It was Satchel Paige, miraculously pitching big-league baseball when he was 59, who famously asked all of us who keep getting unhappily older, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?”
As we plunge into 2023, and Jmore’s cover story this month offers lessons in “Aging Gracefully,” we’ve all got reflections on the passage of years and lessons learned along the way.
When I turned 30, I was struck by a depressing age revelation. Embracing old Satch’s wisdom, I’d spent my adult life imagining there was still time to nurture the boy’s dream of playing big-league baseball. Some scout might yet see me shagging flies on a weekend playground and fall in love with my potential.
“It just hit me, I’m too old to be discovered now,” I told my father.
He was a pretty good athlete in his day. He’d won varsity high school letters in basketball and track, and was still playing handball twice a week and tennis on weekends.
“Scouts don’t sign up 30-year-olds,” I said. “It’s over for me. Dad, when did the realization hit you it was too late to be discovered?”
My father smiled wistfully. “What makes you think it ever has?” he said.
He was 52 at the time. The body ages, but the dreams of youth can flicker forever, can’t they?
“Old” age is relative. For Americans born as late as 1900, average life expectancy wasn’t even 50. Today, it’s close to 80. There are more people on the planet over 65 than under 5. One in three caregivers — caregivers! — is 65 or older.
In her mid-80s, my mother moved to Atrium Village in Owings Mills. She figured she’d be perceived there as ancient. She was stunned, she said, to find herself surrounded by plenty of residents tootling around in their 90s.
We’d all like to make life stand still, to stop the aging process before it’s too late. Instead, at our best, we replace old pleasures with new ones. As the late Rodney Dangerfield once joked, “I’m at the age where food has taken the place of sex in my life. In fact, I’ve just had a mirror put over my kitchen table.”
In my childhood, I thought we were all locked into place forever: Kids were born as kids and would stay that way, and adults were born as adults and would stay that way, and we’d hold our positions forever.
What a shock when we left school and, the next morning, the grown-ups handed us our adulthood papers and asked what we intended to do with the rest of our lives.
In high school, a teacher introduced us to the 17th-century English poet Robert Herrick, who wrote, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may/Old time is still a-flying/And the same flower that smiles today/Tomorrow will be dying.”
I was in college when I started fretting about age. It was a time of the so-called “Generation Gap” when we chose up sides by age, and young people were warned, “Don’t trust anybody over 30.”
I was 19 when I heard this. I had an 11-year dread of turning 30, where I thought I’d be considered old and outdated.
In her 1970 study, “The Coming of Age,” the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote, “There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups, or to causes — social, political, intellectual, or creative work.”
As we grow older, we have a choice. We can lament the lateness of the hour or we can make the most of whatever’s left, and remember that this life isn’t a dress rehearsal for some opening night to come. This is our one shot. Make it a good one.
Or as the great philosopher/pitcher Satchel Paige said, “Age is a case of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it don’t matter.”
Michael Olesker’s latest book, “Boogie: Life on A Merry-Go-Round,” was recently published by Apprentice House. It’s the life story of Baltimore legend Leonard “Boogie” Weinglass, an original “Diner” guy who grew up to create the Merry-Go-Round clothing chain and contribute millions to charity.
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