"On Turning Seventy"

Sydney M. Williams
January 31, 2011

Note from Old Lyme

"On Turning Seventy"

“I don’t feel old. I don’t feel anything until noon. Then it’s time for my nap.”

                                                                                                                      Bob Hope (1903-2003)

The most remarkable thing about turning seventy, other than the veneration one expects but rarely gets, is how unremarkable it all seems. Of course, there is significance to seventy – one is supposed to be revered for one's sagacity and respected for one's endurance. Old age is associated with patinas, such as one might find on a dusty volume, an antique chair or, better yet, in a fine Bordeaux. But I don't feel any more revered or respected (other than by my grandchildren whose powers of discernment are not yet fully developed) than I did a week ago.

Gertrude Stein once said, “We are always the same age inside.” That is true. I look at my wife, or my brothers and sisters, and I see the person I knew fifty or more years ago. Returning to my high school's fiftieth reunion a few years ago, it was not the wrinkled, stooped, balding, elderly gentlemen that confronted me that I noticed; it was the young men they had been. Looking at myself in the mirror every day for the roughly 10,000 times I have shaved, I never notice the gradual change in my features. I feel a little like Dorian Grey, unaware there is a portrait in the attic that is aging.

As much as anything, it is the rapidity with which time seems to sail by, that is most notable. Thoughts of mortality rise to the surface more frequently than they did twenty or thirty years ago. In my teens I thought I was immortal, but no longer. Thornton Wilder captured the fleetness of time in his play, Our Town, written in the town in New Hampshire where I grew up, Peterborough, when he was a resident of the MacDowell Colony. The play is an allegory; it traces the residents of a small New England village through several generations. The stage manager delicately and sensitively assists the viewer, or reader, through several scenes portraying critical moments in the lives of some of the residents, from birth to marriage to death. In the middle of the second act – on Emily Webb's and George Gibb's wedding day – the stage manager ruminates on Mr. and Mrs. Webb's life together: “You know how it is: you're twenty-one or twenty-two and you make some decisions; then whissh! You're seventy.” That is the way I feel, especially about the passing of the forty-eight years since I met my wife, Caroline.

Life is filled with decisions. We pick a college. We find a place to live. We get married and have children. We pick up and move. We change careers. Each decision carries consequences, most of which cannot be foreseen. Decisions, subsequent to mine, have resulted in ten grandchildren, a source of immense pleasure and enormous pride. Knowing that they will follow fills me with hope for a future that too often appears uncertain. The message is: life is filled with wonder and surprises; it cannot be foreseen; it is to be savored. The greatest regret we have as we get older is rarely what we did, but things we might have done, but did not.

In a speech in 1905, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, Mark Twain said, “Three score and ten! It is the Scriptural statute of limitations.” I don't think so. Seventy today is not the same as my grandfathers. I cannot picture my grandparents schussing Vail’s Riva Ridge, as I recently did. When I go out on the tennis courts at the Hillsboro Club in Florida, I look and feel like a newborn gazelle. There are people in their nineties batting the ball back and forth with surprising vigor. The concept of retiring is unappealing and, in fact, frightening, marking, as it does, the end of a person’s active life. It would bring to an end a career I still enjoy. The business has brought great friends, for which I am thankful; to be surrounded with youth helps keep me young.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote: “To be seventy-years old is like climbing the Alps. You reach a snow-crowned summit, and see behind you the deep valley stretching miles and miles away, and before you other summits higher and whiter, which you may have the strength to climb or not. Then you sit down and meditate and wonder which it will be.”

While I enjoy the memories, I don't have to sit down and meditate about the future. I know that I will aim for the “higher and whiter” summits, and will continue to live this life and hike these hills as long as I am able.