As I entered the murky zone between middle and old age, I came up with a slogan: “If not now, when?” Meaning, I should go-be-do while I’m still hale and hearty. Specifically, that meant more hiking and biking.
Results have been mixed. Yes, I hike and bike. But I also still work – by choice. And do household chores, as one must.
What I mostly do, though, when the cooking and cleaning and yardwork are done (and often when they’re not) is futz around. As in: stare at screens, whether those screens are showing me word puzzles, baseball games or TV shows.
You would think that as my peers increasingly regale me with “organ recitals,” I would develop a sense of urgency. Soon enough, I know, I’ll have infirmities of my own to sing of. Yet they still feel as far off as they did before my hair went white.
Maybe the urgent mindset isn’t the best response to the sands seeping out of the hourglass. Taken out of context, as it usually is, the poet Mary Oliver’s question – “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” – sounds like an invitation to compose a bucket list. But before she gets to that famous last line, she spends half the poem contemplating a grasshopper.
Climb Kilimanjaro, if you must. Swim with sea turtles. Jump from a plane. The usual thrills and chills.
Sunita Puri, a palliative care physician, recently offered some late-life advice more in keeping with what Oliver had in mind. Forget bucket lists, Puri wrote. “Think about how you spent the last six months. What and who brought you fulfillment and joy?”
OK:
January: My trip to Oregon to see my daughter and her family. After a 4:30 a.m. airport run, I tried to nap. Penelope, 6, and Beatrice, 3, weren’t having it. They burst through the door and dove on top of me. Highlight of my visit.
So: More family time, please.
May: Gene Foreman’s 90th birthday celebration. After an illustrious career as the managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer (while he and his wife JoAnn raised five kids of their own and foster-parented 11 more), Gene came to Penn State to teach journalism. Now he’s in his second retirement, a time when those who worked with him could be forgiven for forgetting he’s still around.
No one has. The guest list for the party numbered in the mid-300s. The tributes to his kindness and his integrity would make a modest man blush. Gene is a modest man.
Saturdays with Irvin: I arrive at 9, bearing breakfast sandwiches. For the next 90 minutes, Irvin Moore tells me about his youth, his 52 years in prison and his life since prison. Given a fresh start at the age of 75, Irvin is the most joyful person I know. Who wouldn’t want to be around that?
Beyond those moments, I think of simple gifts: basking in the morning sun on the back deck; live music (jazz great Cyrus Chestnut at the State!); dinner parties; blooming mountain laurel in the Rothrock (act now!); lush greenery everywhere (a rainy spring isn’t all bad); my wife’s company, always.
When the writer Suleika Jaouad was diagnosed with leukemia for the third time, her oncologist advised her to live each day as if it were her last.
Her response: Too much pressure! “It’s hard to carpe diem the crap out of every moment.”
Instead, Suleika tries to live each day as if it were her first – full of curiosity and playfulness and wonder and creativity. The nice thing about this approach is that you don’t need the Seven Wonders of the World to experience wonder.
This spring, I watched robins build a nest on my deck. Then came an egg so intensely blue it looked lit from within. That was wonder enough for that day.
And then: the big wind that knocked out power all over town. The egg disappeared. I found it in a flower bed a few days later. I put it back, vainly. I’d seen no sign of the parents around the nest since the storm.
A day or two after that, the egg vanished again. Then I found it again, cracked, in another flower bed, farther from the nest. Squirrel? Blue jay?
If you’re looking for a metaphor, savoring goes hand in hand with fragility and fleetingness. Life’s flavor is bittersweet.
And what of the imperative to leave the world a better place than we found it, as Irvin Moore and Gene Foreman are doing? That’s a tall order, given the shambles the rest of us oldsters are bequeathing to our kids and grandkids.
We’re futzers and fritterers, most of us. We know our time on Earth is short; we live as if we’ll be around forever. We live as if normalcy and sanity will prevail. They may not.
Ahead of me this summer lie two weddings, helping my son and daughter move, and lots of grandchildren time, all wild and precious, made more so by this dire time in which we live.
