The Double Nickel

"I am old and proud of it; to survive is glory enough, and I wear my wrinkles, limps, and age spots as decorations." -Donald Murray ". . . Although we cannot finish, we must continue. For if we do not, who will?" -Linda Weltner

As my wife Sabrina will affirm, I don’t like getting older. I guess that I am at heart a glass-half-empty kind of guy. My mother has been known to say that she hopes she is never as old as I am.

I’m not crazy about birthdays. Thirty was tough, for as those of my generation will remember, that was the age at which one could no longer be trusted. Thirty was my internal deadline for (finally) growing up, so obviously I looked forward to it with a kind of cosmic dread.

If thirty was traumatic, forty brought on a mid-life crisis and a brief career change. I left the ministry for two years and moved back to my home state of Maine: permanently, or so I thought at the time. But we all know about what happens to "the best laid plans of mice and men."

(It could have been worse: my dear friend Edgar Bowden simply went to bed for a week when he turned forty.)

Fifty made me just want to lay low and lick my wounds.

When I was working at Maine Maritime Academy in the early 1990s, I was complaining to one of my older co-workers one day about having recently passed my fortieth birthday. "Well, wait until you hit the double nickel," he said matter-of-factly.

And, well, this week I finally hit it. And as my friends are fond of reminding me, it’s a lot better than the alternative. In fact, it’s actually a lot better than I expected.

Oh, I can’t say that I "celebrated" turning fifty-five. There are, increasingly, those nagging aches and pains and those annoying little malfunctions and memory lapses. But the fact is that there is something to be said for it. It means that you have seen a lot of life and survived a lot of battles. It feels good, for example, to know that you have survived your children’s teenage years. It is really rewarding to see them begin to find their way in the world.

It is good also to have one’s career more firmly established, and to be able to look back at some successes along the way. There are a lot of great memories in fifty-five years, though, of course, there have inevitably been some pretty tough losses, too.

In preparation for my birthday this week, I started looking through one of my files on "aging." I came across a couple of old clippings, the kind of thing that nowadays your sister sends you in e-mail for a few laughs. They’re kind of funny in a gallows humor sort of way:

A man has reached middle age when he is cautioned to slow down by his doctor instead of the police.

Middle age is having the choice of two temptations and choosing the one that will get you home sooner.

You know you’re in middle age when you realize that caution is the only thing you care to exercise.

Don’t bother about avoiding temptation. As you grow older, it will avoid you.

Don’t take life so seriously--it’s not permanent.

Despite the cost of living, it’s still quite popular.

If you’re old enough to know better, you’re too old to do it.

Everything hurts and what doesn’t hurt, doesn’t work.

The gleam in your eye is from the sun hitting your bifocals.

You feel like the night before, and you haven’t been anywhere.

Your little black book contains only names ending in MD.

Your children begin to look middle aged.

You look forward to a dull evening.

You need glasses to find your glasses.

Your back goes out more than you do.

In all seriousness, though: for many of us, middle age presents the first opportunity to do some of the things we couldn’t afford to do when we were younger. The kids are (well, almost) finished with college, or the end is at least in sight; the mortgage has been reduced to a somewhat less terrifying level; you’ve made most of those major purchases that life in American seems to demand of us, for good or ill. For the first time, you have a little of what is euphemistically called "disposable" income.

The opportunity to finally be able to travel has been one of the great joys of my fifties. And though I would gladly have done without all the angst caused by raising my children, I wouldn’t have missed the joys of that for anything.

I think that we all know, in our better moments, that aging does have its benefits and rewards. Boston Globe columnist Linda Weltner, in a 1999 article entitled "Why we live so long: There’s growing up to do," writes that, "We all know that time etches itself into the lines of our faces, but we don’t often think of how it can improve our characters, broaden our perspectives, or teach us the value of perseverance."

It is at least possible that we might become better people--kinder and more compassionate and more empathetic--as we grow older. Weltner writes,

I’ve been thinking about this subject since I began reading James Hillman’s The Force of Character and the Lasting Life. Hillman rejects the idea that old age is no more than a time of losses, marked by a succession of senior moments, gray hairs, and wrinkles. He prefers, he says, to entertain the idea that the development of character requires additional years beyond those in which we have spent striving and sacrificing. He believes that older men and women, finally free from the yoke of conformity that prevented their fullest development, require this time to grow into their own unique selves.

          Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that gulfs will wash us down;
It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,--
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

I didn’t even start working with my cousin Roy Bowden until he was seventy-six, and I wouldn’t have missed our steeple-jacking days for all the world, not to mention the many wonderful stories he told me about family members who died long before I was born, or the hilarious days we spent together on the golf course. He was fifty years my senior!

My colleague and friend Carolyn Owen-Towle, from whom you have already heard this morning, has written that,

Around forty, it occurred to me, "Hey, I’m not going to get out of this alive." With the gift of my birth came the inevitability of my death. We can only spend life, use it up. In truth, we can shorten our life by suicide, dangerous risk-taking, or poor health habits, but we can do little to extend our existence. And so we spend our days. The critical thing is how we do it, for how we spend it is the story of our lives.

While there is much to be grateful for in achieving middle age, I also understand, far more personally than I did when I was younger, why so many of my older friends through the years have counseled me never to grow old. As if I have any choice!

Without question, it is the losses which really take their toll as we grow older. As we age, we become, as Wendell Berry wrote, "survivor of many and of much that [we] love, that [we] won’t live to see come again into this world." First our grandparents and their generation, then our parent‘s generation, and, too often along the way, dear friends and mentors begin to go. The young, too. As T. S. Eliot so poignantly wrote, "So many. I had not thought death had undone so many."

But if we are lucky, if we manage not to harden our hearts along the way, if the losses do not finally break us, we may find ourselves growing into those better people we so long to be. That is certainly our faith as Unitarian Universalists: it is never too late. We can always improve what we are.

For myself, I can say that I feel things much more intensely now than I did in my younger days. The emotions are closer to the surface, and I am able to show them more easily than I used to. It is a bittersweet kind of joy that we sometimes feel as we grow older, but I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Because it means that we have lived life, that we have loved and lost, but we are still here. Life is much sweeter as it grows shorter, and if that is the price we must pay, then so be it.

Dorothy Monroe has written, in words I often use in memorial services,

Death is not too high a price to pay for having lived. Mountains never die, nor do the seas or rocks or endless sky. Through countless centuries of time, they stay eternal, deathless. Yet they never live! If choice were mine, I would not hesitate to choose mortality. What ever Fate demanded in return for life, I’d give, for never to have seen the fertile plains nor heard the winds nor felt the warm sun on sands beside the salty sea, nor touched the hands of those I love--without these, all the gains of timelessness would not be worth one day of living and loving, come what may.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock