I’ve decided that ageism is okay

March 1, 2024 – Prosper, TX

Now that I’m retired from radio I’ve kept busy writing a weekly online column about radio. I get to sleep four hours longer than I used to and I work at home in my sweats but I’m still focused on radio, just from a different perspective. Nothing wrong with that but I want to expand my world so I’ve been exploring some options.

I have been thinking about going back to school. I never graduated college, maybe I should go back and be the one old fart in every class. Still mulling that over.

Writing fiction is my passion and though I can string words together nicely I don’t know anything about the craft. I wish I had gotten a writing degree when I was young but I didn’t. Now I’m looking into some online classes but they’re expensive. And what I do know from my experience is that in the end you still have to be willing to do the work. I’ve been mulling that over for decades.

The other thing I would love to do is act. I did plays onstage for 20+ years when I was much younger. At the time, when castmates of my age were trying to get professional acting careers started I said, “I’m going to wait until I’m old. You see the same old people in movies and on TV all the time. There aren’t many of them. I’ll wait until the competition is dying. ”

TV character actor Bert Mustin, 1884-1977. We saw him everywhere.

I have arrived. No, not as a professional actor, I have arrived at old.

I signed up for a free subscription to a casting call website for actors. Some of the jobs are unpaid, and some claim to pay very well. They all describe the actors they’re looking for, mostly young people. Over 50 is rare and calls for actors over 70 are nonexistent. That’s fine, I never expected to burst into Hollywood in a leading role at 72. I figured background acting (still referred to as “extras” if we’re honest) and maybe a sentence or two here and there would be great fun.

But here’s what dawned on me this morning as I was looking at the casting notices and writing courses:

Creativity is imagined to be a young person’s ability.  All the websites I’ve looked at for writing courses feature pictures of happy young college types. Casting notices are the same. For some reason, our society assumes brains wither as bodies age.

Years ago in my 40s and 50s, I entered some playwriting competitions and was incensed to find contest entries restricted to “young playwrights”. Some actually specified “under 30”, or words to that effect. It pissed me off, and rightly so. I just lied about my age. It’s none of their business, right? I don’t have an expiration date.

Not incidentally, I won four of the half-dozen playwriting contests I entered.

(Paul McCartney, now 81, was asked ten years ago if he shouldn’t consider getting off the stage and letting younger performers have their place in the spotlight. “Fuck ’em,” he replied. “Let them work their way up like I did.”)

Here’s my point, and I think this may surprise you because I’ve written several ageism rants in this blog over the years. That, in itself, makes the point: I’m still learning and so will you.

I have gotten to an age where I don’t think ageism is a big deal. It’s a state of mind based on the perspective of the observer. It’s normal and natural, and sometimes it is reasonable and warranted.

I can’t portray a man in his 40s no matter how much time I spend in makeup. I’ve talked about this recently on the radio, about radio.  You can’t hire a 60-year-old on-air personality for a Hot AC music station, you just can’t. 30 years is a lifetime. Inevitably the old guy is going to impart some of his life’s lessons into his shtick.  Just as inevitably, the young audience will roll their eyes and say, “Okay, Boomer.”

This is how life works. When we’re young we think old people are stupid because they’re old. Old people think young people are stupid because they’re too young to know what they’re talking about.

They’re both right.

I understand the need for laws banning hiring discrimination of all kinds but you can’t legislate reality. Life experience and perspective can’t be ignored. It’s the result of personal growth through aging. It’s what keeps us fascinated by learning and passionate about life.

I’m a fat old fart looking for a TV or movie walk-on. Hell, I can even deliver lines believably.

But don’t tell me I’m too old to write. I’ll kick your young playwriting ass.

 

This ‘n that

A chilly and sunny Sunday morning north of Dallas…

I haven’t written here in a while but just saw a link to one of my blogging partner Anita’s recent posts and it inspired me to mention a few things for this weblog, which has become something of a 20-year journal.

July 6, 2023 Bushmills, Ireland
Me, pensive: Giants Causeway, Bushmills, Northern Ireland, July 6, 2023.

The past seven months have been notable. I went to work at KLIF as usual dark and early Monday morning, July 31, having no idea it would be the last day of my 54-year career. After work, I drove CarolAnn to her cataract surgery appointment. From there we decided to have lunch at Mooyah Burgers in Stonebriar Mall. Enjoyed our burgers, sweet potato fries, and shakes. Walked outside to the car and I collapsed in the parking lot where I remained unconscious for a few minutes. I didn’t feel it coming, felt great in fact, and when I started to awaken I was being loaded into the back of an ambulance. After several hours in the emergency and a night in a private room at Medical City Frisco, several doctors shrugged and sent me home with no diagnosis.

Texas law makes it illegal to drive for three months after blacking out so I took a limited disability leave. Over those three months, I had every heart and brain scan that exists; still no explanation for my passing out. It surprised me to learn that this sort of thing is fairly common and usually leaves more questions than answers. Somebody commented that it must be very frustrating not knowing what happened. Actually, I’m pretty good at letting the unknowable pass without pointless wondering. What the doctors were able to tell me is that I didn’t have a heart attack or stroke and I don’t have any brain damage or tumor. Good enough for me.

By the time my waiting period ended and I was able to drive again CarolAnn and I decided I didn’t need to drive into Dallas at 3 AM anymore. I retired and am happily-ever-aftering with my beloved wife and pets. I love it. I’m doing a podcast called Conversations.buzz and writing a weekly column for the Barrett News Media national publication. Otherwise, I do the occasional chore at home, fix CarolAnn’s dinner, talk to the dogs and cat, and I usually work in a nap.

I loved my radio career and don’t miss it a bit.

Some people talk as if retirement is a death sentence. For me, it’s an endless string of Saturdays.

I have also retired from worrying about the world. These are troubled times and I’ve been studying and reporting them daily for 45 years. After five hours of news five days a week, I’m taking a long break. I haven’t read or listened to any news since that last July morning at KLIF. Ignorance really can be bliss. I expect to get over that and go back to keeping up on current events but I’ll be regularly skipping the political wars and daily tragedies that make the headlines. I guess that makes me selfish. I do care. In my own way, I’ve tried to make the world a little better by bringing daily smiles to morning commuters in Sacramento, Los Angeles, and Dallas. I try to be kind to everyone I meet and keep my attitude well-adjusted.  I think I’ve earned a break from stress that isn’t all mine.

There is also a great deal of joy to be found in the world if you just look for it.

 

Planning to die

by Dave Williams

Man, I’ve written a lot of philosophical tripe recently about aging, retiring, and now, dying. I suppose it’s only natural but I’m getting tired of it. Life is for living, not preparing to die.

The targeted ads are getting annoying.

Facebook targeted ad

So, listen up – I’m only going to say this once:

Whatever becomes of my “remains” when I die is not my concern. That may sound like I’m just kicking the can (along with the bucket) down to my survivors but look, it’s a pass. Don’t worry about it. I don’t. I’ll try to leave behind enough money to pay for the, ahem, cremation procedure (which is something I really don’t want to think about) but after that, do whatever you will with the ashes.

The ashes. Not my ashes.

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep…
— Mary Elizabeth Frye

I used to have a grand plan that I told my family: to scatter the ashes in my beloved hometown of Sacramento. Specifically, I told them, sprinkle my earthly remains into the water where the Sacramento and American Rivers meet, just off Discovery Point. My grandpa Webster used to take us fishing there and it’s just upstream from Old Sacramento, where I spent many happy jazz festival days and nights as a young adult.

I told my wife and kids that it would be fitting if a four-piece traditional jazz ensemble played on the shore, perhaps a lively, Dixiesque rendition of the traditional Christian hymn, “A Closer Walk With Thee”.

Or maybe, “Another One Bites the Dust.”

Whatever. I’ll leave that up to you and the band.

That was my thinking years ago when I was still alive in my hometown and a regular, semi-celebrity fixture at the annual Sacramento Dixieland Jazz Jubilee.

Imagining the picture of my grieving family huddled together in a small boat under the cover of darkness (scattering ashes in a river is illegal in California, as are most innocuous things) brought a happy tear to my eye. But then life its ownself (copyright, the late, great Dan Jenkins) moved us to L.A. and eventually Texas. Meanwhile, the world’s greatest traditional jazz festival was crushed by cultural and political forces that trashed its glorious tradition after first removing the word Dixieland from the title. Thanks to the annual Sacramento Bee shocking photos of old people having fun, traditional jazz was run out of town.

Don’t get me started.

The point is, I don’t want my wife and kids to have to spend time and money fulfilling a silly idea I had years before I was old enough to think about dying in a reasonable way, which I now am.

I respect and admire people whose final wishes are detailed and specific.

Though he never expressed his desires to me, we took my father’s ashes to Green River in southwestern Wyoming, where he fished as a boy. It was a moving experience for us all. And if my family wants to do something similar to celebrate my life, by all means, they should do it.

But don’t do it for me. Do it for you.

CarolAnn, I’m leaving this decision to you. You’re really good at making decisions. Don’t feel compelled to have me in a jar in your bedroom but if that’s what you want, do it.

Hey, if you still have our cat, Corabelle, dump me in the litter box. I think it’s funny! You’ll get a giggle each day when you scoop it.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Live and love your life knowing that I loved mine thanks to you all.

This is not yet…

The End

 

November is Norway

Today is November 1, 2023.

I went searching for a pithy quote about November and this is where I stopped looking:

“November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.”
–  Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson has always cracked me up. I know I know — she is widely considered to be America’s greatest poet. I’m a troglodyte when it comes to poetry. I’ve spent 25 years ridiculing the “Belle of Amherst” since I wrote a play making fun of her work on nearly every page. After I finished writing it I was shocked to learn that Harvard University Press still held the copyright on most of her creations and they insisted on reading my two-act mockery before granting permission for me to quote her.

Even more shockingly, they decided it was fine, go ahead and perform it!

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul…
–  Emmy again

You can’t make this stuff up. Oh, I get it, in this famous piece, a bird is implied as a metaphor for hope. I just find most metaphors to be unnecessary and often unintentionally funny abstractions.

And yet, when I went looking for a pithy quote about November  I was hoping to find a touching metaphor of life approaching its final days.

Since I turned 70 more than two years ago I’ve made an effort to think philosophically about aging. Songs and stories are always referring to May to December romances and such.

Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few
September, November
And these few precious days I’ll spend with you

– “September Song”,  lyrics by Maxwell Anderson, music by Kurt Weill

I retired from radio yesterday and I’m very happy about it. I have no second thoughts and no regrets.

I just wanted to say something pithy that would express my complex sense of aging and, quite coincidentally, of leaving one’s lifelong career in the past.

Norway would have never occurred to me.

“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

-You gotta love her, Emily Dickinson

I have wondered if it was sheer bravado whenever I heard retired people praise their retirement as the “new chapter” in their lives. Maybe it is for some, but I’m all in.

I’ve had a wonderful life and I still do. I’m more aware than ever of how fast my life has gone because I cherish every moment. I wouldn’t change a thing. I mean that literally.

I also know that I’m relatively close to the end of my life, but I’m not there yet.

Happily, I’m finally old enough to get it. These really are my golden years.

You’ll get it when you get here.

 

Transitions

by Dave Williams

For the past six weeks, I’ve been off work and stuck at home because of a blackout I suffered in the parking lot at Mooyah Burgers. Two MRIs and various other medical tests are inconclusive. I feel fine. I could have gone back to work after my one night hospital stay except that Texas law won’t allow me to drive for three months after blacking out and the company that employs me won’t allow me to do my radio show from home. So, essentially, I’ve been visiting retirement.

I sleep later than I do when I go to the job; I wake up to feed the dogs and fix coffee. Then, I chat with CarolAnn before kissing her goodbye as she heads to work. The day that follows is pretty slow. I deal with medical and insurance-related paperwork, do some writing, and take a nap. That’s pretty much it until later in the afternoon when I can anticipate my wife’s return home.

Me on a train in Ireland.

As much as I have insisted over the years on my need for time alone, my life right now feels kind of lonely and confusing. I’m not retired, I’m on disability leave with tentative plans to return to work. But really, I am retired in the sense that I’m completely cut off from my career of 54 years. It’s all in the rearview mirror, for now, at least. That’s not necessarily a sad thing. It’s a mixed bag, really.

And, confusing.

In recent years I’ve asked retired friends how they fill their days. I get as many different answers as there are friends. Some have undertaken new, second careers, others find things around the house to keep them busy, yard work and home improvement, for example. A couple of guys I know admitted to being bored a lot. One of my oldest friends and colleagues told me he’s learned how to make shopping for an avocado fill up most of an afternoon.

Sometimes I think the idea of “keeping busy” is a misguided insistence. I might be happy doing nothing. What’s wrong with that?

The problem with transition is the uncertainty of it all. Should I retire now or wait? Can I even go back to my old career or is that just snuggling under a familiar but old, worn-out blanket when there might be more I can do?

What would that be? What can I do?

And, why do I insist on doing more?

I know all of the suggested answers from writing to volunteer work and just deepening my budding interest (please pardon the pun) in gardening. Maybe there is no single answer. Maybe what I’m doing now, a little bit of this and that, will settle into a comfortable pattern. I don’t know.

I suspect this is a transition that will fulfill itself in time. It’s confusing right now.

If you’ve “been there, done that” or are asking yourself the same questions please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

I may not be looking for answers as much as I’m looking for company.

Golden Years

by Dave Williams

May be an image of 4 people
CarolAnn and I in Northern Ireland, last month: Giants Causeway.

