I know, I know – as an old man I’m supposed to harp philosophically and say things like “age is only a number” and “you’re as young as you feel”. Those cliches are true but they feel too modest.
It’s my birthday! That makes me happy, I feel special today and am old enough to admit it.
Please indulge me just for a moment while I talk about the things old people always talk about, though we’d rather not. There is a point to all of this.
A year ago, just before my 72nd birthday, I had a health scare that ended with the great news that there was nothing wrong with my heart or brain. How many people get that kind of reassurance into their eighth decade?
That led me to retire from my radio career, a heads-up that it was time to get off the rat wheel and make every day Saturday. CarolAnn and I don’t have the money to go gallivanting around the world as future retirees dream. I still want to take a great vacation when we can but I love my wife, our dogs, and our home. A lot of people have none of that.
In the past month I’ve been diagnosed with type-2 diabetes and nearly simultaneously had all of my teeth extracted to make room for dentures. I was born without teeth and that’s how I’ll go out. Wish it could be otherwise but you know what the older old folks used to say, “You can wish in one hand and spit in the other…”
I don’t remember how that ended. It never made any sense to begin with.
Diabetes is manageable and the dentures will be useful when my gums no longer hurt and I learn to eat without feeling like I’m chewing with a mouthful of Legos.
An aside: If you’re looking for a dead solid perfect weight loss diet try combining sugar and carb restrictions for diabetics with the severe limitations of eating without teeth. In six weeks I’ve lost 35 pounds!
So, yeah, I’m thrilled to be 73. My dad died five months before he got there. That weighed on my mind for most of the past year, it really did, for two reasons: At first I was merely hoping that I wouldn’t keel over as early as he did. Then it finally dawned on me that Dad would be over the moon in love with the fact that I outlived him. For some reason that makes me proud.
Dad and me c. 1953, Land Park, Sacramento
I still talk to my dad. Not out loud but whenever I have a question I know he could answer, I ask him. I can hear his wise and loving answer as plainly as if he was here in the room.
I hope to live another 20 or 30 years. I’ll probably be lucky to manage another 10. But if I should pass and anyone asks, you tell them I died a happy man. No matter when or how it happens it will be true.
I’ve crossed the finish line. Now I’m just taking victory laps.
We say we’re “getting” old because we don’t know exactly when old happens and we keep pushing it back. I’m about two weeks from my 73rd birthday and still waffling on the definition of old. But along the way, I’ve gotten some physical bulletins that are impossible to ignore.
Unlike everyone my age I know, I will share my experience with you. You’re welcome.
The first heads-up was realizing that I need to take advantage of every public bathroom I see, whether or not I feel the need because when I do feel the need, it might well be too late.
Why didn’t somebody warn me about that? It seems like it would have been a neighborly heads-up between “getting old” friends. Just tell me, “You’re going to start leaking if you don’t pee in every nearby urinal or toilet.” That seems like a polite piece of advice, doesn’t it? Tell your friends.
A few days ago I had my remaining teeth taken out of my head. I now have no, zero, teeth.
The back story is lifelong, I’ve always had lousy teeth. Even as a child of the 50s, I had many cavities and horrific experiences with Dr. Clifford and his slow, smoke-emitting drill.
I’ve always brushed. I have occasionally flossed, (wink-wink). But while other people went in for semi-annual checkups I stayed away because nothing in my mouth ever hurt even as my teeth simply began disintegrating for no apparent reason.
I had one tooth break while I was eating soft, non-crunchy ice cream. A couple of years ago I found a broken tooth in my mouth while I was sleeping. WTF?
So, CarolAnn and I decided it would be best, and ultimately cheaper, if I would just yank ‘em all and get dentures.
As of three days ago, I have no teeth but expensive dentures that look like those wind-up chattering toys we’ve all seen.
So many things people don’t explain as you get older. And the websites don’t help because they’re written with AI prompts by marketing pros 50 years younger than you are. Some of them still have baby teeth.
The good news is that my dentist, periodontist, and oral surgeon, all enriched by my patronage, agree that the procedures thus far have gone perfectly.
