AUDACITY OF AGE [6-6-25]

BEYOND WINTER: Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—AUDACITY OF AGE [6-6-25]

 

I have gotten back onto an every-other-day posting, rather than the every-third-day regimen I was trying. I just have so much to say about what it’s like to be old, so old that I am no longer even in “the winter of our years” but actually “beyond winter.”

Isn’t that the most audacious thing you’ve ever heard? I mean, why in the world would anyone think that folks would want to hear about stuff that happened so long ago?

This came to mind as Helen and I reviewed our first 66 years of marriage, to see if we could make improvements for the next 66. I thought about folks celebrating their 66^th anniversary on the day we got married in 1959. They were wed in 1893!

Young people in 1959 thought that people who got married in 1893 were hopelessly out of it. I mean, that was in “the gay 90s,” before “the turn of the century,” way before “the roaring ‘20s.” Before all the WWs, not to mention Korea and Vietnam and Desert Storm and… Way before The Great Depression.

That was stuff you study in history class, not stuff anybody actually lived through. Photos in black and white, made not by a cell phone but by a camera on a tripod with a photographer draped in a black cover. Henry Ford’s first Model T didn’t sell until 1908. Folks married 66 years before us left for their honeymoon in a buggy pulled by a horse. Those brides couldn’t even vote until they’d been married 26 years,

To those of us married in 1959, 1893 young married couples lived only in history books. [Not even in film strips, the hot new technology of our day.] To young people now, folks married in 1959 live only in history books, not in real life.

That’s why it’s audacious for an old person to write about “back then.” Even old people now don’t believe in stereographs and mimeographs and graph paper. We forget so easily. We think that cars always had seat belts, that you could always control the TV from across the room, that you didn’t need cash to pay for your Pepsi.

There is an audacity of age that is unlike any other.

In my final sermon, I told of my early years on a farm, with 13 families on one telephone line, and growing up without a car, and milking a cow by hand. Some friends heard a young teen boy sitting ahead of them say to his parents, “Is any of this true?”

Well, no. It’s just stuff old people make up so that we’ll sound more interesting. We always had cell phones and electric cars and computers. One thing different, though. We didn’t have AI. Our intelligence had to be real.

 

John Robert McFarland