In the course of the Great Downsizing, a long-buried letter emerged from the "archives." It's from my long-gone father, and was written in December of 1974 on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. A most fortuitous discovery — inasmuch as I am now exactly the age that Pop was on the day that he wrote to me. In his letter, Pop reports that he is taken aback by the person whom he has become. Who is this guy with the gray hair and the "little paunch" who "takes a day or two to recover from any physical activity" and who "finds events repeating themselves."
"In my mind," he says, "there is another me, a real me," who looks upon this present self as a "stranger and an interloper."
It appears as though my father's self-image was lagging behind the reality of things
I hadn't remembered reading the letter – it sat in a box for thirty-five years — but I'm not surprised by its content. My father was a strong, athletic, handsome man who didn't easily accept the inevitable changes that come with septuagenarianism. I vividly remembering him saying, at eighty, "I hate my body."
I'm with him, but only a part of the way. Of course I'm dismayed by the decline. The gray hair, the thickened figure, yes. The deterioration of memory, certainly. But I don't share Pop's sense that my real or better self is somewhere in the past. True that I can't jump as high — yet, paradoxically, I feel more like myself, more comfortable being me now than ever before. I'm also more cheerful, on the whole — although not at nighttime, when i sleep just as badly as ever my father did). When I look in the mirror, I don't see a face ravaged by age — I see a face that now looks like it was always destined to look and finally got there. I have become more like myself, so to speak, every year. But how long until the me-ness starts to plummet? It must happen eventually. Time will tell.
My father used to say, "You're entitled to your biblical three score and ten. But after seventy, you're in extra innings." o which I would respond, "In some sports, extra innings is known as sudden death."
But hey, let's not forget that the extra innings are frequently the most exciting part of the game.
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