On Thursday evening of last week, Julie and I celebrated my seventieth birthday. It was a quieter celebration than we had planned a year ago. It’s hard to have a party when you’re hunkering down and trying not to catch something.
Julie baked an apple pie, and created a couple of wedge salads, and we split a huge New York steak we had bought at Costco the day before. We tried to split a nice bottle of red, but we ended up full and sleepy before we finished it. Julie gave me a photo book of our many fall trips to Yellowstone. She also gave me a pair of suspenders, which, due to old-man-butt-shrinkage, have finally become necessary to keep my pants up.
We spent the evening (before we got too sleepy to talk) in a conversation that touched on how improbable it was that we were sitting across from each other. I was thirty-eight years old when I taught my first college class as a new professor at the College of Idaho, and that class happened to be Julie’s first one as a College of Idaho first-year student. Now we joke that we bonded at first sight (like baby ducks, we went for the first thing we saw when we broke out of the shell).
It may have been more complicated than that. For one thing, at the time I was sure that professors with a modicum of decency didn’t end up in romantic relationships with their students. These things do happen in colleges and universities, but they almost never end well, just like psychiatrist-patient romances almost never end well. Several years before, I had bartended in Ketchum in a bar where the only work rules had been to show up on time, do your job, share the cocaine, and don’t sleep with your co-workers. The people who broke those rules gradually disappeared from the employee roster. (I didn’t have cocaine to share—I had watched it turn too many people into incandescent assholes—but I had noticed that when people stopped sharing it with their co-workers, their co-workers wouldn’t sleep with them anymore.)
Also, I was determined never to get married. At thirty-eight, I had pretty well used up my lifetime supply of good luck with women. I was about to give them up for a year or two and see how I did, and I was absolutely certain that I’d do better than I’d been doing.
Also, upon her arrival at college, Julie had joined Campus Crusade for Christ. She was attending hellfire sermons every Sunday and urging her fellow students to dedicate their lives to Christ or else. After spending most of my life as an agnostic, I had become a Christian Existentialist after the manner of Albert Camus, which meant that whatever joy Christianity offered came from hanging on the cross, and not from what, if anything, came after.
(Camus is improbably convincing about finding happiness in the midst of the unbearable, which is why he appeals to those who have finally decided to spend their lives alone.)
It took us a couple of years of I-can’t-believe-I’m-feeling-this way craziness, but Julie and I finally confessed to loving each other the spring of her junior year. After a year of covert and anxiety-ridden liaisons, we decided to brazen things out, move in together and see how long we could make it work. That was twenty-eight years ago. We’ll celebrate our brazen twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in August of 2021. We hope to have more people at that celebration than we had at my birthday party, but if it’s just the two of us, we’ll still have a surplus of joy.
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Spending twenty-eight close years together means that you transform into a person you would have found unrecognizable before you met. Julie is no longer a fundamentalist Christian. I no longer have the lonely, harsh, and when-you’re-dead-you’re-dead outlook of Camus.
Instead, we have come to a new kind of agnosticism, which stems from a series of unanswerable cosmic questions: Why is it, when you’ve lived long enough to make mistakes and learn from them, when you’ve become empathetic enough not to go around hurting other people through carelessness and judgment, when you’ve found somebody to love who loves you back, when life is good, and interesting, and full of things to do—why do you have to die? If you like this life, why do you have to leave it? Why do the people you love have to leave it?
We don’t know, and won’t know until we die, and maybe not even then. But these are questions we can’t help but ponder.
Camus, of course, would say worrying about the whys and wherefores of a temporary existence is the worst kind of wasting time. He didn’t have a lot of patience with people given to navel-gazing, or who speculated about the motives of a god or gods, or who became so enamored of an idea they’d kill for it.
Life has no meaning, Camus would say, except what meaning you decide to bring to it. Your thoughts don’t matter until they become actions. In fact, your actions are the only things that matter in your life, at least until you’re dead. Then even they don’t mean anything, at least not to you.
Camus called this scheme of things the absurd, and he asserted that it is the wispy substance of our lives.
If Camus had an absolute, it was that we should all do our best to make life easier and more dignified for our fellow human beings. It would have been hard to derive that morality from his philosophy, which doesn’t provide much distinction between good and evil.
Camus ultimately chose to deal with absurdity by following the Golden Rule, which was fortunate for the people around him, and probably for himself. It is, I’m certain, where the more thoughtful of us end up.
Treating others as you would like to be treated by them is a sort of moral 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. It’s hard to escape it in the end, no matter your philosophical or religious pretentions, and it makes both treaters and treatees feel better. It certainly has made Julie and me feel better.
