On Turning 79 in 2025

Top of Trinidad Head June 30, 2025. My climb dedicated to my friend Mike and to the
memory of Jim Harrison

On one of his birthdays, writer Jim Harrison pointed out that he was exactly one day older than he was the day before. That’s one interesting perspective on a birthday’s significance, and here is another: for the next year after my birthday I will give my age as 79, but in fact that birthday marked the end of my 79^th year of life after birth (or as adherents of some belief systems would say, of this life). The moment after the anniversary of my birth, I will be living in my 80^th year.

So it’s not too early to consider this threshold. For all of my childhood and adolescence, I did not know anyone as old as 80. All but one of my great-grandparents were dead when I was born, and the last great-grandfather died when I was 4, and he was 79. (Though he lived nearby, I don’t believe we ever set eyes on one another.)

My three surviving grandparents and those in their generation I always thought of as old, but they were mostly in their 50s and 60s when I was a child.

My grandmother and me 1972 when she was 76 and I was 26.

My grandmother Severini turned 80 the year I turned 30. She’s my only real experience with that age. I happened to be nearby for most of her 80s, and spent a fair amount of time with her. The family stories she told me (or repeated from earlier years) I used much later in my Severini Saga.

That was my last frequent, sustained contact with anyone in their 80s. I saw my Uncle Carl on visits to PA a few times in his 80s, and was in touch with him by email especially in the last year or two of his life in his early 90s. I was in touch by phone and email with my Uncle Bill in his last year—he was 96.

Most of the conversations with all of them involved them talking about the past. It was fascinating first of all to hear what they remembered and what they didn’t. But the information, the feeling of their time, added depth to my life. It was I think an important and a satisfying experience for both of us.

For our past and what we recall, what we’ve learned from our experiences and observations are reflected in our stories, and our stories are increasingly what we have left to give as we grow older.

But the young (a category that now encompasses almost everybody) have to be ready to receive those stories. I marvel with some chagrin how uninterested I was in my parents’ lives, and then it was too late. It seems we must ourselves have a past we recognize as such, before we become interested in the pasts of others.

My grandmother got through some of my cognitive blindness by being a beguiling storyteller. And I was in a sense a captive audience. She did not hesitate to evoke my guilt and shame to ensure that I visited her often. She arranged endless memorial Masses for my mother so my sisters and I would dutifully attend, and of course go by her house afterward.

I am too distant from the younger generations of my family and too diffident to insist on their attention. I’ve taken on the work of telling my stories, of writing what I remember and what I know, to pass on to younger people by making them available, mostly on the Internet, so they can find them whenever they are ready to receive them. That’s as much purpose as I can find that gives me pleasure enough that I actually do it, however incompletely.

Of course at this age it is more comfortable to spend time with the past than to focus on the future. Apart from the mysteriously timed but inevitable denouement, we face at minimum a gradual decline in health and energy, so our days—and nights—can become at best a less than predictable adventure. So the present demands its attention—bad moments definitely, but with effort, good moments, too.

In these times it is good to have old friends to talk with about the new things happening to us. Besides my very-slightly-younger life partner, I have an even more slightly-younger friend I’ve known since high school. Our phone conversations are becoming paradigms of old people cliches in the greater proportion of time we spend each successive year on comparing health notes. At least we’re not competitive about it (“you think that’s bad, the pain in my...etc.”), the basis of comic bits about old people from at least vaudeville times.

And we are aware of the increasingly strange and threatening context around us, a world that no longer seems to be ours. He and I were partners in high school debating something called “medical care for the aged,” around the time that early Medicare began in 1965. Now not only Medicare and Medicaid are needlessly and cruelly endangered, but the generation-older Social Security. This being only the most specific anxieties, as we are forced to watch a painfully built protective context being angrily dismantled, with cruelty, brutality and contempt for the non-rich as official policy maniacally pursued.

It’s hard also not to notice that this society has blithely accepted (by blithely forgetting or denying them) over a million deaths of mostly older Americans from Covid, which continue with thousands a month. You might get the idea that what old people are expected to do is die, as soon as possible.