Three weeks ago I celebrated my 72nd birthday and then blacked out in the parking lot of a burger joint after lunch. I woke up some minutes later in the back of an ambulance, was taken to a nearby hospital, poked and prodded just a bit, and sent home the next day with no diagnosis.

The hospital people were very nice. They wheeled me out and wished me luck.

Since then I’ve seen a neurologist and a cardiologist. Both have run tests, neither has provided me with any insights. I like and trust them. The problem is, I’m not their only patient and they have their personal lives to lead. I don’t begrudge them a moment, I just await their educated assessments.

Except for the second-degree burns I suffered from lying in the parking lot during a Texas summer, I feel fine. Oh, maybe a tad dizzy at times. The neurologist did say I suffered a concussion. It should go away. She’ll let me know.

Meanwhile, my wife of 35 years, the Lovely-and-Feisty CarolAnn Conley-Williams, is having trouble sleeping. She looks at me with a mixture of adoration and anger; her experience in that parking lot was the shocking belief that I was dying. I didn’t but in her mind, I still could. Understandably, that scares her and pisses her off.

The company I work for has just learned that Texas law doesn’t allow me to drive to work after suffering a seizure. They also understand that while I could work from home, their own recently enacted policy forbids it. So, they’re paying me to sleep in and, no doubt, counting the expense. I’m grateful for the time I’ve been welcome there, however and whenever it ends.

For a long time, I’ve understood that my career will come to an end eventually and that the glorious achievement of living to my golden years would bring some medical challenges.

I just didn’t expect it all to happen on my birthday.

Things can almost always be worse. We carry on in gratitude.

 

 

 

A selfie

by Dave WilliamsJuly 6, 2023 Bushmills, IrelandMe in a pensive pose, Bushmills, Northern Ireland, July 6, 2023 

I like this picture, but my God I look old.

I’ll turn 72 in a handful of days. I know there are a lot of people older than me who don’t seem to give age a thought but I’m sure they do. How could they not?

Twenty years ago I began to wonder if old people think about dying. I never had the nerve to ask an old person, but now I am one and I’ve got the answer: You bet we do, but not in the way I expected.

The past is a great place and I don’t want to erase it or regret it, but I don’t want to be its prisoner either. – Mick Jagger, just turned 80

I think about dying just as I think about being born — I know nothing about either. I only know everything that has happened in-between. That’s where I live and always have. I wouldn’t change a second of it.

And, I’m not done yet.

Getting old

by Dave Williams
March 9, 2023

“At old age, one realizes that life is truly a dream.”
— Michael Bassey Johnson, The One Ironauts Body

I was looking for a pithy quote about aging and this one struck me right.

How many times have I thought and written that the past comes back to me in fleeting memories as old black-and-white photos? I know the people in the pictures. I know the places existed and the captured moments actually occurred but they are no more real to me now than barely remembered bits of an old movie I saw a lifetime ago.

Photo by Bruno Martins on Unsplash

Recently I’ve thought a lot about getting old. I don’t feel old but as often as you insist, “You’re only as old as you feel”, the numbers are stunning.

Two of my friends turned 60 yesterday. That’s a significant number in the story of one’s life, I remember it well.

I turned 60 alone, in a high-rise apartment in Chicago. CarolAnn and the rest of the family were home in California. She was getting ready to join me in the Windy City.

August 6, 2011. It was a good day. I didn’t have a lonely birthday pity party. I watched some baseball on TV, talked with my wife and kids on the phone, and then walked to a nearby fancy seafood restaurant and treated myself to a birthday dinner. I went to bed that night wishing I could have celebrated with my loved ones, but knowing there would be next year and many more birthdays to come. And there were.

That was twelve years and seven months ago, and yet just a couple of weeks past. I’m 71 now and my newly 60-year-old friends seem like kids.

Suddenly it occurs to me that there may not be “many more birthdays to come.” My definition of “many” is now questionable.

I remember celebrating my dad’s 60th birthday. It looks like a fuzzy black-and-white picture that spilled from the shoebox.

I think of the older friends and family members I’ve had who lived into their late 80s and 90s. But I also have a list of very dear friends I lost when they were much younger than I am now.

Sharmayne was older than me but she never reached 65.

I always thought of Jerry Grisham as a second father. He died long before 71.

Dad was 72, almost exactly a year older than I am now.

Remember when you were a kid on the Ferris wheel? After many wonderful loops past the stars, the operator suddenly stops the wheel when you reach the bottom, and opens the bar. It’s time for you to leave. And you think, “But those other people got on before I did.”

That’s how it must feel.

