Sydney M. Williams
Essays from Essex
“Reflections on Turning Eighty”
January 31. 2021
“At twenty, a man is a peacock; at thirty a lion; at forty a camel;
at fifty a serpent; at sixty a dog; at seventy an ape; at eighty, a nothing at all.”
Attributed to Baltasar Gracián (1601-1658)
Spanish Jesuit, writer and philosopher
On this date eighty years ago, my mother delivered a baby boy, with the assistance of Dr. Robert Salinger, at Grace New Haven Hospital. It was 3:00PM; the baby was named for his father.
All babies, it was once said, looked like Winston Churchill. Whether that was complimentary to Churchill or the baby, I never knew. But what was true for many was apparently also true for me. Two days before the commencement of Operation Dragoon on August 15, 1944 (the invasion of Southern France), my mother’s youngest brother, my Uncle Joe Hotchkiss, was in command of LST 601. Churchill was there to wish the men Godspeed. He stood aboard a barge that came down the column where Uncle Joe’s ship was anchored. My uncle wrote to his parents of Churchill: “Smiling and waving, he passed within fifty feet. He was in his blue playsuit looking just as much like little Sydney Williams as he could.”
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Regarding the rubric quoted above, it hurts that a man who never made it to sixty should refer to one who has turned eighty as a “nothing at all.” Of course, when the average person meets 10,000 people in a lifetime it means I may have met approximately 0.00014% of the world’s population. Those I do know or have known may have something to say about me. The rest could care less whether I am a peacock, a camel or an ape. So perhaps Gracián was right, to most of the world I don’t exist.
Nevertheless, I do, and I feel good. I am healthy and blessed in my family and friends. Yesterday morning I did my regular (five days a week) series of exercises, which includes fifty crunches and twenty-five push-ups. Yet, my grandchildren look at me, knowing I am a relic of yesteryear. I can hear them reworking those lines from Lewis Carroll: “You are old Pop Pop Williams, my grandchild said, and your hair has become very white. And yet you incessantly stand on your head. Do you think at your age it is right?” Well, my hair has been white for fifty years, and I do not stand on my head. Staying upright is my focus! Nevertheless, I look forward, with chin out, to whatever the future offers. Bring it on, I say!
Of course, there are things given up as one ages. For example, I gave up skiing in my seventies. One advantage of giving up something like skiing is that time and memory exaggerate past reality. I never danced down the deep powder on Vail’s Bolshoi Ballroom with the grace I see in my mind. But so what? It’s my memory. We all have a little Walter Mitty in us. And age has other advantages. It excuses one from the complexities of high tech. When I had trouble logging onto the portal my accountant wanted me to set up for my “organizer,” my complaint brought forth the following e-mail response: “Bonny, please send Sydney a paper organizer.”
However, eighty doesn’t seem that old, when I look back at the speed with which the years have passed. Like a roll of paper towels, time unfolds at ever-increasing rates. Was it really seventy-seven years ago that I saw my father board a train in New Haven that took him to Texas and thence to Italy with the 10th Mountain Division? Can it be that Seventy-five years have passed since I enrolled at Miss Lindeman’s school in Peterborough, New Hampshire, or that sixty-five years have gone by since I met John Harper, my roommate at Williston Academy? Has it really been fifty-seven years since the Reverend Dr. J. Burton Thomas, pronounced Caroline and me man and wife at the Church of Our Heavenly Rest in New York? Can our youngest child be turning fifty this year? Our grandchildren were born yesterday, so why are five of them in college? Where has time gone? Photographs remind us of what once was, just as in our memories the people we once knew live on. In his 1958 book Things Fall Apart, the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe wrote: “A man’s life from birth to death was a series of transition rites, which brought him nearer and near to his ancestors.” There is truth in that. At night, before nodding off, my mind wanders back to earlier days.
When I turned 30, my wife threw a birthday party. There was a sense of youth left behind for the more serious job of being a parent: recklessness, out; responsibility, in. Indicative of the age, a fight broke out in the dining room over something, the importance of which has evaporated. At 40, Caroline threw another party – less rambunctious. Our children were getting older. There is a photo of me in a cowboy hat, with a silly, bourbon-induced, grin, contemplating the onset of middle age. There were no fisticuffs, just a bunch of men and women having fun. There have been three other parties celebrating the passage of the decades, with the time between each, while numerically the same, getting shorter.
When we’re living through it, time passes quickly. On the other hand, the eighty years before I was born seems long ago. Consider what those years brought and how far away they seem: The Civil War and the assassination of Lincoln. Custer’s Last stand in June 1876. The assassination of two more U.S. Presidents: James Garfield in Long Branch, NJ in 1881 and William McKinley in Buffalo in 1901. Teddy Roosevelt’s ride up San Juan Hill, in 1898. Kitty Hawk, NC in 1903, with the Wright Brothers first flight. Doughboys sent to France, in 1917, to “make the world safe for democracy;” not realizing the war would give rise to Mussolini and Hitler. The “Roaring 20s” and the Great Depression. Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and the start of World War II.
In a letter to Edward Dimmitt, in July 1901, Mark Twain wrote: “Life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages.” I have been one to repeat the oft-quoted line that youth is wasted on the young, but I fear Twain is wrong for one fundamental reason – not knowing our fate helps keep us going.
Time is sobering, as it exhibits both the alpha and omega of life. In those eighty years before I was born, all but one of my great-great grandparents died, as did all but one of my great-grandparents. And my parents and grandparents were born. Since my birth, all have died, along with two sisters and one brother. In Hannah Rothschild’s book House of Trelawney, Tony Scott, an aging, bachelor art dealer, reminisces: “One of the worst things about aging is that if you stop, there’s a danger you might never get going again; muscles seize up and then every movement is uncomfortable.” We cannot let that happen. Walking with my wife in the woods around Essex Meadows is a life-saving antidote.
In his 2016 book of essays, Senior Moments, Willard Spiegelman wrote, darkly in my opinion: “We come into the world alone, with a cry. We exit alone, to confront the eternal silence. The fun, all the pleasure and adventure, lies in between.” More succinctly and less poetically, a friend used to make the same point: “It is not the destination in life that is important, but the trip.” But who knows? Perhaps the future is more exciting? John Kendrick Bangs suggested the party continues. In his 1896 book, Houseboat on the River Styx, he wrote of Charon, whose job was to transport ‘shades’ across the River Styx, from the land of the living to Hades. He takes command of the houseboat, which is filled with well-known personages, from myriad cultures and multiple centuries, who socialize together. The house committee includes Sir Walter Raleigh, Cassius, Demosthenes, Blackstone, Doctor Johnson and Confucius. Who wouldn’t want to mingle with that group? Bangs was having fun of course, but the dead do live on in the memories of those who knew them. After my Grandfather Hotchkiss died in 1947, my grandmother told me to remember him and to do so often. “For,” she said, “when you do, he will come alive, in your memory.” She was right. He does.
In “Morituri Salutamus,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow spoke to his 50th reunion class at Bowdoin
“For age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress.
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.”
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And on that note, with a future lit by stars, these reflections on completing eighty years come to a close. But I go on.
Labels: Baltazar Gracian, Dr. J. Burton Thomas, Edward Dimmitt, Hannah Rothschild, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Kendrick Bangs, Joseph W. Hotchkiss, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Willard Spiegelman, Winston Churchill
