary. If I were to describe, as simply as possible, what I did all my life, I might say, "I made sentences." (Nobody has asked me that question, nor any like it for quite awhile, but at least I have the answer ready.) I also made music, and dreamed up images, wrote dialogue and so on. But basically, in the range of work I did for love, a larger duty and for hire, I made sentences.

 John Banville began his review of books on Emerson this way:"Surely mankind's greatest invention is the sentence." Of course in addition to sentences, I made paragraphs and pages and so on. I thought about and worked at all these forms, but they are basically built with sentences. So I'll make my stand with the sentence.

 And if it is indeed humankind's greatest invention, it matters less what those sentences were about than the fact that I worked at making them the best sentences I could. While trying to lead an honorable life. It was not a bad way to use a life. So I think I'll keep doing it.

On Turning 70 in 2016: How Terribly Strange/Still Crazy

 

Turning 70 is (or used to be) a milestone birthday.  Sometime in the months preceding mine, an old friend got back in touch.  In one of her emails she related what her family did for her brother's 70th birthday, which included an epic poem and a parade.  Now they were planning for her older sister's 70th--my friend and contemporary from college--which would feature a video made for the occasion.

So it was especially jolting when the day of my 70th arrived and I was not even contacted by anyone.  No phone calls, no emails, no cards.  Margaret gave some gifts and took me to dinner at my favorite local Italian restaurant.  But that was it.  

Perhaps that's why I didn't post anything to commemorate it except two videos: one of Simon and Garfunkel singing "Old Times" with that line that chilled us in 1967, "how terribly strange to be seventy."  The other was of Paul Simon's later song, "Still Crazy After All These Years."  I just had no words to add.  So these two songs must stand as my turning 70 statement.

Within a few days both of my sisters wrote to me, relating some serious family events that had been absorbing them. They remembered my birthday, but without any sense that it was a special one.  Only Social Security seemed to think so--I reached full benefits on my 70th.  

My 50th was made special by a party my sisters threw for the family, including my Uncle Carl and Aunt Rose.  There were lots of old family pictures, including several framed for me, and they presented me with a domed tableau (pictured above) in which all the details came from me and my life, especially in Greensburg and Pittsburgh over the past decade or so.  As it was a few months before Margaret and I left for California, it was also a going away party.  It also turned out to be my last birthday celebration not limited to my partner and my pets.  (Though I did have several dinners celebrating our mutual birthdays when my PA friend Mike was visiting my corner of CA. But when his daughter moved from Santa Rosa to Colorado, those visits stopped, shy of my 70th.)

As I turned 70 (judging from notebook entries as well as memories) I was especially in need of recognition.  I'd retired in early May from two little jobs with the university I'd done for ten years, without ceremony or any but the briefest acknowledgement.  Again, within the people I knew, and in the general tenor of the times, this emptiness was simply to be expected (though I hoped to be surprised), and it was a little weird to want anything more. With the worst presidential campaign in history (so far) getting underway, I needed more reassurance than I got.  Apparently the normal thing was that if I wanted anything special for my birthday, I had to initiate it.

With my retirement I expected my local relationships to taper off, but perhaps not as suddenly and thoroughly as they did.  I knew that many were mostly transactional, and once I was no longer in position to be of benefit, they would lessen or disappear.  I realized that locally I was known mostly through my jobs, including my decade stint as a columnist on theatre and occasional feature writer in the local weekly.  Or as Margaret's partner.

 But I was also less inclined to attend public events, such as plays or concerts, since I'd done that so much as part of my jobs.  I lost the taste for it all.  Out of sight, out of mind.

All of this probably added weight to the tendency I was already developing, of turning more and more inward.  My relationship with the world was through imagination and empathy, though of course I still saw people in public, and observed and entered into the natural world in a limited way.  I saw that if I wanted to finish my work, my writing, I would need to concentrate on those inner explorations.  The lack I felt at my 70th mark only deepened this belief, though with some melancholy doubts that worked against such commitments. 

 So the pattern was set for future birthdays: a solo hike up Trinidad Head, and no expectations.

