Beyond 60... WAY Beyond

 

By George Eleon Shuman

 

 

A few days ago, my nine-year-old granddaughter Nahla came to me and asked if she could ask me a question. I don’t know why she does this and doesn’t just ask the question in the first place, but she always does, and our short conversation went something like this:

“Papa, I have a question.” (See what I told you?)

“Sure. What is it?” I answered, as I always do.

“Do you remember when you were sixty, Papa?”

“Yes, I replied. Well, I don’t remember anything specific about being sixty, I guess.”

“But do you remember things that you did when you were sixty?”

“Um. No, I guess I don’t.”

And that was it. She didn’t ask anything more and left me puzzled at her query as she left the room. And then it hit me just a bit, with that sort of sinking ‘wait a minute’ feeling we probably have all had from time to time, that my ‘sixties’ were all gone; every one of them.

I did remember being on the other side of those years and considering and thinking that sixty-something ‘retirement aged’ people were moldy-oldie, crunchy, cranky, wrinkled wheezer geezers. I will admit that it scared me a bit to realize that the sixty-year-olds of today were just being born when I had my eleventh birthday. That that decade of life, which for so many years was squarely but distantly in front of me, was now getting smaller in my rear-view mirror. It was already small enough that I didn’t even remember much about it when my granddaughter asked.

You know… I know that I’m not as spry as I might have once been, although ‘spry’ is a relative term. (George Burns once said that he could do anything at 95 that he could when he was 18. And then said: “That just proves how pathetic I was at 18.”) At my age now I sort of resemble that remark.  Still, I truly hope that the younger people in my life don’t think of me as some dried-up old codger… at least not yet.

I do remember one other short conversation with my granddaughter. This one happened last spring. I had just hauled my bicycle up from the cellar, for the summer, as I always had, and she laughingly, but kind of seriously said: “Papa, don’t get on that. You CAN’T ride that bike. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

Well, I proved her wrong, at least briefly, but didn’t get much joy from mounting my old green ‘steed’ that day. I remember that everything hurt that night in ways and locations that I won’t describe here. I left the bike outside for the rest of the summer, without getting on it even one more time.

I am convinced that age is ‘mostly’ in our minds, although mine is also somewhat in my bones and in my bathroom mirror. (I hate that mirror.) Mentally, I don’t feel old at all. I know some others feel the same about those things. My wife’s grandmother, a woman Lorna and I both loved very much, once told me that she was just an eighteen-year-old girl in a ninety-five-year-old body. There is a lot of food for thought in that.

Also, my own mom, who is still with us, and who we both love very much too, still calls me every single evening, just to see if I’m okay or if I have some ailment that she can worry about, (I don’t.) She just took a trip to Florida and then back again to Maine to celebrate her 102^nd birthday with a huge party of family members whose very existence is entirely her fault. She’s a true treasure!

I never found out why Nahla wanted to know if I remembered being sixty that day. Maybe it was so that I could write this column?