Thoughts on Septuagenarian Status

                                       

     Achieving septuagenarian status is a marker that should occasion gratitude and thanks. To observe the attainment of my three score and ten, Anita and I were at Symphony Hall two nights ago to experience Bach’s Mass in B Minor, music so transcendent that it is, as maestro Muti avers, one of the proofs of the existence of God.  Today we’ll be at a bookstore author signing; and then dinner at a restaurant that is not McDonald’s.  This weekend the family will gather by the river in the Quad cities to celebrate not only my 70^th but also Daughter the Elder’s launching of her own law practice.  In addition we will attend a concert where Daughter the Younger will step out from her chorus to bathe us with a solo performance of “Balm in Gilead.”  And throughout all these activities, providing counterpoint, will be the effusive and beguiling babble of seventeen-month-old-granddaughter, Kinley Clare.   All told, it would seem that I am I blessed, bounteously so!

    However, there is no gainsaying the reality that I am now placed squarely in the starting gate of the “decade in which most of us die.”  And it is vaguely unsettling.  As the Simon and Garfunkel tune, “Old Friends,” intones, “How terribly strange to be seventy.”

     I am on guard for requests from family and friends to check my vital signs.  I know that the best dramatic reading I can offer this weekend will not be literary passages, poems and such; instead, on this occasion those near and dear will attend carefully to a reading of the will.  You have to expect a reordering of priorities of your “own ones” when you develop cracks and fissures, for an old man is like “a tattered coat upon a stick.”

     On this birthday morning, Anita presented me with a beautifully framed diptych.  Two pictures of me.  The first when I was one, the other at present.  My mind turned back to an object I found in our house when I was a boy.  A small bellows.  I thought it was a toy.  But it was explained to me that it was for the fireplace, to help the kindling catch, to fan the flames. I was fascinated by it. I liked to mess with it when the fireplace was not in use, and watch when it served its purpose to aid domestic warming.  I later learned the word “bellow,” and was intrigued by the fructive lexical closeness of these two words.  Since a bellows “fans the flames” and a bellow assures hearing, I found the gestalt of melding both effects to equal a core value in my life.   So from this birthday on, I have two choices, both of them embodied in the compelling figure of Lear, Shakespeare’s aging king, who towers over all even as he totters through his final days.  At the beginning of the play, Lear divests himself of his holdings in an attempt “to shake all cares and business from our age, / Conferring them on younger strengths, while we/ Unburthened crawl toward death.”  But Lear is also the master of the bellow.  For example, to Goneril and Regan who seek to strip him of his retinue on the putative grounds that he no longer has any necessity for followers: “O reason not the need!/ Our basest beggars/ Are in the poorest thing superfluous. / Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life is cheap as beast’s.  . . . ----I will do such things----/ What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be/ The terrors of the earth.”   And in the most famous caterwaul, his apostrophe to the storm upon the heath, he defies nature itself:  “Blow winds, and crack your cheeks.  Rage, blow! / You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout/ Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks. . . . Here I stand your slave, / A poor, infirm, weak and despised old man. / But yet I call you servile ministers . . . 

     It is from King Lear (certainly not from Hamlet) that I have learned to believe in the bellow. Extremely quiet people are not to be entirely trusted. I regard them as more suspicious than auspicious.   A loud utterance, often in the interrogative, has an immediate purpose.  For example, “Are you in the house?”  It is surprising that even when only two people live together in an upstairs/downstairs abode, you can be unsure whether the other is above or below, or has slipped out unbeknownst.  The bellow is not a plaintive cry or a forlorn lament, such as “Why me, Lord?”  It has a practical purpose.  And it is not only an old person’s tool.  For example, it is useful for parents and other adults tasked with forming the young: “Have you cleaned up your room?” or “Is it possible for you to look up from that screen?”  But the bellow takes on an added richness in aging.  And Lear is not alone in wielding it.  At the other end of the nobility scale, remember Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman: “The woods are burning boys . . .” and, “A man is not a piece of fruit!  In poetry, the bellow has a proud tradition and many will recall Dylan Thomas’ exhortation to his father, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”  But there is something askew in the poet’s imperative here.  You really cannot bellow on behalf of another.  Voice your own stentorian declamation.   Upbraid, denounce, laud, endorse, or shout with joy, but make your presence known.  If the hortatory urging to follow your dream leaves you flat, try the elixir of unleashing well phrased condemnation.  Make noxious noise.  So long as it scans or has a lilt to it, you’ll leave the world (probably in your eighth decade) all the better for having fanned the flames.