Another Birthday, on the Way
A few weeks ago, an old friend in Paso Robles emailed me a great series of cartoons dealing with aging. He does that a lot, and those cartoons are often quite amusing – even if they hit way too close to home. The best cartoon he sent in that batch showed a woman of indeterminate age standing up, facing the reader. She says: “I finally figured out what I want to be when I get older: YOUNGER.”
Yep, that pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? This month of March is, indeed, my birthday month – and while I’m still around to celebrate the start of another year of my life, I’m pretty sure I’d much rather it be a year with a smaller number involved. After all, I’m like everyone else – we all want to reach old age, but when it comes, we complain about it. The real trouble is that I used to be a young man, and I haven’t gotten over it.
But as the great author Wallace Stegner once wrote: “If you’re going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get.” Well, I’m trying. One of the reasons we moved back to the Valley – after living, wonderfully, in Paso for seven years – is medical care. To put it bluntly: We could not find the same quality of medical specialists on the Central Coast that we had in the Central Valley. And at our age – especially mine – medical care is the most important consideration you have – if you want to live longer, that is.
We’ve been back here in the Valley only a short time, and already I seem to have a standing, every-month “invite” to see my dermatologist in Fresno – whom I’ve been going to for years. He’s always ready and willing to freeze bad stuff off my face – stuff that keeps showing up because decades ago, when I was a teenager, I fell into the “deep sun-tan makes you look healthy” craze. Heck, remember when Coppertone ran that great series of ads saying, “Tan, don’t burn, with Coppertone”? Remember when Vic Damone sang the Coppertone song on radio? “Get the fastest tan that anyone can. Tan, don’t burn, get a Coppertone tan.” None of us, of course, had ever heard of skin cancer. Well, we’ve heard of it now.
So here I am – about to turn another year older, and grateful to still be around. As the comedian Joe E. Lewis observed, “If I’d known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.” Amen, brother. William Saroyan said his secret to growing older was simple: “Not dying.” Now, almost everything I eat and do is related to trying to stave off the inevitable body deterioration. At my age, that’s pretty much all I can do. There’s no real way to make our bodies “age in reverse.” We just need to slow the decline.
Of course, the older we get, the more memories we make – if we can remember them. I was reminded of that a few weeks ago when we were unloading box after box of Hart memorabilia that we’d moved from our Paso place to a storage bin in Clovis – where it had stayed for a year – and finally into our new place in Madera County. I told Sharon – and, truly, I meant it – my goal was to reduce, big-time, the number of old plastic storage containers that held decades of “must-keep,” “can’t-throw-away” material. You know – stuff like photo albums we never look at. Video recordings we made a few decades ago that we not only never look at – we couldn’t if we wanted to, because we no longer have a VCR to play them.
I thought I was being really “with it” a few years ago when I asked a friend to dub some of the many TV newscasts I produced over the years around the nation from tape to DVD. But, again, I never look at them because we no longer have a DVD player, either.
And then there are those DVD burns of pictures of Bradley and me, traveling around Europe during a few summers back in the early 2000’s. There’s a DVD of our trip to Italy, with us at the Forum in Rome. There’s another one of our trip to Paris, with us in the Eiffel Tower. There’s yet another of our trip to Greece, with us at the Acropolis in Athens. And – closer to home – there’s a priceless DVD of photos of Brad and me playing golf at the Wawona course in Yosemite on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon about 15 years ago. It was the only time he and I have ever played golf together.
There’s also a big box of TV memorabilia from some of the numerous stations where I worked over the decades. WSB in Atlanta. KPNX in Phoenix. KPIX in San Francisco. KNBC in Los Angeles. And there’s even an old sweatshirt from the first radio station I ever worked at – KSUE in Susanville. It’s way, way too small for me to even think about wearing because I weigh a whole lot more today than I did when I was 22. Do you think I could ever throw any of that – ANY of it – away?
Nope. The best I could do weeks ago was put all that memorabilia into a series of shiny NEW storage containers (black, with yellow tops) we bought from Costco. I’ve put labels on all those containers, and they’re sitting in our new garage in Madera, ready for our adult kids to dive into and make decisions about when – well, you know. Sorry, Brad and Amy. You’ll have to make the call about what to do with all of it.
So, yes, March is my birthday month, and I’m about to get older. To quote another of my Paso friend’s cartoons (he’s got a million of ’em): “Don’t worry about old age. It doesn’t last that long.” I sure hope that’s wrong. I’d love to have a long, long old age. After all, we still have places to go and things to do and memories to make, and I’d hate to miss any of it.