The bad news is my gums are now swollen and painful. I talk like Daffy Duck, lithping and thputtering. Trying to eat soft food like a banana with new dentures is the same as chewing with a mouthful of Legos.
Look, as I told my dentist, Joe Smith (yes, his real name), just yesterday, I don’t get all twisted over things I can’t change. It is what it is. I’m alive, reasonably alert, and happy.
The professionals tell me things in my mouth will get better. I paid to trust and believe them.
But you know what? Either way, I wake up every morning with my wife beside me, the dogs are ready to be let outside to pee, and then I make their breakfast and my coffee.
People like to ask what I do every day now that I’m retired. It’s a hard question to answer because I do a lot of things that fascinate me but would sound like a complete waste of time for nearly everyone else.
I do stuff around the house, I write, I watch a little TV, and I nearly always take a nap with the dogs. But you know what I love most? Thinking. It’s something I haven’t had time to enjoy for most of my adult life. It’s the ultimate indulgence.
“Sometimes I sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits.” – A.A. Milne (Winnie the Pooh)
What amazes me about getting old is the constant revelations of things I never gave much thought to.
Sometimes those revelations only create more and much bigger questions. Physics, for example: the construction and meaning of life. I’ve always been as curious as everyone but shrugged it off as unknowable, and what the hell, let’s order another drink. But recently, as I approach what we all assume will be the end of our existence, it has become a fascinating focus of my curiosity.
Who am/was I and why?
I want to soak up as much information as I can before it all becomes irrelevant.
The last couple of days I’ve been listening to a Lex Fridman podcast in which he talks with astrobiologist and theoretical physicist, Sara Walker. She’s one of those people with an IQ that’s off the charts. People who make the charts don’t know what to do with her. Lex keeps up with her pretty well but I get lost in nearly every exchange.
My progress is slow, the podcast is long. I feel stupid. I don’t know what I’ll take from it when I’ve reached the end but I do know it fascinates me.
I would be content to live retired without much mental stimulation. I love my wife, our dogs, our home, and our family and friends. I enjoy old movies and TV shows as much as the next old fat guy. But thinking about things I don’t understand excites me. It sends me down rabbit holes far more entertaining than the old Star Trek episodes I’ve been binging lately.
I think Sara Walker would agree without having a good handle on it herself.
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.
by Dave WilliamsMe 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.
When I was a senior at Highlands High School (Sacramento) in 1968-69, I ran with a great group of guys, including my best buddy, Ray Hunter, our shared best buddy, Pete Olson, our other best buddy, Jim Postak, and the only kid I ever knew who was allowed to smoke cigarettes at home, best buddy Mike Worsham.
Clockwise from far left: Ray Hunter, Pete Olson, Dave Williams, Jim Postak, Mike Worsham. 1968, on our way to Blue Canyon for a day of tobogganing.
Best buddy Roy Johnson worked at the Der Weinerschnitzel hot dog drive-thru on Friday and Saturday nights. My non-employed buddies and I would pull up to the window, and he’d give us a fast food bag filled to the top with french fries free of charge. We called Roy Lord of the Fries. We usually arrived close to midnight after a football game and pizza at Shakeys or an evening of mini golf and an hour or two imagining that four guys in Ray’s Ford Falcon might chase down some hot chicks in a GTO. We actually did that once and cornered the girls in a cul de sac. We had to let them get away because there were four of us and just two of them, and none of us had the guts or the know-how to smooth-talk them.
Our other best buddy, Paul Jimison, was our secret agent. He was a good guy and always available when we needed him to put on his old man pants and head into the mom-and-pop grocery in nearby Rio Linda to buy beer for us.
The store was named Shop-and-Save. It was little more than a rundown liquor and convenience store in a sketchy part of what passed for a town in Rio Linda. We called it the Stop-and-Rob because it was more accurate.
