"How Terribly Strange to be 70"

So sang Simon & Garfunkel in their 1967ish song, "Old Friends." What a poignant line to a 17-year old. No way to comprehend such a thing. I recall when my father turned 70, he said, "well, that's my three-score and ten, the rest is all bonus." I heard and smiled, but in my self-absorbed way, didn't go any further with it. Never thought to ask how it felt inside to be at the point in one's life when it there's not much future left, and the past is what it was, no do-overs.

Today I am 70, seventy revolutions around the sun, and wanted so share something of what it's like. And find I don't have much to say. Perhaps the most profound thing would be to say nothing, and mean it. But I can't do it. I have to speak, and the writer in me has to write something.

I don't feel anything like my youthful conception of "old." I'm just me, maybe a bit resentful that this shelter-at-home stuff has intruded into my retirement tranquility, but basically the same. I feel maybe a bit of entitlement to be curmudgeonly or to take afternoon naps, because I "earned it," though that doesn't really mean much. I suspect Billy Joel was right, only the good die young. I avoided many of the risks of my era, such as Vietnam, by luck more than anything else. I survived rheumatic fever and a major heart attack, and the adverse stupidity of hitchhiking half-way across the country. And a lot of other things that, looking back, came so close.

So I don't really feel so much of an achievement as simply a state of being. I feel gratitude, blessed, and, much as I try to quiet them, I feel pangs of regret for not having been or done what I know now I could have been or done. I also forgive myself, mostly.

No profundity, except maybe this: listen to your heart, it's trying to tell you something. Don't blindly follow, but don't ignore it. Be as kind as you can, because that's what will matter more to you as you look back. Don't try to cling to your younger self, but appreciate it. And, as John Prine wrote, if you come across a lonely old person, don't just walk by, because someone is in there. Just "say hello in there, hello."

I suspect, but I can't yet say for certain, there are worse consequences than death. That's what my heart tells me now.

To quote Cat Stevens, "though you'd like to last forever, you know you never will, you know you never will, and the goodbye makes the leaving harder still."

Thanks for reading this, for indulging an old, but not yet lonely, man.