Aging process at 64 strikes a rough note
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Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery, according to the Book of Common Prayer.
Or else life is long, the man grows fat and bald, and a woman points this out fully and makes him miserable, according to common experience.
These are not cheerful thoughts, but today they are hard to avoid. The problem is that I write this on a day when the time known as "many years from now" has finally arrived. Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2012, was my 64th birthday.
Readers of a certain age will recognize the "many years from now" line from the Beatles song "When I'm Sixty-Four," a track on the famous 1967 "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album. It is a jaunty tune -- but at the same time full of youthful insecurity and sadness. It is a perky anthem of coming ruin, many years from now.
For the benefit of Mr. Kite and readers too young to be certain of their age, it is worth explaining that in the olden days there were things called records, which went round and round and emitted the sounds of songs that made our lives go round and round too. And there were things called albums, but to heck with that -- all you need to know is the lyrics of "When I'm Sixty-Four":
When I get older losing my hair
Many years from now
Will you still be sending me a valentine
Birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
These are important questions for the baby boom generation, and at last I have lived long enough to answer them authoritatively.
Yet it is amazing to me that "many years from now" is now. It seemed so far away at the time. But it is a perverse characteristic of life that it speeds up as you grow older. One minute you are tending the carrier pigeons and the next moment modern communications have been revolutionized by the iPhone, with not even an interim stage involving an iPigeon.
The pace of change has become so frantic that an older person hardly dares to go to sleep at night.
In fact, this is the mistake I made with my hair. Sure, it showed early signs of deserting its post, but it didn't happen over many years. It seemed like I fell asleep as a passably hirsute person and woke up the next morning as a bald person -- a classic case of hair today, gone tomorrow.
First Published January 4, 2012 12:00 am
