Candles

A funny thing happened to me today. I turned 70. I’m not quite sure how that happened. Most of my friends are younger, which isn’t surprising. Just by the odds one would expect that. They ask the same question: “Do you feel 70?” In truth that is hard to answer. After all, I’ve never been 70 before so I’m not sure what it is supposed to feel like. I know the answer they want to hear, which is “No,” so I politely tell them that because the question isn’t really about me. My superannuation reminds them of their own advancing years and mortality, so they want reassurance that nothing bad is in store. Something bad is in store. But it might not arrive at 70… or 80 or 90. Then again, it might arrive much earlier.
 

A more honest answer is more nuanced. Most of the time I feel little different than 20 years ago, but it would be a lie to say that there are no moments (in every day) when I feel very different. Without crossing the line into TMI, let’s take simple examples. My living room ceiling peaks at over 16 feet (5 meters). There are 4 recessed lights near the peak. One of them chose yesterday to burn out. I had no trouble setting up and climbing the extension ladder to swap the bulb, but I don’t just clamber up and down the ladder the way I did a decade ago (never mind 4 decades ago). I climb carefully step by step and catch my breath afterward. Reroofing the garden shed this past summer (it required only 5 bundles of shingles) took as much out of me as reroofing the whole barn did 10 years ago. I still could do the barn (I think) but it would take a few days longer. There would be a lot of breaks – from the labor, I mean. I don’t think I personally would break, but you never know. I’ve fallen off a roof or two in my day. I probably don’t bounce as well anymore.

Barn roof

Garden shed

The number of seniors in the world continues to rise. In the US 17% of the population is over 65. This is more than the percentage of the population under 10. A senior who wants to exercise the age-prerogative to yell at kids to “get off my lawn!” may be out of luck. There aren’t enough kids to go around. The growing number of seniors is the primary (far from sole, but primary) reason for rising health care costs. 68% of Americans on Medicare have chronic medical conditions. As we age, immune systems decline, eyesight fails, bones thin, bladders get impatient, and respiratory efficiency drops. Yes, exercise helps, but it doesn’t reverse the general trend. And that is just normal aging. Throw in a serious ailment and things get pretty hairy.
 
When I was in high school, optimistic science teachers told us, “Some of you sitting in this room will live to be 200!” The biotech revolution was just beginning back then, and there was a widely held assumption that it would advance as quickly as hardware tech had advanced in the 20^th century. That hasn’t happened. Life expectancy has gone up but only because medical treatment has improved and – most significantly – fewer people smoke. The pace of normal aging itself hasn’t changed at all. A healthy 90-y.o. in 1922 was much the same as a healthy 90-y.o. in 2022 – there are just more of them now since they are less likely to be taken out by infections and other ailments. Getting to 100 is still a rare event. The odds of reaching 100 are 1 in 10,000. The chances of reaching 110 are 1 in 7,000,000. Yet students continue to be told the 200-years line (though nowadays they are also told the world will end long before then). Despite well-funded efforts by The Immortality Project and by Elon Musk’s Transcendence Project and by private biotech firms such as Calico (which aims to “develop interventions that enable people to live longer and healthier lives”), I am skeptical that there will be any dramatic slowing of the aging process in the lifetime of anyone in the world today.
 
Is there an upside to aging? In psychological terms there may be. Studies over the past dozen years indicate that happiness in the general population (there are always individual exceptions) follows a U-curve. Kids are happy and then grow ever more unhappy as they become adults, reaching a nadir of happiness in middle age – not coincidentally a time when we are likely to have the most bills and responsibilities while reaping the fewest personal benefits from them. In middle age we also experience our first age-related health declines. Then happiness increases again after 65. It is not clear why. Maybe we just stop giving a damn.
 
Inner contentment is all very well, but there is no point denying that physical decline is inevitable. It can be resisted, but ultimately not defeated. We might as well make peace with that. Still, as is often noted, it beats the alternative. I suppose that is another reason to be happy. My current target is to reach 75, at which point I’ll have lived longer than any of my immediate family. After that… well, we’ll see how things go. I might have to hire someone the next time I need a roof.
 