Assimilating the past adds depth to the present, but telling our stories from our past can also be a link to the future, and to the young. I usually have a book or two that inform my birthday thoughts. This time it is Horizon by Barry Lopez, which is the summary and final of his many books.

I’ve read several of his earlier books in the past year, including the best known: Arctic Dreams. Though I’ve had some of his books around for years, I did not appreciate until recently that he is one of the best, the greatest writers of my times. (When at the age of 80 Bill Moyers decided to retire from TV, he carefully selected his last interview for his Bill Moyers Journal. It was with Barry Lopez.)

At some point I grazed YouTube for any interviews and events Lopez did that might be preserved there. The first I came upon was at the end of his book tour for Horizon in 2019, and he began his talk with an urgent message. “Hell is coming,” he said. “Not hell with a small h, not something we’re going to solve with technology, or certainly not an election. It’s coming, and we have to figure out how to take care of each other...and provide for our children and grandchildren, so that they have the opportunities to exercise imagination that we have had. Then maybe we have a prayer.”

“If you’re looking for something to do in the time of climate change and ocean acidification and methane gas pouring out of the tundra, and [the Sixth Extinction]: Make common cause with young people.”

They can use the experience that their elders can communicate to help them tell the stories and find greater imagination to apply to addressing what’s coming very soon, he said. They need to imagine not what is pushing us into the future, but what is calling them into the future.

Others reaching my age have grandchildren and perhaps even great-grandchildren with whom they have ongoing personal relationships. I do not. My grandmother in her last years had a mantra: “We do the best we can.” Partly because I didn’t know anyone past 80, and partly because—thanks to the hydrogen bomb, the military industrial complex, the poisoning of the planet and its effects on health, as well as my dubious earning ability—I never expected to reach 79. But I have, in relatively good shape it seems.

So even with what seems like fewer good hours in my day, and more time and attention taken by health matters, an old introvert night owl hermit like me can do what wants to be doing. In my case it’s the same old, same old. I make sentences.

I often post a poem on my birthday.  Here is this year's, by Jim Harrison.

 

The other boot doesn’t drop from heaven.

 I’ve made this path and nobody else

 leading crookedly up through the pasture

 where I’ll never reach the top of Antelope Butte.

 It is here where my mind begins to learn

 my heart’s language on this endless wobbly path,

 veering south and north

 informed by my all-too-vivid dreams

 which are a compass without a needle.

 Today the gods speak in drunk talk

 pulling at a heart too old for this walk,

 a cold windy day kneeling at the mouth

 of the snake den where they killed 800 rattlers.

 Moving higher my thumping chest recites the names of a dozen friends

 who have died in recent years,

 names now incomprehensible as the mountains

 across the river far behind me.

 I’ll always be walking up toward Antelope Butte.

 Perhaps when we die our names are taken

 from us by a divine magnet and are free

 to flutter here and there within the bodies

 of birds. I’ll be a simple crow

 who can reach the top of Antelope Butte.

--Jim Harrison

Very recently, researching the writers who clustered in Key West in the early 1970s for my latest "History of My Reading" post, I watched on You Tube a film made about them.  Jim Harrison was one of them, but he'd died before the film was made.  Towards the end of the film, writer Tom McGuane, his close friend in Key West and elsewhere, read the first part of this poem to the camera.  Then suddenly his voice overlapped with Jim Harrison reading the rest of the poem, filmed evidently for a PBS segment years earlier.  He was standing in front of Antelope Butte in Montana.  

As I looked and listened, I noticed the orange logo on his t-shirt, which looked familiar.  And then I looked down at myself: the orange logo was on the pocket of the dark blue long-sleeved t-shirt I was wearing as I watched, the exact replica of Jim Harrison's.  So this was another reason this poem seemed appropriate for my 79th birthday.

Harrison was 79 in 2016 when he died from a heart attack--instantly, according to his daughter--with pen in hand, while writing a poem.  Not the worst way for a writer to go.  By then he'd known his heart was weakened, as the poem indicates.  Besides becoming a simple crow, he also had wished to be reincarnated as a tree.  