On Turning 71 in 2017: Reporting Yet

My 71st Year

After surmounting three-score and ten,
With all their chances, changes, losses, sorrows,
My parents' deaths, the vagaries of my life, the many tearing
   passions of me, the war of '63 and '4,
As some old broken soldier, after a long, hot, wearying march,
  or haply after battle.
To-day at twilight, hobbling, answering company roll-call,
   Here, with vital voice,
Reporting yet, saluting yet the Officer over all.

Walt Whitman

(When I posted this in 2017 I received a comment on it from a dear friend, Joyce Morgan, who I knew through three last names beginning in high school.  This is what she wrote: you are still here.  your voice is still heard.  your presence brings much to many.)
 

In recent years it's become my tradition to hike the Trinidad Head on my birthday.  It's not the only time I do it, but it's become a ritual of that day.  It's the first time this year though, and the first time since President Obama declared the Trinidad Head a National Monument, along with other features on the Pacific coast.

Hasn't changed anything--the trail is still rocky and narrow, which is reassuring in a way. This year on 30 June it was cloudy but bright when I started, and I could see the fog coming in as I headed up.

By the time I reached my favorite bench, you couldn't see the ocean anymore.  I went on to the top just to make it official.  My windbreaker and glasses were wet by the time I got back down.

A Spanish ship sailed into Trinidad Bay in June 1775, named the place Trinidad because it was the feast of the Trinity, and sailed away.  The Yurok lived near here, and they were left in peace for another 75 years.  But once the 49ers came, it took only a decade or so before their way of life for thousands of years was destroyed forever.  Their descendants are nearby.

On Turning 72 in 2018: I Dwell in Possibility

Returning to my reposts of birthday essays, which will eventually form an almost continuous series of observations, expectations etc. spanning nearly 20 years.  

It was a pretty good 72nd year.  No one close to me died, or came down with a serious illness or injury, though I certainly know people my age with significant health challenges.  The exception is our beloved cat Pema--we're currently nursing her through a terminal illness, making this a sad and anxious time. But as for my health, I'm looking forward to my annual trek up Trinidad Head later today. Yesterday I set my home court record with 7 straight midrange baskets (I can't in good conscience call them "jumpers") and 9 out of 10, before I missed two in a row.

I'm pleased with writing I did this past year, including what amounts to drafts of two short books which I have cleverly hidden within my blogs on the Internet.  My recollections--first of books, but especially of my senior year of college fifty years ago-- went very well, by my own lights anyway.  The process was fascinating. Reclaiming context through factual research seemed to evoke and free memories, some of which came to me in the act of writing.

Lately I've had episodes of visual memories, which have been rare before now. I'm not good at visualization.  "Imagine yourself on a beautiful beach" etc. has never worked for me as a meditation or relaxation technique, for example, if it depends on seeing it.  But lately, visual memories have come almost unbidden, and once I've had them (usually on the edge of sleep but not always), they more or less remain accessible.

The past, both culturally and personally, remains my focus, my fireplace (which is what "focus" means.)  I'm interested in depth, reiteration, a more thorough exploration, rather than new places and experiences.  Fortunately I don't have to defend that choice.  "Don't Want To, Don't Need To, Can't Make Me, I'm Retired."

At the same time, I am exploring new ideas, though they tend to be more like going farther along a path I darted down for awhile before.  Some of these bear upon that other area of concern, the future.

The future has looked dark many times in my life, probably most times.  But there was always an idea or two that suggested the possibility of light coming into being. That is less so now.

The newest ideas I'm still learning about are actually 20 or 30 years old.  It was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, for example, that the scientific ideas informing the Gaia hypothesis were percolating.  Its basis was formulated even earlier, in the late 1960s when I was in college (but it was so unorthodox that it never would have been mentioned in a science class.)  In studying the atmosphere of the planet Mars, James Lovelock discovered that the physics and chemistry of that planet predicted what it was like.  But the physics and chemistry of Earth does not describe its actual atmosphere.  There is another element determining and regulating Earth's atmosphere, and keep its temperature fairly constant despite changes in the heat coming from the sun.   That element is life.

