When I’m 64…

Will you still need me? Will you still feed me? When I’m sixty four… it seemed cutely remote to consider being that old when the Beatles sang “When I’m Sixty-Four” back in 1967 on their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Sixty-four seemed so far away then. My father wasn’t even that old in ’67. Sixty-four was to my teenage self somewhere in the distant future, like science fiction or The Jetsons. Old age was somewhere in the time zone of my grandparents, an exotic foreign, and wrinkled land. Unimaginable being there, at least for me when that song came out. Sixty-freaking-four? Ancient!

The vinyl spun, I danced and was oblivious to the movements of this mortal coil. After all, it would be decades, maybe centuries into the distant future before I ever got that old. I’d have a jetpack and flying car, maybe living in a Moon colony long before then! I’d have a robot butler and I’d strap a phaser pistol on my belt to battle rogue aliens in my spaceship… I’d look back, remember the song, and laugh…

Fast forward to 2024. Generations, cultures, governments, even nations have passed on since 1967. Sixty-four… the Beatles sang it almost sixty years ago, and broke up long before any of them reached that age. The Fall of the Berlin Wall is younger than that song. The Vietnam War — in full throttle when Sgt. Pepper’s was released — is in the archeological past, with the ruins of Greece and Rome.

What was once ancient — reaching sixty-four — I now look back upon. Sixty-four was something that happened long ago, a moment passed by almost unnoticed among the fleeting years. It’s been a full decade now since I crossed that hurdle. Oh, my aching knee… have I so easily slid deep into the “Get off my lawn!” era of my life? Eheu fugaces labuntur anni wrote Horace… Alas, how the fleeting years slip by. How did that happen? One minute I was in the prime of my life dancing and staying up past 11, the next it seems I was napping in the afternoon, obsessing over my fibre intake, and taking multivitamins every day.*

Not long after that Beatles’ song was published, Sandy Denny sang her haunting Who Knows Where the Time Goes? That could be my anthem these days.

You’d think that, after you retired and didn’t have the daily grind of work to consume your time, that days would drag by, a slow march. instead, they seem to fly by faster than ever and there doesn’t seem to be a lot to remember about the intervening days. What do you mean, it’s November? It was June only last week! Where, oh where, Sandy, did that time go?

Having a regular work schedule helps to at least keep the days of the week straight. When Maggie Smith, in Downtown Abbey, asked “What is a weekend?” we laughed. But after you retire, you easily move in that sort of every-day-is-the-same miasma. You no longer have to slog through the peaks and valleys of a working week, but that also means no days have any particular meaning. There is no TGIF moment. Holidays are just days when there are more people about.

Wisdom is supposed to come with age. But so does arthritis, forgetfulness, sleeplessness, and a whole panoply of illnesses, ailments, and complaints. But then, if wisdom truly comes with age, why do so many people become conservative as they age? Wisdom suggests people who have had a longer experience with life would be more tolerant, more liberal, more caring, and more empathetic than the average conservative. Yet I often meet people in my age cohort who seem to have fallen for the toxic lies and disinformation schemes of conservative parties here and in the USA. I suspect conservatism is one of those illnesses, like arthritis, but a mental disease that infects some people and makes them intolerant, gullible, and afraid of change. And maybe stupid too, at least in how they vote and how they think about the climate crisis.

In his poem, High Windows, Philip Larkin asked,

I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life…**

Looking back, I can’t say that when the Beatles were singing that song, anyone forty years older than me was my role model. I’m pretty sure back then my heroes were longhaired guitar players and other musicians closer to my own age. And I know for damn sure I have never been the role model for anyone forty years younger. I don’t think I know anyone forty years younger than I am, aside from the grandkids.

But maybe, if I don’t fall into the tarpit of conservatism like others my age, I might yet aspire to be someone’s role model. Maybe: as long as I stay true to liberal and humanistic values, don’t give in to tawdry materialism, and maintain my cynical exterior towards pseudoscience and MAGA conspiracy cultists. If I don’t give in to the political apathy that elects autocrats, racists, misogynists, con artists, and convicted felons. If I continue to resist loudly and publicly and stand up for democracy, maybe, just maybe I might make someone younger think, “When I’m his age, I hope I still give a damn about the planet and other humans like he does.”

Or maybe they’ll just shake their head and wonder if I’m off my meds.

Notes:

* Horace Odes: Book 2, Ode 14. Actually, what Horace wrote was Eheu fugaces, Postume Postume, labuntur anni, writing those words to his friend Postumus. The name, however, is often dropped in quotations. Horace remains one of my all-time favourite poets.

** In his poem, Aubade, Philip Larkin wrote about getting old and the constant awareness that death is present. Here’s the first verse:

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

Larkin also wrote in his short poem Days:

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

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