The Morning

Would I love it this way if it could last

 would I love it this way if it

 were the whole sky the one heaven

 or if I could believe it belonged to me

 a possession that was mine alone

 or if I imagined that it noticed me

 recognized me and may have come to see me

 out of all the mornings that I never knew

 and all those that I have forgotten

 would I love it this way if I were somewhere else

 or if I were younger for the first time

or if these very birds were not singing

 or I could not hear them or see their trees

 would I love it this way if I were in pain

 red torment of body or gray void of grief

 would I love it this way if I knew

 that I would remember anything that is

 here now anything anything

 --W.S. Merwin

Happy Holidays

Rhyme For This Past Weekend Plus

Buy, buy, said the sign in the shop window,

Why, why said the junk in the yard.

Paul McCartney

"Junk" 

Choosing

Choosing

Was it home or foreign

 that city without color

 where I once lived for a time

 that often seemed long

 thinking there was no choice 

and all night I heard the captive

 lions roaring

 now I look back

 from when the rain is falling

 in the bright day

 a friend and I

 talked back then about a tree

 whose branches were the choice that we

 had not taken

 then she chose not to be

 never was there any such tree

 better

 the sound of the rain

 better the brightness falling

 better the day

 choosing to be morning

--W.S. Merwin

photo: Henri Cartier Bresson

The Way It Is

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among

 things that change. But it doesn’t change.

 People wonder about what you are pursuing.

 You have to explain about the thread.

 But it is hard for others to see.

 While you hold it you can’t get lost. 

Tragedies happen; people get hurt

 or die; and you suffer and get old.

 Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.

 You don’t ever let go of the thread.

 --William Stafford 

 Just after my 75th seems a good time to post this poem (together with this scene from my  childhood), which expresses a guiding principle of my life and (as it turns out) my lifetime.

How It Happens

How It Happens

 The sky said I am watching

 to see what you

 can make out of nothing

 I was looking up and I said

 I thought you 

were supposed to be doing that

 the sky said Many

 are clinging to that 

I am giving you a chance

 I was looking up and I said

 I am the only chance I have 

then the sky did not answer

 and here we are 

with our names for the days

 the vast days that do not listen to us

— W. S. Merwin

 “In Blake, we recover our original state, not by returning to it, but by re-creating it. The act of creation is not producing something out of nothing, but the act of setting free what we already possess.” --Northrup Frye

Photo: Trinidad Head June 30, 2021

Once Later

 It is not until later
 that you have to be young

 it is one of those things
you meant to do later

 but by then there is
 someone else living there

 with the shades rolled down
 how could you have been young there

 at that time
with all that was expected

 then what happened to
 the expectations

 there is no sign of them there
a shadow passes across the window shade

 what do they know in there
 whoever they are

  W.S. Merwin

The top image is a recent real estate photo taken in the back of the house where I grew up just outside Greensburg, PA.  The window to the left is to the room that had been my bedroom.  While I was in college, my parents took this window out, installed a door, and turned the room into a den.  At some point--probably not long ago-- a new owner took out the door and replaced the window, returning the room to being a bedroom.  You can see how the bricks are newer under the window.  So in this way, it is more as it was when I grew up there than it has been since. The wood deck is new as well--it had been a brick patio-- and judging from the wood and bricks piled in the photo, all this was done recently when the photo was taken several years ago. The real estate photos of the inside are interesting.  They show what has survived and what hasn't.  They also suggest that no children have lived here recently.  I don't think it has been a family home anymore.

I see that I've posted this poem here before, but it means even more to me when paired with this picture.

Another Blue Voice

Trinidad Ca 2008 BK Photo

This poem happens to contain this blog's name within in.  I'm not aware of having read the poem before I named the blog, which was a very long time ago in Internet years.  That's even though it happens to be by probably my favorite poet, William Stafford. I present it here now as a way to rededicate this blog, which I've neglected.  But it's always been my favorite blog, though I am apparently its only faithful reader. Here's the poem.