The Earth is self-organizing and self-regulating through its specific lifeforms. Living systems, from the smallest bacteria to the entire surface and atmosphere, self-maintain.  That makes the Earth a single system, and by some definitions,  a kind of organism.

The implications were vast, and go beyond ecology--the study of the Earth as our home--to the study of the Earth as our body.  The idea of Gaia was an immediate magnet for various New Age enthusiasts but in the late 1980s, William Irwin Thompson and the Lindisfarne Association published a couple of collections of essays derived from conferences the Association had held since the early eighties. (Gaia: A Way of Knowing, and Gaia 2: Emergence).

The authors were serious people, including James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, the scientist who helped him develop the hypothesis, as well visionary cybernetic pioneer Gregory Bateson, visionary neurobiologist Franciso Varela, physicist Arthur Zajonc, botanist and popular writer Wes Jackson, economist and futurist Hazel Henderson and W.I Thompson himself, who promoted the idea that Gaia could be the guiding idea of cultural transformation in the 1990s.

As far as I can tell, there didn't turn out to be a guiding idea of cultural transformation in the 1990s, nor do I know of any guiding idea since.  At best, some segments of society sort of caught up to ecological ideas of the 1960s and 70s.  Others got sidetracked by computer technology to contemplate bogus ideas like "the singularity" or just got sucked into the social media vacuum.

But lately I have been reading Slanted Truths, a book of the mid-90s, a somewhat shaped collection of essays by Lynn Margulis and her son Dorion Sagan. (He is also the son of Carl Sagan, and has taken on his father's job of popularizing science, though he's much more his mother's son in the science he attempts to popularize.)

Their essays were mostly published separately in periodicals and are often repetitive (which is actually good, since the ideas are still new and the science unfamiliar) so it is an immersive experience.  (These writings are however more coherent than either of the authors speaking: Dorion does not have his father's skills and both are pretty unorganized in the events YouTube has preserved, though Margulis is nevertheless magnetic and occasionally mesmerizing.)

Margulis herself transformed life sciences by concentrating on microorganisms, and showing the crucial role they played in evolution.  She also showed that these are the organisms upon which Gaia's ability to self-regulate depend, more than any other.  Bacteria is the essential lifeform to maintain the life of planet Earth, including its atmosphere.

I am reading this in the context of a year in which it seems that the collapse of civilization within the next century, and perhaps the fall of the American Republic much sooner, seems more and more likely.  On a somewhat longer timeline, the fate of the human species is in question.  If the climate crisis and mass extinction are as bad as they seem they will be, homo sapiens may be facing enough reduction that extinction is possible.  In a previous climate crisis, homo sapiens were down to perhaps 2500 beings in one small location.  Coming back depends on how extensive the changes are, and for how long.  Nuclear weapons complicate this further.

Mass extinctions may wipe out all large mammals and perhaps too many keystone species we don't even know about.  But the ultimate threat to life seems to depend on what happens to the oceans, and whether we end up killing them.

Margulis and Sagan leave me with at least this hope for the future of life: that bacteria are likely to endure and adapt, and since from them in time came all of the species we know, they can just start again.  Raccoons or rats or even ants may be faster to develop but then, does the planet want to go through all this again?  I sometimes wonder whether a species that invented helicopter gunships even deserves to survive.  Maybe evolution will settle next time on a scenario like that in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Galapagos, in which descendants of humans are more like porpoises, who frolic in pools with fins, incapable of building anything.

For the near future, Gaia offers some possibility of offsetting the worst effects of global heating, in that we don't understand exactly how life regulates the atmosphere.  Perhaps that self-regulation can overcome excessive global heating, although it seems there is unlikely to be enough time to adapt.  But maybe.

Which suggest another source of hope: our ignorance.  We think we know a lot, but all we've learned are a few limited mechanisms and how to do some stuff, mostly through trial and error.  We've just done too much of it, on too large a scale. Because in part there are too many of us.

In fact we know almost nothing about our world and our universe.  Steven Wright used to joke: "I bought a packet of powdered water but I don't know what to add to it."  We don't really even know what water is.  We certainly can't make the stuff.

