My Birthday Again!

Every year for any number of years now, I have used my birthday, in Fagin’s words, “to review the situation.” It is that time again. Alas, this year I finish my sixtieth year. I am healthy. When I appear before Nathan Rich for the Alan Block Yearly Death Watch (which occurs generally in late winter or early Spring), my blood pressure remains low, and my runner’s pulse (25-30 miles per week still) beats at a superb fifty times per minute. I never have any medications to report taking, and I suffer no allergies. There are few family histories to report, save some serious neuroses. I do not smoke, and I drink moderately--research suggests even my drinking is healthy for me. I try to have at least two drinks each day. I am not overweight, and though emotionally distraught these days, I am not emotionally disturbed.
But I am sixty years old, and I don’t like it one bit. I neurotically drove myself to the emergency room this past Sunday evening (dear Nathan was on duty) and discovered in AARP magazine that the longevity for the human being increases steadily--for males it is now almost 77 years. SEVENTY SEVEN YEARS? Even my feeble math skills suggest that if I attain the average, I’ve got only seventeen years left. SEVENTEEN? I can’t even remember being seventeen! I am somewhat relieved to discover that Brooke Astor recently died at 105 years of age, and that both Ingmar Bergman and Michaelangelo Antonini were in their mid to late eighties, but Merv Griffin was only in his early eighties!

I don’t like the idea of being this old, because I feel this young. I don’t like the idea that two thirds of my life may be over. I hate being told, “You don’t look sixty,” because whether I look sixty or not, I am sixty years of age. And I hate being told, “You’re still young,” because though I am more active than most people I know, I am still sixty years of age and it takes a great deal longer getting up from the floor that it did thirty years ago.

Yes, I am complaining. I hate listening to my carp and moan. It implies regret, and I don’t want to consider that I have any of them. But today it is not the regret, but the reality that weighs on me.

So, my fifth book will be published in September, and in two weeks, I start my thirty fifth or thirty-sixth year of teaching; I have had a good career. I am in the midst of writing what may be a sixth book. This week I send my oldest daughter to college, and my younger daughter starts eighth grade. I live on the Ponderosa, and I have a beautiful cabin office (Walden), built for me with love by my dear friend, Gary Welch. The only pills I take are my vitamins (twelve to fifteen pills a day--megadoses of most of them), and I arise tomorrow morning on the sixtieth anniversary of my birth to run four miles with Gary. Having said that, it is clearly only the spoiled child that complains.

Right now the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera is showing: every one knows there is no sanity clause!

I begin my sixty first year. May it be more productive and happier than the sixtieth has been. May my complaints next year be no different than they were this year. And may I be awake next year to run with Gary on my birthday.