Seems like old times

 From our overstocked archives

Sam Smith, 2016 -  Three years ago my wife gave me a great 75^th birthday party at Linda Bean’s restaurant across from her grandfather’s Maine store. Everything went well until the next morning when I realized I had blown my cover.

Part of my strategy in life had been to pretend that I wasn’t getting any older, a con aided by the fact that I was a physical spoiled brat, which is to say that other than a bout of prostate cancer, badly hurting my back while pumping iron, and hundreds of hours in dental offices, nothing serious had hurt my health. .

I attributed my good health in part to the fact that I spent my first ten years in a  house built on a trash dump. In those days, many homes in Washington had restrictive covenants on them, barring sale not only to blacks and Jews, but to an assortment of other ethnic pariahs including "Syrians and Persians." My father and mother - he a mid level official of the New Deal - weren’t going to sign one of those.

The Georgetown trash dump -- next to a row of ramshackle homes with privies outside and impoverished blacks inside -- came without a restrictive covenant. Three years after the 1930s modern house was built, it was listed in the 1940s census as a "rural residence."

Thus I was a sub teen before I realized that all dirt didn’t have broken glass and metal in it. Further, as a teenager I would work summers on an organic farm moving real manure rather than the virtual variety that I would confront in my journalistic career. And my five siblings and I would get poison ivy shots from the town doctor all with the same needle.

I mentioned my random immunization by nature to one of my doctors and he agreed with its significance, noting that he had been a child in Spring Valley. As one account puts it:

“On a winter morning in 1993, the residents of the affluent Washington, DC neighborhood known as Spring Valley awoke to the news that construction workers had unearthed World War I munitions in the backyards of two homes. Unbeknownst to them, the United States Army developed toxic chemicals at nearby Camp American University and tested them in the surrounding countryside during the war. There is no record of where they might have been buried, and after the war ended the land was sold to a developer, who built houses on the site.”

I confess I did worry, perhaps inordinately, about dying. As I wrote once:

[As a boy] I became infatuated with the idea that I would not survive past the early twenties… There was surprisingly little morose about this, though I knew, from my reading and radio listening, that a polar bear might attack you at any moment -- that is if you were living a truly interesting life. This would be tragic -- but in a literary sense -- a story that others would tell and weep about for years to come. It also made me sad to think about it; on the other hand it would be a good story and it was, it seemed, far better and more interesting to die young by polar bear attack in the Arctic than of respectable, stultifying old age where I was currently living.

The problem with the sort of good fortune I actually experienced is that it gave me absolutely no training for getting older.

And as recently as the past couple of years I have twice been challenged by TSA security guards over my claim that I was old enough not to have to take off my shoes.

But in the past few months, the delusion has suffered a number of setbacks, albeit mostly cultural rather than physical. For example it dawned on me that I had outlived all the men in my family of three adult generations except for one uncle and one grandfather. And since the latter never drank and was senior warden of his church, I felt he didn’t count.

Then there were the little things. The lack of chronological challenges at the airport, gratuitous assistance getting my coat on, asking a younger guy to crawl under that table for something I dropped, restaurant servers with polite sarcasm calling me “young man,” my daughter-in-law pointing out the rocking chairs at the miniature golf course where she is taking on her young son, and the other snowy day at the Bow Street Market, where the cashier actually had the gall to offer to take my bags out to my car.

Add in the annoyance of arthritis and it seems like old times have finally caught up with me.

I wasn’t going to say anything about it, until I remembered something I wrote a long time go, namely that nothing in life short of death is so bad that you can’t get a good story out of it. 

And it’s better than the alternative.