When I’m Sixty-Four

Art by Shani Gross at http://fineartamerica.com/featured/when-im-64-shani-goss.html

When I get older losing my hair
Many years from now
Will you still be sending me a valentine
Birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
If I’d been out till quarter to three
Would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I’m sixty-four?

Greg turned 64 this past weekend: a significant milestone, especially for a child of the 60’s. The immediate association we sixty-somethings always make with this epic birthday is When I’m Sixty-Four from the Beatles’ 1967 Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album.

When we first heard this song (we weren’t together yet and would not meet for another two years), we probably thought that being 64, being that old, seemed as far away as the distant moon. Although, we should have known, with the moon landing only two short years away in 1969, that even the unimaginably distant can, with the inexorable passage of time, become very close: maybe much closer than we would ever want it to be.

Could we imagine then, in 1967, at the age of 17, who we would turn out to be, what we would witness, what we would celebrate, what we would simply survive? The future opens up before a 17-year-old like an endless and mostly empty highway running to a distant horizon where spectacles and miracles await, just out of sight and sound, to be discovered. At the age of 17, with his yellow Camaro and its racing stripes, Greg was ready to barrel full-tilt down the asphalt and look over the edge of the horizon, into the limitless future.

But now, at 64, many years from then, we’re peering a bit fearfully over the edge that was once so far away. The inevitable final horizon, looming darkly but indistinctly ahead, isn’t as inviting as the one we had imagined 47 years ago. We want to put on the brakes, let up on the gas, slow it all down. The endless days, the slowly turning seasons of our youth, rush by faster and faster now, with a disturbing momentum we are helpless to arrest and all too keenly aware of—the so-called wisdom of age we suppose.

At 17 the future waits eagerly for us, full of all manner of things that haven’t happened yet. Everything blooms with potential. Just leaving the cocoon of home and school, we haven’t had our first real jobs, haven’t gotten married—or wanted to; we haven’t bought houses, had our children, and met all of our once and future friends. We haven’t decided on and pursued our vocations and avocations. Everything is yet to be. Life fairly burgeons, bursting, like the swollen bud of a flower opening to the sun, the rain and the kiss of a butterfly. At 17 it is all springtime and the waning of the year seems far, far away; as the song says, many years from now.

But now, here, at the age of 64, careers are over or winding down. Houses have been bought and sold. Children have been born, have grown up, and are going, going, gone away. One dear boy crossed the final horizon before we will. Our friends, our peers, fellow children of the Sixties are beginning to fall away from cancer, heart attacks, and the sundry other visitations of old age, entropy and accident. There seems to be so much to fear, to rail against; the temptation is to turn our faces away from the future that we once leaned forward to embrace.

Yet, yet, at 64, with silvering hair and all the blemishes old age inflicts upon the face and body, there is a birthday gift, a consolation bottle of wine, a valentine. Over the years a lot was gained and much was lost, but we still have one another. We will have been married, Greg and Joan, for 42 of those 64 years; we met over 45 years ago. Those 45 years together, that is what those 64 years has brought us. The time together, the shared experience, the complex depth of the knowing that such intimate togetherness brings…it outweighs and outlasts the lamentations of our advancing age. And we know, finally, the answer to the question

Will you still need me, will you still feed me

When I’m sixty-four?

The answer is yes.