Yesterday was my birthday, and I am now 89 years old. Yes, I said old. I am not 89 years young. I am old and I feel every damned year of it in my bones. You may believe that saying I am 89 years young is somehow a compliment. It is not; it’s goddamned patronizing. Just stop it.
And don’t address me as Young Man. I have a name. Use it. If you must categorize me, I will accept curmudgeon. But I’d be far more comfortable with old fart or You Old Bastard.
Unless you want me to piss in your lunchbox when you’re not looking, don’t you dare pat me on the back. I will not accept that as an endearing gesture. It is an assertion of your youthful superiority over my decrepit condition. A pat on the back is always directed downward: from the teacher to the student; from the captain to the private. No humble worker would ever pat his boss on the back. Now don’t you dare pull that bullshit on me.
I can no longer run a hundred yards in under ten minutes, or bench press my own weight. But I have 89 years of history locked away in my head. I can tell you what it’s like to make a midnight dash to the outdoor privy at forty below zero. I can tell you what it’s like to carry drinking water from the pump or melt snow for the Saturday morning bath. I can tell you what it’s like to do your homework by the light of a kerosine lamp. If I wanted to talk to my best friend, I didn’t take out my phone. I set out walking the two miles to his house—on more than one occasion, while he took a short cut through the woods to my place.
I don’t remember Pearl Harbor, but I do recall victory gardens and scrap iron drives, ration books and national 35 mile an hour victory speed limit. I can remember when war waster was the most derogatory label in my vocabulary. I remember fireside chats and when Spam was the only meat on the table. And I remember VE Day and VJ Day and when the boys came marching home.
Before there was covid, there was polio, and the fear of spending the rest of your life in an iron lung. We had The March of Dimes and the hope that it would someday facilitate a cure or entirely eliminate infantile paralysis. Until we had vaccinations for them, measles, mumps, and chicken pox were known as childhood diseases. Everybody got them. Before the miracle drugs, penicillin and sulfa, became available, a cat scratch or a splinter could be life-threatening. Pneumonia was often a death sentence.
I don’t have to remind you of the red scare, when communist, communist dupe, or pinko were the boogieman under the bed, when the so-called blacklist denied to the world the talents of some of our most creative minds, or when the duplicity and outright lies of Senator Joe McCarthy and his minions paralyzed political thought through the early ‘50s. Your generation has the orange abomination in the White House and his MAGA contagion.
Mark well the moment. The day will come, much sooner than you can possibly know, when some snot-nose kid will pat you on the back, call you Young Man, and announce to the world that you are 89 years young.