It seemed odd, even to me, that after posts (or, let's face it, essays) on major and not so major birthdays for the past 20 years, I let turning 80 go by without a word. The reason is that despite recognizing that this was a big deal, I had nothing in particular to say. At my 79th birthday, I seemed to be searching for models of how to be 80. But there are no models of how to be 80 now, for my generation. We are it. I think my reticence came from feeling that models were irrelevant. I am myself at 80. I have choices within that, but this is simply the reality I am living.
I turned 80 in June. Margaret turned 80 in September. She is my partner in this reality we are living. My friend Mike turned 80 in August. He came out here to California from Pennsylvania for a week, returning on my birthday. We did my annual walk up Trinidad Head together. We'd been together around major birthdays since our 60th. We're still here. Everybody isn't. Mike and I were also friends with Clayton, who died last year. We'd known each other since high school (I'd known Clayton since 3rd grade), and the three of us had played together in a musical group for a few years. Mike and I sang some of our old songs, including some that Clayton and I wrote together.
In September, someone from our high school class contacted Mike and invited him to a kind of group birthday party for members of our class who also turned 80. It was in Greensburg, where our high school was and is. He couldn't make it but afterwards she sent him photos. He didn't recognize anyone. She then sent him names, and matched some to the photos. He forwarded them all to me.
I recognized many of the names. There was Carol C. who I saw a lot at the Mountain View Hotel swimming pool one summer when my mother got me a membership. There was Linda P. who I used to call up for awhile and talk to, the first step to dating. I never took the next step. I probably didn't know what it was. I remember Mary Ann H. who provoked our English teacher Sister C. to flee the classroom when she quoted John Lennon in her oral presentation: "Women should be obscene and not heard." And there were some guys there I knew as casual friends. I have more or less fond memories of all of them, and it's interesting that there are at least this many of us still around.
But I didn't recognize any of them in the pictures either, and I tried. Not even with their names. We all just look like old people. I also felt, staring at these pictures, that I wouldn't have fit in at this party, just as I barely fit in while in high school. I was back in Greensburg for nearly ten years from the late 70s to the 80s, and all of them presumably were around, but I never saw any of them. Except Carol D., the hostess of the party. I was there when my book was published, and I had a couple of reasonably publicized book signings--an event admittedly alien to anyone in Greensburg then. None of them showed up, nor did anyone else from high school. Mostly friends of my mother (though they didn't go so far as to buy a book.) But I did see Carol D. walk by me at one, without a glance in my direction. Kind of like high school.
But even so, I was more social in high school than I am now. And I was for most of my life, at least before moving here. A lot of that was at least slightly forced, out of loneliness and longing. But much of it was just human interaction and shared activities. Then when I came out here I stopped going to bars, first because of the smoking and then because I wasn't drinking. Here my social time got taken up with transactional events and relationships as part of or derived from work, as often happens. Then retirement, the pandemic, and the masks.
It's kind of usual for relationships to drop away as we get old. Friends and family members die, or are far away. Transactional relationships end when the reasons for the transactions end, which is usually the job. To younger people we become what we look like-- just anonymous old people, of no individual interest. It's not entirely that we're treated as having the bad taste to not have died by now, but it's something like that.
Fortunately for me, I've always cultivated inner resources. I'm an introvert, so becoming something of a hermit just means more peace and quiet. I've recently replaced my flip-phone with a so-called smart phone, but I don't get any more calls or texts from real people than I did before. The phone mostly stays in the drawer, or in a pocket when I go out. I am very wary of what reliance on them has done to attention spans--I never would have believed it, but all the evidence and experience confirms it is true. I want to keep reading long books, and slow poems.
I am also very fortunate in that I still have a good memory for the past. I've explored my past for years, so most of my memories are of memories I've already had, and in many cases written down. But I occasionally get a new one, as when on a visit back to Greensburg my friend Joyce (from high school and many years after) told me one of her memories of me--of how I went out in a snowstorm to pick up medicine for her young daughter when she was sick. This was in the 1980s. I did not immediately remember it, but one day I just recalled it--her phone call, my walk through the beautiful falling snow in the night, down to Paul's Pharmacy and over to Joyce's house, because the roads were just too bad to drive and I knew I would love the walk anyway.
I usually have a book that I can associate with a particular birthday but I didn't have one for 80 until recently. Once again (as it was for my 72nd) it is a book by Dorion Sagan (son of one of the most important scientists of the 20th century, Lynn Margulis, and the definition of a scientist icon, Carl Sagan.) It's his deceptively dull-titled Notes From The Holocene published in 2008. In terms of the breadth of its ideas, I see it further along the continuum of books like Ed Yong's An Immense World and James Bridle's Ways of Being (which I wrote about here), as well as the earlier work of James Lovelock and both his parents.
Yong and Bridle showed that we know very little about how animals and plants experience and influence the world, and Sagan takes that further to the level of microorganisms and chemicals, but back up to the idea of a living organism we call Earth. Apart from expanding my purview, it reinforces the sense I got from those other books: a mandatory humility. Here is Sagan:
"The vast complexity of Earth's environment, like the ultimate nature of the universe, eludes simple human minds; perhaps our cognitive lack, our finally coming up short, in trying to find the grand design or story, is a structural necessity. We are only a miniscule part of the vast colossus we examine. To even begin to comprehend that which contains us, and so much more, we caricature, simplify, and distort."
Hubris is so human, and so silly. And yet, I am reminded in this regard as in so many others in my daily life, of something my grandmother often said in her 80s: "We do the best we can."
Another book I'm reading (or actually re-reading) now is one in a series of police procedurals set in Venice starring Commissario Guido Brunetti and written by Donna Leon, that in the past few years have become my favorite comfort reading. In A Sea of Troubles, Leon uncharacteristically steps back for a moment to sum up Brunetti's character. "Incapable by both nature and inclination of worshipping at the altar of the bitch goddess, Success, Brunetti had more modest desires. He was a man of short views, interested in the here, the now, the concrete. He left larger goals and desires to others, contenting himself with smaller ones: a happy family, a decent life, the attempt to do his job as well as he could. It seemed to him little enough to ask of life, and he settled for those hopes."
That's pretty much where I find myself. I've written in earlier birthday accounts of my fixation on the future, and how frustrating that's become. I maintain an interest, and I keep listening to people like Kim Stanley Robinson talk about it in practical terms (these days he's defining Utopia as getting to the end of this century without fully plunging into a mass extinction event.) But I feel in concert with my age, for the future belongs to others, and though I offer what I can, it's up to them to consider it. What's left to me is a deeper present. Even though my present has within it my memories, which emerge whether I want them to or not (Paul McCartney calls this "the ever-present past") and my concerns and imaginings for the future, including the lost futures of my youth, I feel more comfortable--and more appropriate-- foregrounding the here and now.
"Life is what you do everyday," Jim Harrison wrote, and I find myself living more in that everyday. I don't need a conceptual context in which to experience it. I simply am living it. Maybe a little more consciously, and a little more fully. For instance, I am more aware of how much I like the feel of wool, and corduroy. I value in every way the moments I sit on our comfortable old leather couch next to Margaret, with our dog Howdy between us.
We have our age-related problems, and spend more time and resources than we'd like in the bizarre corridors of the healthcare complex; and our days include news of people we know in deeper trouble, and falling away. Of course we worry, we fret, we sadly see our devolving society, and I miss the birds that have already disappeared. But we have a lot of good moments. And we do the best we can.