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When I woke up Thursday I made the mistake of checking the national headlines, which were all about the threat of a stolen election and the end of constitutional government, and the start of civil war. I then told myself that I would never see my sixties again, which brought a sense of irretrievable loss. I read the obituary columns in the local papers, and recognized some names, which added an acute sense of mortality to the festivities.
On the bright side, I got happy birthday phone calls from friends. I opened a stack of birthday cards, all of which assured me that I wasn’t as old as I felt. Julie gave me a birthday kiss and told me I didn’t look a bit over sixty-nine-and-a-half. We went for a walk to Goat Creek meadows and back. That afternoon, our friends Tom and Ellen, who are even older than I am and still kicking vigorously, came by for early pie, outside on the deck. It was barely warm enough to sit there. They gave me a T-shirt that announced to the world I was old enough to have heard all the good rock bands. I was also old enough to have heard some pretty lousy rock bands, but I decided there would be a better time to tell them that.
I ended the day feeling almost cheerful. The country and I were going to live, maybe for a year or two longer. I really had seen Jefferson Airplane in concert. I had danced to the Troggs (Wild Thing) and Tommy James and the Shondells (My Baby Does the Hanky Panky). Not many Millennials can claim those kinds of memories.
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Seventy is impossibly old. That’s what I’ve believed my whole life, and for most of that life I’ve also believed, following Epicurus, that where I was, seventy was not. Where seventy was, I was not. Therefore, I had nothing to fear from seventy.
Now of course, seventy and I are occupying the same point in time, and I’ve had to admit that while seventy is old, it isn’t impossible, and while it isn’t the end of me, it’s the end of something.
If my seventieth birthday was the end of any chance for fame as a writer, it was always a longshot anyway. Olympic medals or Nobel Peace Prizes or being elected to a school board had disappeared from the radar long before seventy was even a threat. Children? Neither Julie nor I ever wanted any. A vast fortune? Not in this lifetime unless we win the lottery, and we don’t buy lottery tickets.
What seventy ends is any lingering insistence that infinite possibilities are still out there. I’m lucky that it took me as long as it did to get to that realization.
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It’s a paradox, but there is a tremendous freedom that comes with your choices becoming fewer and narrower. You start noticing that if you worry about what’s going to happen in 2050 you don’t have the energy to properly worry about lunch. You don’t have to go anywhere, so you don’t have to get ready to go anywhere. You don’t have to act on anything that doesn’t need to be acted on.
It’s amazing how little needs to be acted on, at least once lunch is taken care of.
You resist lifetime memberships because they’ve suddenly become bad deals. Maintenance and refurbishment, in all arenas, become preferable to new construction. Time becomes like the generous bundles of cash in the campaign fund of a retiring congressperson. It’s all yours. You can spend it any way you want.
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The last few days have been cold in the valley. It was close to zero last night. The sky is a dark blue and the sun will be bright when it gets here, but it will be a while. For the moment, we’re in shade and it’s too cold to stay outside. Julie’s put four big pieces of wood in the stove and it’s pumping out heat. It feels good, almost as if we’ll make it through the winter.
I’ve been dreaming a lot. I awaken with vivid and lucid images in my mind, mostly faces. I’m sure it’s partly because I’ve been sleeping way longer than I should, but it’s also because I seem to have had stowaways with me all my life, most of them since high school. They seem to have chosen this time of semi-quarantine to announce themselves. They are all eighteen, not seventy, and I am beginning to wonder where they’ve been hiding. I worry that they will eventually start speaking and reveal themselves to be nice people I really should have kept in touch with.
Maybe the mind releases the faces of your youth when you’re strong enough to handle them looking back at you. Maybe the faces themselves are alive, and only when the mind relaxes enough to stop clutching at them do they escape and roam free. Maybe the memories of adolescence bring back an old certainty that anything is possible, and it’s when your possibilities start shrinking that your dreams, in merciful compensation, recast a wide-open future.
These are thoughts that will lead to grief and loss and regret if I keep worrying away at them. So many things could have been done better or not at all. I know that Albert Camus wouldn’t approve of my spending time this way. Attend to the present, he’d say. You really want to make things better? Try not to do anything you’ll regret fifty years from now. He’d grin. Little existentialist joke, he’d say.
Good advice, joke or not. Impossible to follow. I’m pretty sure this is what I will spend a good chunk of my seventies thinking about. In the meantime, Julie’s face is in front of me. It’s real, and it reminds me that I’m not alone, and for the moment, neither is she.