 

Bob Dylan – Forever Young

Trotting Out the Turkey

It is Thanksgiving week again. As a kid it was my favorite holiday, edging out (albeit not by much) Halloween and Christmas. A day when overeating was encouraged appealed to the budding hedonist in me. Better yet, for years I feasted twice due to competition between both sets of grandparents: midday with one set and evening at the other. Eventually my mom had enough of this and called a halt to it; she thereafter hosted Thanksgiving herself. This had advantages, too, it turned out. True, my single-day gluttony thereby was reduced to a single table, but all those marvelous leftovers were right there in our own kitchen. For the next few days, turkey sandwiches and pecan pie slices were there for the taking. For the past two decades I have hosted the meal at my table; the attendees vary from a handful to a crowd depending on the year (and extraneous events such as covid). I no longer gourmandize with carefree abandon as I did when I was 10, but I still have some fondness for leftovers.
 

The mythic association of Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims, by the way, we owe to late Victorian storytellers. There was such an event, but it was neither the first nor foundational. Harvest feasts in the Americas were common among the Spanish and French in the 16^th century and later in the English colonies. A Thanksgiving (called by that name) proclaimed in Virginia in 1607 preceded the one in Plymouth colony by 14 years. Thanksgivings were celebrated sporadically in different colonies in the 17^th and 18^th centuries without any thought of referencing Plymouth. It was first declared a US national holiday by George Washington as a one-off event in 1789. He made no mention whatsoever of the Pilgrim story. The holiday was about the new Constitution: a day for Americans to give thanks for “an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.” Thanksgivings were declared intermittently in subsequent years by presidents and state governors. In 1863 Abraham Lincoln made the holiday permanent. He didn’t mention the Pilgrims either in his proclamation. He instead talked about the things for which to be grateful despite the Civil War. (He also started that weird turkey-pardon tradition.) FDR gave Thanksgiving one final tweak. Lincoln had set the date on the last Thursday of November; Roosevelt changed this to the fourth Thursday (some Novembers, of course, have five) as a Depression-era measure to extend the Christmas shopping season. That is where things remain today.
 
Few people really concern themselves with origin stories unless trying to make some political point. Most just like the excuse to hang out with family and friends and to pig out. Writes, however, researcher Chloe Nahum-Claudel of the University of Cambridge, “Feasts mobilise people’s values, their morality, and understanding of the world of which they are a part. They have particularly powerful world-making effects because they are both irreducibly concrete – satisfying hunger, exciting pleasures, coordinating the political-economy, and embedding themselves in the organization of time and memory – and expansively meaningful, simultaneously expressing and generating deeply held values.” Maybe so. But I’m pretty much just looking forward to the leftovers.
 

Jan & Dean - "Let's Turkey Trot"

Feeling One’s Oats

I gave in to the urge to snack earlier tonight. I opted for a couple of oatmeal cookies. (Literally two – not like “I had a couple of drinks with the boys,” which more typically means six.) Cookies are never exactly healthy. They don’t really qualify as cookies if they are. Still, I could have chosen worse. Oats, the central ingredient, have a lot going for them in terms of nutrition. That is not why I picked them though. When I was a kid my Scottish maternal grandmother (yes, we called her Granny) always had oatmeal cookies in her kitchen in a porcelain cookie jar in the shape of a log cabin. So, oatmeal cookies have a nostalgia factor for me. The aroma alone has a nostalgia factor. (I still have the cookie jar btw.) Besides, just for flavor and texture I like them better than chocolate chip – and I like chocolate chip.

The first page Google results of a search (including Wikipedia) on the origins of oatmeal cookies will tell you that the recipe dates to 1896 when it was published in Fannie Farmer’s cookbook. This isn’t true. She never said it was. It is fair to say Farmer’s best-selling cookbook popularized the cookie. Recipes for it, though, can be found in earlier 19^th century newspapers and magazines. The origins go back much further than those.
 
32,000 years ago human hunter-gatherers would eat anything that didn’t eat them first. Wild oats were very much on the menu, albeit mostly in northern climes since oats don’t grow well in warm environments. In cooler temperate zones they grow readily in a wide range of soil types. Despite such a deep prehistory however, after the Neolithic shift to farming oats were the last of the great grain crops to be domesticated – thousands of years after wheat, rye, and barley. The reason is that raw unprocessed oats are hard to eat and they don’t store well. Horses like them in raw form, but humans generally speaking don’t have horse teeth. I’ve tried raw oats (from horse feed) and they are really not as bad as all that, but as one’s primary diet I can see how they would tire the jaw. I don’t think it is an accident that the rapid expansion of oat farming occurred at the same time as the domestication of the horse. Oats make superb animal feed. (To this day 90% of the US crop goes to animal feed.) Since the crop was on hand anyway to feed animals, humans immediately set to making oats more palatable for themselves too. This meant grinding, rolling, or cutting the groats (whole oats) into smaller bits (even down to flour if you keep at it) that are easier on the teeth. Even so, oats were most commonly cooked in water to a soft texture as porridge or gruel. (I like oatmeal porridge.)
 
