HEADING FOR SIXTY
(Fifty-Seven and Holding)
It seems only yesterday I wrote the epitaph to my fortieth year (Forty and Holding). Yet now, 17 years later, 40 is fading in the past. I'm heading pell-mell for 60, and still holding. Life is still good, not too much decay yet. Birds aren't singing out of tune... yet! Seemingly, very little has changed. Sure, I would like to do some of the things I used to. I wish I could still beat my son one on one in basketball in our driveway, or be able to understand the new math in algebra and geometry equations my daughter brings home. I assure her, smiling, I could certainly explain it fully, adeptly, adroitly even, if teachers just didn't confound the issue by sending the lessons home in Greek.
Life is still sweet, and still what you make of it, wherever you are according to the sands of time; sands that slowly, inexorably, trickle to the bottom of ye olde hour glass. Sand at the bottom of the hour glass represents life past, so the majority of my journey has been run. But still ahead lies the sprint to the finish, the golden years where you can look back, relax, and see what life has wrought. You can revel in your children and their lives. You can cuddle the grandchildren, (if we had any, Brian) knowing that because of you they are here, and the cycle of life you started is just gaining momentum.
Hopefully, your children will listen to what you have gleaned during your long journey of experience and learning gained on your sojourn through the travails of life, and into the valley of the shadow. I know children do not appear to hear a single word you say. Kids often fight any expert logic you might as good parents share... or dictums of discipline you might in infinite wisdom impose... but if you say it, and say it often enough, they will hear. Truly they will! Someday your very words will bear fruit. Just hope you don't have to eat those words given during those pesky teenage years! Your children when they become adults may quote many of the things said many years before to a seemingly deaf teenager. Your one time teenager may now think the thoughts original with him, because he does not know the source... but I know. And I smile with pleasure when I realize many of his thoughts and actions are a direct result of a father who loved him. Hopefully too, he has learned from some of my mistakes, and there were some doozies! I hope and trust he is able to differentiate between the two.
It is interesting to see tendencies now, learned from his home life, interacting with those gleaned from his environment and his experiences, melded into individual attributes now uniquely his own. I can look back and see these little transformations and adaptations... because my stately being as I approach my sexy sixties affords me the chance to sit back and observe.
Remember how I said I was ignoring old age by going back in time with each passing birthday... and how at thirty I hadn't liked what I could see ahead, so did an about face, getting younger every year. By my actual calendar age of forty, I jokingly said I was celebrating my 20th birthday.
Well, looking down into the chasm of youthful indiscretion and naïveté? Below 20... I came to the conclusion quickly; I don't want to get any younger either. Being too young is even worse than being too old! So I smartly did an about face and started up life's track AGAIN! When I was fifty, I joked I was thirty, and again did an about face to yo-yo down again. I now figure that by these calculations I am 23... you getting all this? But, as I said, who am I kidding? I wonder how long I can keep this delusion up... and surprisingly, lately I have begun not to care so much about the facade of tomfoolery, or flip-flopping ages. I just call a spade a spade...
I am rather proud of being sub 60. I am even rather proud of the sometimes circuitous journey that brought me kicking and screaming to where I now reside.
Sure I fought and almost died in that cruel Asian war. Sure it stripped me of my innocence. That war messed up my trust, my faith, my value systems, my direction, and the purpose laid as a foundation during my youth, in ways that I still find confusing and hard to comprehend. Vietnam was a hum dinger of a test. And the score is still being tabulated. But Vietnam also gave me some things too. I have a much greater appreciation for the fragility of life in the simplest things. My every footfall since that fateful day is done harkening back to the lessons learned there. Vietnam not only imbedded in me a multitude of fears, and voracious memories, but laid a new set of senses attuned finitely to the little things.
I know I maybe think too much still. Now that's a conundrum... can you really ever think too much? I know I do, and once again my group sitting under a lilac bush concur. I ponder why, to the extreme! I weigh what happened so long ago, yet only yesterday, and endlessly contemplate the meaning. I am carried back constantly, unwillingly, to that fateful struggle, again, and yet again, feeling and assessing its impact on my life, thinking on war's impact to my wife and children, and their children.
I find thoughts and memories becoming more vivid rather than diminished with passage of time, as I look back and think of what I could have done, should have done. I think of clinging to my straight and narrow rod to God established in youth, then severed. My life has been a struggle to again find the pieces. I still feel tears welling up uncontrollably in me whenever I again revisit the horrors buried deeply in my soul. But no matter how severe my wounds, Vietnam taught not to feel sorry for myself. I couldn't feel pity for myself. It was impossible, because there were so many all around so much worse off than I. Every way I would turn I would see horrors that made mine pale in significance. I think it's like the parable of the man who cried because he had no shoes, until he met a man who had no feet.
I know things about life from traumas in Vietnam that I would never have known but for Vietnam. The ordinary person on the streets can never know, will never know, the lessons Vietnam taught me, until he too has gone down into that valley of the shadow. I've faced the devil, and it was touch and go for awhile there... but I won... at least the first round! I am not saying I know all the answers, far from it. But at least I know there is a question. Vietnam posed that question, and waited for the answer. Though Nam made of life a hard, hard road, I will persevere. I will be further ahead in the long run, if I can put the pieces back together, than if had continued in naiveté and childish innocence.
Vietnam is my refiner's fire! "Into the furnace God may try you, hence to bring thee forth more bright." The refiner's fire is a process making ordinary steel into finer steel, by purifying it in a spectacular heat that will break ordinary steel with any coarse, inferior elements, but polish and make elegant that purified. Whenever I feel on the verge of breaking, I sometimes think of the test to true character Vietnam has given me.
You remember how I wondered earlier, "Is this the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end?" Well, I'm still not sure of the answer to that question, but I do know I can more clearly see the light at the end of the tunnel. I'm just not sure if that light signals a greater life to come, or just a freight train bearing down full bore.
In the autumn of life snows are starting to fall, but for some reason I'm not in the least worried. They say life is downhill after forty. It's a slippery slope alright. All I can do is try to be calm as I watch the parts fall off... and coast on in.
Besides, anything I used to do I can now do better... it just takes me a little longer to get up the steam. Sure, I may have lost a step or two...some say three, but I can still do things I did when I was younger, because of experience. As to ravages of old aged winter – bring 'em on. I'm ready for them.
When I see those in the 90+ age bracket, I think life is an eternity ahead... but I know too the end can come in a twinkling, anytime, without warning, day or night. But that's the way I want the end to come, without warning, without premeditation, without lingering deliberation and contemplative conjecture. Death is not postulation. It will happen! We are all going there. Death is a proven, undeniable fact... and it happens daily. It may yet be a long ways away, or it could come tomorrow. I'm in the loop, and the pillages of my youthful body and spirit in Vietnam still may have a hand to play with death's hole card, Agent Orange, or the residual effects that Vietcong booby trap wrought. I may have been killed there; I just don't know it yet.
My grandfather and grandmother preceded me into that great realm beyond, followed by my father and mother. I am now the oldest of the oldest generation in my family now living... now that's a sobering thought. I know I said I wouldn't get too contemplative about it, but you know, I've done things I said I wouldn't before. In the autumn of your life things tend to stay the same, or change everyday. There is no wrong or right to any of this... only the way it is! I'm just rolling merrily along, going with the flow... except when I'm not, pausing for reflective tears, the contemplation of past and future. Sure there are cares. There are big ones... truckloads of cares, but you can't obsess on them... especially when they consist of things you can do nothing about. You must think deeply only about the cares that are so vitally important, like... uh, well, I, uh... I forgot! So no worries!
And still, the beat goes on...