At times I lean toward being overly morose about all of this but I shake myself loose thinking it’s just part of the never-ending process of growing up. And then I remember my school friends who died decades ago, some so young they never even had a chance to fall in love.

That shames me back to my reality.

I’m fine, I really am. I’m healthy and happy. I’m convinced that joy is the key to long life. No pity parties for me.

The only thing is, in my mind’s eye I can see the end of the road for the first time in my life. It’s not so much depressing as it is a curious wonder, a totally new experience.

I don’t have many new experiences these days, so this is good. I’ll wrap my head around it soon.

But yes, at some age it will occur to you that life is truly a dream.

I just thought you might like to know.

I got the Willies

by Dave Williams

I heard a guy on the radio this morning waxing nostalgic about the time he met his childhood hero, Bart Starr. At that point he employed a clever trick we radio talkers carry in our toolbox, asking rhetorically, “Did you ever have a chance to talk with your idol?”

It’s what we call a hook. It engages the listener. We get you personally involved in a topic. This is called active rather than passive listening. It works every time, even on me.

I’ve told these stories here before but hell, I’ve been telling one of them for about 60 years, the other for 32. Why stop now? They still haunt me.

I met Willie Mays when I was ten or twelve years old. For reasons I still don’t understand a security guard protecting the San Francisco Giants players’ parking lot from a rowdy crowd of kids waving pens and gloves opened his gate just wide enough to admit me, and me alone, into the autograph promised land. The other several dozen kids were left clamoring at the chainlink barrier like starving waifs in a Dickens novel.

This was my golden ticket, even before Willie Wonka was created.

When my hero emerged from the locker room door my heart started pounding and my mouth went dry. I walked toward him calmly, on rubber legs; I politely raised my baseball glove and pen to his world-famous face and muscular shoulders, forcing my thick, parched tongue to stammer, “Mr. Mays, can I have your autograph?”

Willie kept walking. He didn’t slow down, look at me, smile, or shoo me away.

He made me doubt my own existence.

Willie got in his car, I went back to my dad and we started the sad two-plus hours drive home.

Willie Nelson was much nicer. He smiled and nodded as I looked at him dumbly. I mean that in the literal definition of the word, I was struck dumb, so enamored by his presence that I was unable to utter a word.

I was no kid at this point. I was 38, host of the highest-rated morning radio show in Sacramento history, but at that moment I was dumb as a fencepost.

CarolAnn bailed me out, as she often still does in social settings. She smiled sweetly at Willie, fluttered those gorgeous eyes, and asked him to sign our ticket stubs. He did so with a charmed (and may I suggest, slightly lecherous) smile.

As I chewed on my tongue to reduce it to a usable size, my wife turned radio producer, asking Willie if he could find a few minutes to talk with me on the air the following morning by phone. He kindly explained that he’d love to but he would be sleeping in his bus hundreds of miles away on the road to Utah. He might not even have a cell phone connection.

Then the Red-Headed Stranger smiled again and tipped his hat to the love of my life, giving me a quick, curious glance as he left.

“Radio show?” he thought, “The guy can’t even talk.”

 

This obsession with age

by Dave Williams

August 6, 2021 

Today I’m seventy.

It didn’t exactly sneak up on me. I’ve thought about that number quite a bit in the past year or more.

“Forty is the old age of youth; fifty, the youth of old age.” – Victor Hugo

I don’t like cheesy wordplay but that probably seemed brilliant three hundred years ago.

Hugo lived to 83. If he said anything about seventy he seems to have kept it to himself, which is wise. At seventy we shouldn’t need to have aging explained to us.

The problem with age is that it pesters us from birth when people begin keeping track of the numbers of days, then weeks and months we’ve lived. We’re taught to celebrate the arbitrary concepts of years and decades past.

We celebrate mere survival more than life itself.

When I turned fifty my father laughed and told me it made him feel old. He was seventy-two and for no good reason at all he died six months later. I hate that I remember this by the numbers.

This obsession we have with age is a cultural curse. It segregates us. It stigmatizes us.  Old people are irrelevant; young people are ignorant.

It confuses us as we move from one age box to the next.

So, here’s my birthday wish:

Don’t call me a senior citizen. It’s neither endearing nor insulting, it’s just irrelevant. In fact, don’t refer to me by age at all unless it’s the specific topic of conversation or a good old person joke. I like old people jokes that are funny, not corny or mean.

I’m not ashamed of my age, it just doesn’t matter. I’m no different now than I was at twenty; I’m still living and learning, still loving life and excited about tomorrow.

At seventy, numbers don’t matter.

I’ll be back here ten years from now to let you know if that’s still true.