Over the Hill? What Hill?
Maybe age IS only just a number
In the early 70s, Blood, Sweat and Tears recorded a song called “Over the Hill” with the lyrics: “29 years and it’s over the hill at thirty/They got your wheelchair ready, and your hiking boots are not even dirty.” When that record came out I was a teenager, and despite the song’s anti-age-discrimination message, thirty years seemed old to me then.
At one time, it was. In 1900, the average life expectancy of a male in the United States was only 46 years. By 1941, improvements in health care and lifestyle brought it up to 63. In 1980 that average increased to 70. In my twenty-something mind back then, 70 was ancient.
The way I see it, ancient is as ancient does. That’s why, though I am turning 70, I don’t think I fit very neatly into the old man mold.
After all, old men are supposed to be slow and slumped over, aren’t they? They’re supposed to be either half blind or half deaf, talk with a raspy voice and complain about their ailments, right? Old men aren’t supposed to enjoy hiking, traveling or playing in a rock band, (except maybe for Keith Richards and he is old), much less have any interest in dancing, volunteering, or (gasp!) romance. And they certainly aren’t supposed to pull up stakes in their 70th year and move more than two thousand miles across the country.
But here I am, doing all those things and more. It’s not because I’m a health or exercise nut; I just look at life and participate in it much the same as I did forty years ago. No doubt the company I keep may have something to do with it. Though I have plenty of friends my age, I work with, play with, and create art with many who are younger. Some even have parents younger than me. Heck, at least a couple of them have grandparents younger than me. Frankly I don’t know whether they think of me as an old guy or not, but I see them as coequals and contemporaries. So maybe age is, at least partially, in the mind.
In my mind, anyway.
Old seems hard to define nowadays. When I think of “old” I think of my nearly 94-year-old mother. Yet, even at her age she still sometimes laughs like a little girl and enjoys an animated conversation; there are plenty of moments when she doesn’t “act” 94. And old doesn’t have to mean immobile. My wife and I recently went on a 15-day cruise to four different countries with hundreds of other retirees and were surprised to find we were probably in the lower 50th percentile in age. The ship was brimming with octogenarians on walkers and in wheelchairs, yet they were just as excited as we were to discover new sights and experiences. Watching them, I can easily picture myself doing the same for another decade, maybe two.
On the other hand, I’m sometimes surprised, and certainly grateful, that I’ve made it this far. The list is long of my high school classmates who have already passed on, and I have had one or two close calls over the years. Those include a few times I was probably protected by heavenly help from death or serious injury. In my 50s a simple colonoscopy detected what would have turned into cancer had I not undergone preventive surgery. And I’m thankful for an alert cardiologist who spied something suspicious inside one of my arteries and intervened to ward off an eventual heart attack.
I’m lucky. Part of my good fortune is heredity; there is longevity in my family tree. My wife is also a healthy treasure—she consistently reads food labels for saturated fat content. And no doubt my life expectancy increased exponentially after ninth grade, simply because my family moved to another school district, and thus I ceased being a target of a gang of bullies that roamed the playground carrying brass knuckles and wearing bike chains for belts.
Some might say I’m in denial about growing old, but it’s not as if it snuck up on me. Even in my forties my aging was apparent when a teenage kid with a new drivers license obviously didn’t like the slow pace of my car ahead of him. Swerving around me, he yelled, “Get out of my way, old man!” My appearance in side-by side photos from today and fifteen years ago is obviously different, even to my defiant eyes. Mindful of the relatively few but signifiant benefits of age, I have been seeking out and taking advantage of senior discounts for some time now. For decades I have been keenly aware of the advancing years, celebrating those birthdays with a zero in them by writing songs to mark the occasions. On my 30th birthday I wrote a tune called “Looking at Life From the Other Side.” When I turned the big “four-oh” I wrote an agricultural-themed song called, “I’ve Plowed the Lower Forty.” At fifty I incorporated meteorology into my song, titled “I’m Only Warming Up.” I ran out of ideas at sixty, and thus far, there’s no song with a 70s theme. But I’m working on it.
Meanwhile, American males’ life expectancies have continued to increase. The latest statistics show the average is now about 76 years for my demographic. What’s more, the Social Security web site has a calculator that estimates a male who is 70 years old today will live, on average, at least fifteen more years. So maybe I’m still only warming up, and chances are, I won’t feel old even at 85.
So if you and I cross paths then, you’d probably better think twice before calling me an old man. I might still be in denial and do something we’d both regret.
Like maybe run you over with my walker.
© Nick Walker 2023