Oatmeal porridge was available in ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and ancient China, but it wasn’t well regarded. Romans thought of it as horse food that you ate if you couldn’t afford better. They disdained Germans and Caledonians (in modern day Scotland) for their oat-heavy diets, but then again they had a hard time militarily with both so perhaps they should have given the matter further thought. At least some Romans apparently did. We have references to what seem to be oatcakes carried by Roman soldiers in Britain – perhaps picked up from the locals. Oatcakes are still a Scottish thing: oatmeal, water, butter…that’s about it though you can add more. Bake but don’t burn. (Written recipes for these date to the 1300s.) Tell me this isn’t more than halfway to an oatmeal cookie. What is missing other than sugar? Perhaps cinnamon, nutmeg, raisins, et al., but those are enhancers, not essentials.
 
I’m pretty sure there were retired Roman soldiers who reminisced about the oatcakes they ate in their youth up by Hadrian’s Wall. Perhaps they then raided the horse feed to make some at home. I can relate, though I’ll resist the call of the cookie jar until tomorrow. I’ll also give Fannie her due. There is something to be said for being the popularizer. An invention that remains in obscurity is not much fun for anyone.
 

Skunkmellow – Whiskey and Oatmeal

  

The Long Snooze

When he was 90 author Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) commented that the biggest cultural change from when he was a child was in the everyday awareness of death. His childhood Sunday family outings often were spent visiting relatives; back then that meant the graveyard, which was likely to include a sibling. Losing young (or young-ish) family members always was tragic but it was also expected. It no longer is. It happens, but it is not expected.
 
This change is to be celebrated of course. Most of us get to experience life into our senior years, and that is a good thing. In consequence though, we probably go overboard nowadays in denying death altogether. About 1% of the population dies every year (some 3,340,000 Americans in the past 12 months) but you would never know it. Unless you personally participate in some funeral service for a friend or relative, you’ll see no signs of it in daily life. It’s all hidden behind doors. Even in hospitals the deceased, of which there are many at any given moment, are kept out of view of all but a few. This may leave us more unprepared for the inevitable than previous generations, but I don’t see this changing anytime soon. It is the new normal. We dislike acknowledging our own mortality so we keep death out of sight and mind while we live day to day as though we’ll live forever. Life events arrive, however, that disabuse us of this mindset, at least for a time.
 
A couple of things bring this to mind. One was a funeral service for an old friend a couple of weeks ago. (He was in my sister’s HS class [‘68] and one of her posse of friends.) I sometimes remark that I know more permanent residents of the local Hilltop Cemetery in Mendham (where he was buried) than I do Mendham-ites who are ambulatory. This is meant as a joke but actually it is true. One of those permanent residents is my mom (also my dad and sister), and she is the primary reason for these thoughts. My mom died 21 years ago today. One remembers those dates for close friends, spouses, and immediate family as well as one does their birthdays.
 
The passings of those close to us are transformative moments. (I can speak from experience that it is especially odd to find oneself the last one standing.) Parents in particular are so integrated with our sense of identity that finding a new balance after their loss can take a while. We all go through it, however, if we ourselves live long enough. Some face it early, which is exceptionally hard. In the US by age 24 10% have lost one or both parents. In the age group 35 to 44, 34% have. It is 63% of those age 45 to 54. By age 64 it is 88%. (It is surprising to me that 12% of 64-year-olds still have not, but rising longevity makes this less rare than it once was.)
 
There is a part of me that always will be (among other senses of identity) the youngest of a core of four. But that seems like a faraway and self-contained stage of life at this point, much like my prep school years and college years were self-contained stages – also the years of couple of serious romantic relationships. Those remain a part of me too, even though life has passed beyond them.

The core four, c. 1982

For those who remain, life goes on. We form new friends and connections. A large, though diminishing, majority of adults become parents themselves. (I never did though my household at present is not empty anyway, as those who know me personally are aware.) Every now and then, however, (especially on anniversaries such as today) I raise a glass to toast old friends, classmates, and family who have left us. Then tomorrow is another day.
 
 

Little Richard – Thinking about My Mother