It is official. I am older than dirt. I am an octogenerian, have been for almost a week now. 🙃 Or, to be technically accurate, I am now in my ninth freaking decade. Put that way, there may be trees in the petrified forest younger than me. The only way to accurately measure my age is through carbon dating.

I can remember far back in the previous century wondering if I could possibly live long enough to usher in a new millennium. After all, I would be 56 in the year 2,000. Oh my god, that struck me as impossibly old. No way could I last that long. After all, I came of age when a popular mantra was ‘don’t trust anyone over 30.’ But my 30th birthday came and went. Then five more decades came and went along with the Y2K fears that our digitally dependent civilization would collapse when midnight struck while ushering a new century on January 1, 2000. I even watched as Sydney first celebrated that moment, and realized that the world really had survived 🥳, as had I.

So, how do I feel about being so ancient. Pretty good, actually. My condo neighbors regularly gather to chat and to dump on Trump. While the Association is not deed restricted by age, it might as well be. We are all old. And we are all highly educated and successful. We are retired academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers, and other assorted professionals. Many matriculated from the best universities in the land. Yet, none of us seem eager to turn back our personal clocks. We had good lives but are desperately concerned about the future given the various looming threats to our climate, our political system and American democracy, and the uncertainties emerging from the specter of artificial intelligence (to name a few).

Most of my geezer friends and I realize that the world we entered back in the 1930s through the 1950s was not a happy place. There was war, economic disasters, famine, genocide, a host of totalitarian regimes, and a looming nuclear age where an atomic holocaust seemed more than likely. No, it was not a pretty place globally.

Even America faced horrendous problems. We still had legal apartheid that relegated many minorities to lives of isolation and oppression. Women were generally treated as 2nd class citizens. I still recall a colleague from the Wisconsin Law School. She graduated (in the 1950s) at the top of her law school class, one of only two women. The Dean at the time told her that no major law firm in Wisconsin would possibly consider her. She somehow managed to get a position on the law faculty at Wisconsin and become a towering force in her profession.

Certainly, we were not living in anything close to the ideal worlds presented on TV family sitcoms. I’m my situation (as a child), we lived in a cold water flat with no central heating (I could see my breath at night). We had an ice box, no car, a party line telephone shared with 3 other families, among other privations. But no one else had much either, so such challenges never bothered us. I started earning money by delivering papers early on and never stopped working. Even, after retirement, I continued writing books.

Despite all our challenges back then there remained a pervasive sense of hope and opportunity. I could work and scramble my way through a competitive high school and a decent (private) university on my own (no financial help from family), then head off to India in the Peace Corps. I experienced little anxiety about my future, assuming that this really was a land of opportunity. There would be challenges, of course, but I had faith that things would work out. And I was correct, America (back then) had become a real land of opportunity … a moment of promise that began to evaporate with the Reagan revolution that started in the 1980s.

Mostly, though, surviving this long has permitted my cohort to see many amazing things. As a youngster in grade school, I was assigned the honored position of ink well filler. That’s right, we had pens that had to be continuously refilled with ink. At home, we finally got a TV after most other homes had them. Still, you had to struggle with the vertical and horizontal controls to get a picture. Many a time, I accompanied my dad to a store where we got the vacuum tube’s checked. And believe it or not, to change the channel (we had only four at most), we had to walk all the way to the set and turn a clunky nob. Worse, the stations would cease broadcasting around midnight, at which time they would sign off with the national anthem.

But there was other entertainment in the busy streets. The milk man, the coal man, the ice man (who delivered blocks of ice to our ‘ice box’), and a variety of other vendors were frequent visitors to our hood which was over run with kids (large Catholic families). I can still recall running after the ice or milk truck to purloin chunks of ice on hot summer days.

You could get your knives sharpened or buy used rags and so much more. I have a picture (somewhere) taken of me sitting on a horse in front of our flat … yet another itinerant vendor wandering through. In the late 1950s, when I was sick as a dog for several days, my folks broke down and called a doctor (a rarity indeed since they cost money). He came to our flat to check me out … a freaking house call 🏠 if you can believe. That was a good thing. My appendix had burst, and I was near death. I was rushed to the nearby hospital and directly into surgery.

Without cell phones and social media, we were raised the old fashion way. My parents told me to get out of the damn house and not to return until the street lights came on. Kids then were not kidnapped. If any were abused, we never heard about it, nor did our parents seem to worry. (After all, the sign my parents made me wear saying ‘please take this brat‘ did them little good.

Often, as I marauded the streets with a gang of neighborhood ruffians, my long-suffering folks would change the locks or quickly move to an undisclosed location. But they couldn’t lose me no matter how hard they tried. When I got a bit older, my uncle gave me a set of golf clubs. They were so ancient that the shafts of the so-called irons were made of wood. A couple of my buddies and I would walk several miles (uphill at the end) toting our clubs to a local 9-hole course. We could play all day for one buck before trudging home as the sun set. We were tough.

I could go on but you get the picture. The pace of change has been dizzying and accelerating. We did live during an epochal period of historical transformation. The angst we see, particularly among the young, may well be the result of this unprecedented pace of change. Many are ill equipped to handle it. My suspicion is that this unnerving period of exponential change has disoriented those incapable of dealing with uncertainty. They seek authoritarian voices who will calm their fears. Unfortunately, that is like seeking a magician who can hold the tide back. Ain’t going to happen

These eight decades have been one helluva ride. However, I’m glad it is coming to an end. I really am getting way too old for this shit.