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.
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