The view from here is to die for

*

I was born in 1949; my mother, Dorothy Thomas, in 1921; her mother, Florence Mullane, in 1891.

Florence died at 94, Dody at 96; I’m 73.

None of us wanted to belong to the country of the old. Florence and Dody never changed their minds.

This story is why I just did.

*

Look at that old lady.

Mom told this story many times. She and her mom would be walking in downtown Davenport, Iowa. Florence would spot an older person across the street. She would stop, point, and “Look at that old lady.”

Decades later, when mom was 88, we walked up East Street, the steep brick lane outside her house. Her left arm was linked to my right because he had a hip replaced three days earlier. Mom looked across the street and waved to Evelyn Barton walking down her driveway. Evelyn was also 88. Mom whispered, “Evelyn walks like an old lady.”

Mom conceded nothing to her age. No hearing aids, no walker, even after the hip operation, and no memory care unit until my brother had no choice.

I don’t think my mother or grandmother ever felt good about being old.

Ruby’s

Last Thursday, I had breakfast with a group of retired Luther College professors. That’s us in the photo.

On another Thursday morning 11 years ago, I was half listening to one of my mom’s stories. She was visiting, and we were out for breakfast at Ruby’s. I looked over and saw another cohort of Luther retirees eating and chatting. I recall thinking, that won’t be me when I retire.

The old are them and not me.

A country of the old

In 1926 60-year-old Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote Sailing to Byzantium with this first line:

That is no country for old men.

“That” had been his country, full of

The young in one another’s arms.

The poet feels old, soon to be

An aged man…a tattered coat upon a stick.

Yeats died 13 years later, at 73.

Sixty years after Byzantium, 70-year-old American poet William Stafford wrote Waiting in Line,* with this opening:

You the very old, I have come to the edge of your country and looked across…

Later, the poem’s narrator says

I have glimpsed from within the gray-eyed look at those who push, and occasionally even I can achieve your beautiful bleak perspective on the loud, the inattentive, shoving boors jostling past you toward their doom.

Stafford, dead at 79, finished with

You others, we the very old have a country. A passport costs everything.

My mom and grandmother strode to the edge of the country of the old, looked across, and turned away. Passports locked in purses.

I’m on a different path.

Turning Toward

About a year ago, I realized I was shaving with my sleep t-shirt on. No tattered coat, but I had covered my aging body. I didn’t want to look. I was turning away. Turning away is rarely the answer.

Slowly, this past year, I decided, without really deciding, that I would turn toward the country of the old.

Yeats and Stafford suggest this country is superior to the country of the young.

Yeats old man sails to Byzantium, a place, as one critic suggested, “where wisdom, art, beauty, and experience are honored.”

Stafford’s narrator sees in the old a “beautiful bleak perspective.”

Instead of sailing to Byzantium last fall, we motored to Cooperstown, NY home to Baseball’s Hall of Fame.

For a year, I’ve been reading biographies of my favorite players: Ty Cobb, Jackie Robinson, Buck O’Neil, Mickey Mantle, and Sandy Koufax.**

Communing with these men at baseball’s shrine seemed fitting. Until yesterday, however, I had not understood what all this had to do with aging.

“He was complete”

A friend loaned me a book of essays by Roger Angell. Angell, who died at 99 last year, is considered the finest baseball chronicler. In the Preface to Once More Around the Park, he’s contemplating the retirement of relief pitcher Dan Quisenberry, with these words:

He had closed the book, and in that moment had become fresh and young again, and…wonderfully clear in my mind. He was complete.

Bingo

That’s why I’m absorbing baseball biographies. My perspective has changed. Today, I’m less interested in the records of my heroes than in who they became.

And in who I’ve become – the complete.

Only in the country of the old can I contemplate what complete means. Stafford’s last line:

A passport costs everything there is.

The mirror shows me the costs of aging.

But the gift is the possibility of making sense of my life.

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*Stafford’s Waiting in Line is the 10th poem on this linked page.

**Biographies: Sandy Koufax by Jane Leavy; The Soul of Baseball: A road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America by Joe Posnanski; Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty by Charles Leerhsen; The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood by Jane Leavy; True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson by Kostya Kennedy.