62!

March 30, 2011
Mexico City, Mexico

62!

It is, I suppose, normal to be more reflective at the years go by, and at 62 I find myself more reflective than ever. This is probably due to the loss of Mom a year ago; she has been ever on my mind as this month flows into the next. It was she, more than anyone who made birthdays, and Christmas and Easter and every other holiday, special. She loved holidays and it made her sad as she aged that the holidays were not filled with people as they were years ago.

On the morning of my birthday, or my brother’s, we’d come into the dining room to find balloons and streamers attached to the chandelier and one place set at the table with her wedding china. All the gifts would be piled on the plate. And so it’s been this month, as I contemplate what it means to be 62, that I’ve been thinking back through the years to the most memorable.

Maybe I was six. It’s an Uncle Francis story which means I was in Kindergarten. We were just home from Florida and waiting to move back to 23 Grace Ave. My mother must have seen an idea in a magazine. The cake was a “clown cake,” with a decorated ice cream cone as the hat. Perhaps I remember the cake from the photos. I don’t know. But it seems to be the first birthday of which I have a memory.

A year or two later my mother made a birthday cake with four or five layers. She covered it with frosting and coconut. It was the custom in those days that my two cousins, born the same year, would come to my birthday party. The cake was such a hit that both cousins wanted the same cake. My mother would tell that story for many years to come.

When I turned eighteen I became “legal.” I remember going to a store, buying a quart of beer, and sitting in Riverside Cemetery drinking it. At age twenty five I was so depressed for being a quarter century old that I stayed in my apartment all day—a cold, rainy, late March day. Twenty five! Hah!

From the day I turned 29 I spent the next 365 days in angst! I’d be 30 a year later and that was a depressing, sober fact. I remember running into my cousin John Ladue, twenty years my senior, on the night before my birthday. “Oh woe is me,” I must have said. “Tell you what, John said. “Kill yourself right now and you’ll always be 29!”

I didn’t. I turned 30, and the day after I realized what a bunch of negative energy I’d expended for a birthday. I never did that again.

Fast forward twenty years. March 30, 1999. I’m in Central Australia, choosing to climb Ayers Rock for my 50th birthday.

And ten years later, retired, I’m at Iguazu Falls in Argentina. In my memory, there are very few bad birthdays.

I don’t like the idea of 62. I’m still trying to wrap my head around 60. But this is the way it is. I think of my high school friend, David Heath, who died at 16, two weeks after diagnosis of leukemia. I think of a teacher I worked with who died of cancer at 27. And friends and acquaintances dead in their 30’s or 40’s of accidents or disease. And my dear, dear and oldest friend, Mary Boulé, who died of pancreatic cancer within six weeks of diagnosis at the age of 55, leaving behind a 20 year old orphan.

No…like 60, I will rejoice in this birthday, give thanks for blessings more abundant than anyone can ask for, and be grateful that I got this far without anything serious.

The five years since I retired have been…well…astounding! I have come to believe, as the author May Sarton wrote in The House by the Sea, that “the 60’s are marvelous because one has become fully oneself by then, but the erosions of old age, erosion of strength, of memory, of physical well being have not yet fully begun to frustrate and meddle.”

There is still time…time to do all the things that I still want to do. And, to quote a Quaker writer, Bradford Smith, “at 62 I am ready, and fortunately able, to plan my life without reference to earning more money. What I do can be for the doing’s sake, or expected fruits—a prospect as fearful almost as it is pleasant. What is worth doing?”

What is worth doing? It’s a powerful question.

Perhaps I’m doing it.

One thing I’m not going to do is waste my time trying to figure it all out.

62 is a gift! And I am grateful!