In less than two weeks I will enter my 80th decade. Let me put a better spin on that, I will be 79 years old. No matter how you phrase it, I will be ancient. And those cute jokes in the above meme … all too true! Really, how many more years (months, weeks?) before I will be buying Depends, surviving on Ensure, or picking out walkers from the geriatric selection on Amazon.com. After all, I’ll need a top notch walker to chase the nurses around my nursing home. How did that happen? How did that happen so fast?

Sometimes I look back and think, it was a long life. My early images usually come to me in black and white, slightly whiter at the edges. That’s probably because my extent photos of those early years look like that … monochrome and faded. It is almost as if they were from someone else’s existence, another person or not me at least, who lived in some exotic world long lost to us. It was a world without the internet, where you looked up things in an encyclopedia or in a library card file cabinet, where you talked to your friends face to face, where you used your phone only if someone else on your ‘party line’ wasn’t using it, where the milk man and ice man and coal man made regular deliveries, and where you played outside and unsupervised without concern about being kidnapped or abused. My parents encouraged me to play outside and in the traffic but that is another story.

I can recall being thrilled to be assigned as the ink well filler at my local Grade School. Yes, we had ink wells in those days. They were essential to refilling of our pens as we were instructed in how to write in the cursive style. I think quill pens had been discarded only a couple of years before I arrived. Yes, penmanship was taught in those pre-historic days, as well as diagramming sentences, and spelling correctly. Okay, I had trouble in all three areas but at least these skills were taught. Another honor I received was being assigned to walk a group of the younger kids home. I even got to wear a white thingy defining my elevated status. I don’t think more than a dozen of those insufferable little brats were lost on my watch.

There is another ‘sense’ I have about my dotage. I don’t feel this old. I still think about myself as a sexy guy with a trim body and a full head of hair. I put a pic on my Blog profile from that era just to remind me of those glory days, not that any of that helped me with the lasses. Nothing helped with members of the feminine tribe! Sigh! Once, perhaps about a decade ago if that, I was carded while buying something that required proof of age. When I laughed out loud at the at the clerk and revealed to him that I had been a schoolmate of Abe Lincoln, he adopted a look of incredulity … ‘well, you don’t look old.’ Really, I thought they had to pass a drug test before getting these jobs.

Then, of course, comes my daily reality test. It is a bitter test indeed, one of pain and suffering. I have to get up each and every morning. The groaning and muttering and complaining about a body that doesn’t work very well is followed by a horrific realization of the long distance to the male throne room. That moment is best not decribed. Such scenes are not suitable for women and children. And now I have this damn Fitbit watch, a device created by the Devil him or herself ostensibly to get me into shape. That evil thing sets down in irrefutable ways just how inert I have become. ‘What do you mean I only walked 174 steps today?’

I hate people to know this, but I once went to the gym regularly, and walked around the golf course (no cart). Back in high school and college I walked to school, long walks of several miles in all kinds of weather. Now, when the phone rings on the other side of the room, I debate whether the long trip is worth it. That crisis has been resolved by my new technology. The number now shows up on my watch and helps me ignore the calls from scammers promising to make me a literary star. In those, and many other moments, I know I am beyond ancient. OMG! Remember when we had to walk over to the TV to turn the tuner (i.e. pre-remote controls). How did we survive? While that health and fitness watch has come in handy in some ways, it did me no favors when it assigned me a personal nickname … lard ass.

There is one blessing for which I am grateful. I have all the financial resources I need to live in comfort and without worry. Even the enormous costs associated with having my spouse cared for in a memory care facility as she declined with Alzheimers was easily covered because we could pay for a good long-term insurance policy that was available and affordable back in the old days. I thought about all of this, and my good financial fortune, when I ran across a few statistics a couple of days ago:

Just before the pandemic hit, half of all American households had no retirement savings, none at all. While shocking, it has long been known that American’s are relatively poor savers (compared to Asian families for example). Further, it was estimated that only one-quarter of working households had defined benefit plans [pensions], down from at least one half as recently as 1989. But those that had contemporary retirement accounts haven’t saved much. Less than a third of all those houesholds held $100,000 or more in savings, hardly enough to enjoy a comfortable retirment. At ages 55-59, the prime pre-retirement years, the median household had $25,000 in retirement accounts, $5,000 in checking and savings, $40,000 in financial assets, and an overall net worth of $180,000 dollars. With such low levels of private resources, many elderly will rely substantially upon Social Security benefits. The average household benefit from that program today is about $22,000 … hardly enough to escape poverty. And this system will come under increasing pressure in future years.

If you were to travel through Sun City in Arizona or the Villages in Florida, you will see thousands of happy retirees enjoying their Golden Years. They will whip around in their golf carts, enjoy daily rounds of golf, drinks with neighbors in the late afternoon, followed by a meal at a fine restaurant. They might even enjoy the occasional cruise or trip to exotic locations like Las Vegas. Life seems good for our retirees. I recall driving through the villages and seeing all those smiling faces on people waving at us. They seemed so friendly until I remembered they voted for Trump in large numbers. Ugh!

Two things to keep in mind when looking upon these fortunate ones. They represent only a portion of all retirees and, because they congregate in highly visible communities, are easily confused as representing the norm for all of the elderly. Those struggling to survive day to day tend to be scattered and less visible. But there is another way to look on this matter. What we see before us usually is what is most obvious. There is a silent tragedy unfolding, hidden by the curtain of time and our typically myopic point of view.

Many observers have talked about the hollowing out of the middle class, something that happened gradually as a consequence of the Reagan revolution and the redistribution of income and wealth to the elite. Well, think about this. It is this vaunted American middle-class from a prior era that filled up all those modest ranch style homes in retirement communities. Most of the current inhabitants of these homes, or filling up the golf courses, were fortunate enough to work during the golden era that preceded the ‘war on working America’ that began when the newer tribe of Republicans seized control in the 1980s.

My wife and I can be counted upon as memebrs of a more fortunate generation. We came of age in a blessed period when the American Dream was alive and well. We both came from working class families of limited means. Still we were easily able to work our way through school to higher degrees from top universities (a Ph.D. for me and an honors Law Degree for her). And we worked in an era where defined pensions were commonplace, good job opportunities were available, and reasonable compensation packages were the norm. I taught at the college level and, day after day, saw the anxious looks of students who were burdened by crushing debt at the start of their careers and frightened by receding prospects in their futures. These were college students. I understand that the despair and anxiety among today’s high school youth are palpable and disturbing.

My point is that our economic sins of today won’t be fully expressed until sometime down the line. Untold numbers of future aging Americans will hit their golden years without adequate resources to get them through to the end. That is a sad prospect. The old saying is that we measure a society by how it treats its most vulnerable members … the young and the old. We have always sucked (comparatively speaking) in supporting our young. We have done somewhat better with our edlerly (they vote after all). But I fear even our limited successes with that population are about to end.

In the future, America may fail to protect neither its young nor its old. Pathetic indeed. So, perhaps I should not moan so much about my crumbling body and receding hairline. At least I have enough to eat well, too well in fact, and have a decent roof over my head. Hell, I can even buy a hi-tech fitness watch I’ll never use without worrying about the cost. Oh joy!