On the evening of May 4, 1964, when I turned 19 years old, I began to dread turning 30. I didn’t want to leave all my dreading for the last minute, like some kid who knows he’s got a history exam somewhere down the road but waits until the last night to cram in every nuance of the Battle of Hastings.
So I had an 11-year dread of turning 30. Now, as I turn 80, I’ve given up lamenting the passing of time for sheer wonder at its relentlessness.
How can I possibly be 80? There must have been a miscount. I feel like Sal Tessio (played by Abe Vigoda)” in “The Godfather” who knows he’s about to be bumped off by his old mob and turns to Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall.)
“Can you get me out of this?” Sal asks. “For old times’ sake?”
“Can’t do it, Sally,” Hagen tells him.
Can’t do it, says the clock on the wall. You’re 80, and there’s no turning back.
Three years into my initial brooding, nearing college graduation and official banishment from the trappings of youth, I confessed to a girlfriend that I felt like an old man.
“Not everyone who’s 22 is old,” she pointed out, wise beyond her own 21 years.
From college, I started a 40-year career in daily newspaper work under one of God’s noblemen, John Steadman, sports editor at The News American. Clem Florio was there, too. Clem was the paper’s great horse race handicapper.
“I’m taking a swim in the Atlantic one time,” he said, “and I notice an old man floating right past me, on his back, and he’s talking out loud to himself in a thick Eastern European accent. He’s happy as could be. And I hear him say, ‘Anybody that don’t like this life has got to be crazy.’”
Then Clem noticed the man’s arm, which bore the numbers embedded at Auschwitz.
Anybody that don’t like this life …
For years, I identified with a Jules Feiffer cartoon where an old fellow looks in the mirror and says:
“I never thought I’d mind putting on weight, until I put on weight. I never thought I’d mind losing my hair, until I lost it. I never thought I’d mind getting wrinkles, until I got them. And every morning I look in the mirror, and a voice screams, ‘But I’m 18!’”
Me, too. Or at least I was 18 in my head until I was about 35, at which point I began to realize that youth wasn’t retroactive. I went to my father, who was well past 50 and still playing handball and tennis a few times a week.
“Dad,” I said, “I used to imagine some big-league scout discovering me and signing me up to play for the Orioles. But now it’s dawned on me, I’m 35, I’m too old. When did it hit you that you were too old to be discovered?”
“What makes you think it ever has?” my father said.
I grew up in a Northwest Baltimore neighborhood, Grove Park, where we had at least 40 Baby Boomer kids. For a full decade, from elementary through high school, we saw each other practically every day.
I still look outside on springtime days like ours and think, “We gotta get the guys together and play some ball.” But there aren’t enough of us still living to get up a game. Instead, we deliver each other’s eulogies.
Among the most comically heartfelt farewells ever delivered was the late Joel Kruh’s line when our friend Barry Director died.
“This is one of the two worst days of my life,” Joel said. “The other was the day the Colts left town.”
That’s a generation’s laughter in place of tears. I’m a lucky guy. I go to lunch with pals a few times each week, and we make each other laugh. We’re each other’s auxiliary memories. My enduring luck: family and friends I adore, and a grateful sense of perspective. I’m still here.
But sometimes I think about the deathbed words of the great Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
“Ah,” he said, “to be 75 again.”
If only, if only …
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University).
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