We've made up all these categories and theories that soon reach their limits, though we insist they are universal, they are "laws."  Science has at least acknowledged that Newtonian physics doesn't apply in all realms. (And that's because we know how to do some stuff using the math of quantum mechanics, but we have no idea why they work.)  It took recent scientists like Lynn Margulis to begin showing that Darwinian evolution in its traditional definition doesn't apply to everything alive, or even to the origin of species.

Margulis and other microbiologists also showed that many of the assumptions made about how life works in general was based only on larger lifeforms: animals and plants.  But many of those "rules" don't apply to microorganisms such as bacteria.  Either these rules operated in a limited field or they are generally mistaken.

We use definitions as tools and then get captured by our definitions.  The most interesting philosophical essay I read this year, by Galen Strawson, suggests that the conundrum of consciousness as a non-physical phenomenon may lie in a restricted definition of "physical."   The universes of the very small and the very large have shot down a lot of our middle-range assumptions and definitions.  With dark matter, dark energy and all the other more or less theoretical aspects of the universe, exactly what "physical" means is (or should be) in doubt.

So maybe there's something we'll learn that we can't now foresee, something that will make enough of a difference to avoid catastrophe.

For those younger than me who will live in the future, hope is a daily commitment to make things better.  Hope isn't what you feel, it's what you do.  For me, looking at a future that extends beyond imagination, I am buoyed by possibilities we can begin to imagine but can't quite imagine, way beyond anything fantasized in Silicon Valley.

So I greet the beginning of my 73rd year with a poem by Emily Dickinson.  She was a favorite of Lynn Margulis (though admittedly not of mine)--I saw a line of this one that was sort of quoted by Dorion Sagan.  The whole poem however is what I want to say:

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –

Origins: "The Holidays", Christmas and New Year's

 

If you were a Catholic during the first two centuries of Christianity and you wanted to celebrate the birth of Jesus, you would be committing a sin and would go straight to hell.

That's because the Church fathers were emphasizing Christ's divinity and not his humanity.  Besides, no one knew (or much cared) when that birth happened.  The Biblical accounts point to spring, but it was kind of so what.

Then by the late third century the Christian church was large and influential enough to challenge the Roman gods, competing with the contemporary cult of the sun god Mithras, imported from Persia and popular enough to be declared the official religion of the Roman Empire.  It celebrated the birth of Mithras, or Natalis Solis Invicti, with a good long festival centered on December 25.

 It just happened to be about then that the Church got interested in Christ's birth, and more or less arbitrarily declared it was--surprising coincidence!--on December 25.  It took awhile but Christmas began to be celebrated throughout the Empire by the fourth century, when the Roman emperor Constantine was baptized a Christian.  

This December date is roughly that of the winter solstice, long a traditional time for ritual and celebration (including in surviving Indigenous cultures), as the days start to get longer, announcing the coming birth of spring.  In my life it was my Uncle Carl who explained the solstices and equinoxes to me--the nuns teaching me in school never mentioned them, possibly because such knowledge still seemed darkly pagan.

Like those of most holidays, Christmas customs are a mishmash of approximated traditions from many cultures in many eras, often shorn of their original meanings. But an impressive number of them are pretty recent--from the nineteenth century to the World War II era and beyond--especially the songs.  

When I was a child in the 1950s, we used to hear Gene Autry's original recording of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" on the radio--it was a poem devised as an advertisement for Montgomery Ward department stores that was set to music in 1949 and became a massive hit for him.  It has since sold more records that any song except Bing Crosby's "White Christmas," which itself was written in 1942 by Irving Berlin for the Crosby movie "Holiday Inn."

That's me in 1951, defending my sister
Kathy in my new Hopalong outfit

Crosby had another Christmas hit the next year with "I'll Be Home for Christmas," very definitely a World War II song. "The Christmas Song" ("Chestnuts roasting on an open fire...) is from 1945. 

Though Perry Como had a bigger hit with it in 1953, Gene Autry followed up his Rudolph bonanza with "Frosty the Snowman" in 1950, and I used to see the animated accompaniment to the song on WJAC-TV in Johnstown;  the station puts it on the air every Christmastime to this day. 