Sky

I like you with nothing.  Are you
what I was?  What I will be?
I look out there by the hour,
so clear, so sure, I could
smile, or frown--still nothing.

Be my father, be my mother,
great sleep of blue; reach
far within me; open doors,
find whatever is hiding; invite it
for many clear days in the sun.

When I turn away I know
you are there.  We won't forget
each other: every look is a promise.
Others can't tell what you say
when it's the blue voice, when
you come to the window and look for me.

Your word arches over
the roof of all day.  I know it
within my bowed head, where
the other sky listens.
You will bring me
everything when the time comes.

---William Stafford

Now Is Later

Once Later

It is not until later
that you have to be young

it is one of those things
you meant to do later

but by then there is
someone else living there

with the shades rolled down
how could you have been young there

at that time
with all that was expected

then what happened to
the expectations

there is no sign of them there
a shadow passes across the window shade

what do they know in there
whoever they are

W.S. Merwin
published in New York Review of Books
May 7,2015

"He had to choose. But it was not a choice
Between excluding things. It was not a choice
Between, but of. He chose to include the things
That in each other are included, the whole,
The complicate, the amassing harmony."
--Wallace Stevens
Notes Towards A Supreme Fiction

William Stafford, August 1993

A generous spirit pours through the luminous lines of his poetry. William Stafford wrote a poem just about every day. One of his many books, There's A Thread That You Follow, is comprised of poems he wrote in 1993, with the dates of their composition. He was 79 that year, ten years ago.

There are poems that evoke place, and a few that are savage in their politically charged commentary, as the one he wrote in June

Somewhere up there God has poised
the big answer to the new doctrine
written all over this country in concrete
by the corporation everyone has bought into
that leads to where the minotaur waits,

Waits just over there by the new mall,
or at the end of your carefully planned
university course, your Moloch Award,
your honors, your degree fastened like
a dogtag around your neck for life...

It so happened that in 1993, a slim volume of his poems selected by Robert Bly appeared. In his introduction, Bly used as a theme an image in a poem by William Blake that he and Stafford had discussed in a public conversation that was videotaped. Blake's lines are:

I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven's gate
Built in Jerusalem's wall.

Bly wrote that he asked Stafford, "Do you believe that every golden thread will lead us through Jerusalem's wall, or do you love particular threads?" He replied, "No, every thread."

A reviewer noted that in the tape Stafford points out that every thread leads to a poem, not just the good ones--if you don't pull them too hard. Bly replies, "I hear you."

There are ten poems in There's A Thread That You Follow that Stafford wrote in August 1993, including one of his most famous---perhaps the quintessential Stafford poem. It was evidently written after the discussion with Bly and probably after Bly's book of Stafford's poems went to press. He wrote it on August 2. I can't think of a poem that means as much to me as this one does.

The Way It Is

There's a thread that you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you can do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread.


In the book, there are three short poems written on August 25, one on the 26th, one on the 27th, and then a slightly longer one on August 28, 1993.

"Are You Mr. William Stafford?"

"Are you Mr. William Stafford?"
"Yes, but..."

Well, it was yesterday.
Sunlight used to follow my hand.
And that's when the strange siren-like sound flooded
over the horizon and rushed through the streets of our town.
That's when sunlight came from behind
a rock and began to follow my hand.

"It's for the best," my mother said---"Nothing can
ever be wrong for anyone truly good."
So later the sun settled back and the sound
faded and was gone. All along the streets every
house waited, white, blue, gray; trees
were still trying to arch as far as they could.

You can't tell when strange things with meaning
will happen. I'm [still] here writing it down
just the way it was. "You don't have to
prove anything," my mother said. "Just be ready
for what God sends." I listened and put my hand
out in the sun again. It was all easy.

Well, it was yesterday. And the sun came,
Why
It came.


Across the top of the poem he wrote to his wife, "with all my love." He didn't usually do that. Then he went into the kitchen to help her make dinner. A few minutes later, on August 28, 1993, William Stafford died.