  "It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas" is from 1951, with its specific reference to the first television star to generate product lines, the cowboy hero Hopalong Cassidy.

Even the venerable "Jingle Bells" is from the mid-nineteenth century, but for years it was simply one of many songs of that era about sleigh rides, and was first performed in minstrel shows.  It took at least a decade or two before it became associated with Christmas.  Now it is perhaps the most familiar Christmas song in the world.

Rudolph's origin in advertising wasn't unique.  Advertisers were mighty drivers of Christmas imagery for obvious reasons.  They were also apparently responsible for changing the expression "the holidays" from referring to school vacations in the summer to the Christmas to New Years period (and conveniently so, for this was before the non-Christian holidays such as Hanukkah and Kwanza were widely included in general public perception.)  The earliest example of "Happy Holidays" imagery appears to be a 1937 ad for Camel cigarettes.

When I was a kid in the 50s, the holidays were really "the holidays"--they extended past New Years.  I notice here in Arcata these days that holiday decorations go up early (I saw Halloween decorations in late September), which is of course how retail stores and related businesses have done it for decades--get in the spirit (and the spending) early.  But Christmas decorations are often taken down even before New Years.  In my childhood we didn't decorate until the week before or even the week of Christmas.  In some families it was traditional to trim the tree on Christmas Eve or maybe the day before that.  

Christmas itself was for children, and the close family gathered on the Eve and the Day.  But after that it was more for the adults.  Certain pastries and other foods and certainly drinks came out that weren't around at other times of the year.  And then the visiting commenced.  Close family again sometimes, but mostly more distant relations and my parents' friends and their families would visit us or we would visit them, or both.  These could be my mother's old friends from high school (who were often related to us somehow anyway) or my father's current and past work colleagues, and then later those of my mother's when she started working in hospital administration.  They weren't the most fun times for me but they were memorable--my chance to observe adults in their natural environment.

This would go on past New Years, and the decorations would stay up until early January.  It was a long Christian tradition to take them down on Twelfth Night (which is what they called January 5 in England), the night before the feast of the Epiphany, or the visit of the Magi. We weren't that exact, but it usually was around then.  Maybe sooner, if the Christmas tree was drying out and shedding needles.  It's worth noting that commercial activity was at a low ebb after Christmas then, until perhaps the January White Sales.  So they really were the holidays.

Like Christmas, New Years traditions are a cultural hodgepodge.  But there are some revealing origins, mostly associated with the new year as celebrated in the spring. January 1 became the first of the new year with the introduction of the Julian calendar in Rome, but wasn't firmly established throughout the world until the universal adoption of the Gregorian calendar, which took centuries.

But because the new year had been celebrated nearer the March equinox, many traditions were associated with crops and their fertility.   Next to the Fourth of July, New Year's Eve is the holiday most associated with making noise, including explosions.  This tradition was originally to scare away the demons that destroyed crops, especially with diseases.  

On the other hand, some new year traditions were to encourage growth.  The tradition of wassail, a hot drink with alcoholic properties, was part of ancient Anglo-Dane and Anglo-Saxon holiday rites.  In some areas of England, the tradition was all about conviviality, and was associated with Christmas. But at least in one region it was part of another ritual.  Some sources say it was a Twelfth Night ritual, but Henry David Thoreau writes about it in detail (in his essay "Wild Apples") and associates one part of it with New Year's.

In Thoreau's account, the drink was an apple cider, and was used in a rite to encourage apple trees to be fruitful.  It would be shared with the trees on Christmas Eve, and people would dance around it and chant a particular song, to call for a bountiful harvest.  Then on New Year's Eve, in another ritual of noise, a group of boys would visit apple orchards and engage in what was called "apple howling" to encourage the trees, and once again perform a chant while circling them. They also rapped on the trees with sticks, which was called "wassailing," according to Thoreau.  

A New Year's tradition of the Iroquois in America, still existing when Europeans arrived, was to build a huge bonfire and throw their possessions into it, so it would literally be a new year.