(You may remember Rio Linda as the Sacramento suburb made famous by my late friend and colleague Rush Limbaugh. He spoke of every yard in Rio Linda being adorned by a car on blocks and a broken-down washing machine on the front porch. Rush said he went there each Memorial Day to place a six-pack on the tomb of the unknown bowler. It was an apt description, and the folks in Rio Linda loved the notoriety.)
Paul Jimison was our age, but while the rest of us looked every pimply day of our 17 years, he already looked thirty-something in his little league uniform ten years earlier. When he let his beard grow out a bit, for four hours or so, he would put on his legendary “old man pants” (loose-fitting khakis, accessorized with muddy work boots and a too-tight flannel shirt) and could easily pass for one of our grandpas. He was never carded.
We were good boys—we really were. We loved our parents and respected our teachers. When we were lucky enough to go on dates, we kept our hands and our dirty thoughts to ourselves. At the end of the evening, we were available for a polite good night kiss at the door but didn’t insist on it. We were all Richie Cunningham years before the TV show Happy Days premiered.
None of that stopped us from occasionally being the bad version of good boys. That’s really part of the journey, isn’t it? Like our parents before us, we experimented with cigarettes and beer when we could get it, but that’s all. Even though this was during the late-60s hippy era, we didn’t do drugs, not even marijuana. All we wanted for a rowdy night out was a shared six-pack of beer and a pack of Marlboros to make us choke, cough, and feel manly.
That’s why when we needed Paul and his old man pants.
In 1968, a six-pack of Coors cost around $1.87, and cigarettes were 35 cents a pack. The four of us ponied up less than a buck apiece and sent Paul inside. He was back shortly with the Coors, the Marlboros, an assortment of Sugar Babies, Tootsie Rolls, and a pack of Sen-Sen. With 50 cents worth of regular in the gas tank, we were good to roll.
We howled with laughter and high-fives. Paul was our hero.
I have no specific memories of nights out with my buddies, just the still-lingering sense of camaraderie and fun of the great times that Ray, Pete, Jim, Mike, Roy, Paul, and I shared our blossoming manhood as brothers.
Dear Jim Postak, who has been gone for years already, was the young victim of a hereditary bad ticker. He was a charming and talented singer, a friend everybody loved.
I haven’t seen or heard from Mike Worsham since we graduated. He’s one of those special friends who seems to wander through your life and disappear. He was always smiling and laughing. I hope he’s well and happy.
The rest of us are in our 70s, waddling along on creaky knees as old men are wont to do.
The Stop-and-Rob was eventually shut down after being busted for selling liquor to minors, but it wasn’t Paul’s fault. Word of our success eventually spread to dumber teenage miscreants who assumed the store would sell beer to anyone tall enough to put their money on the counter.
The thing is, they didn’t know the secret of Paul’s old man pants.
(Today, June 20, 2023, is Paul Jimison’s 72nd birthday. Happy birthday, buddy. You finally look like a child.)
Bobbi Ercoline died a few days ago. She was 73. Nick, her husband of 53 years, paid her a simple yet powerful tribute:
“She lived her life well and left this world a much better place. If you knew her, you loved her.“
I never heard their names before this week but suddenly realized I do know Bobbi and Nick, I’ve known them most of my life. They’re the kids on the cover of the iconic Woodstock soundtrack album published 54 years ago.
The picture of Nick holding Bobbi in a blanket on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, New York, freezes a moment in time that symbolized my generation’s place in history; we were naively idealistic kids who believed we could end war and hatred by simply declaring we’d have nothing to do with them.
They called us the Peace & Love generation.
“We are stardust, we are golden We are billion-year-old carbon And we got to get ourselves Back to the garden”
– Woodstock: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
Peace is elusive but Bobbi and Nick found lifelong love on a wet hillside in August of 1969.
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.
I wrote the first part of this piece three years ago. Just ran across it today and decided it’s ready for an update. No doubt more will come.
— Dave Williams,
June 16, 2020
“Atlanta” written and produced by Donald Glover
September 2017:
One day last week I was looking for a new TV show to watch and came across something called Atlanta. I’d never heard of it but the picture of three young black men with peaches in their mouths was weird. It intrigued me so I took a look.
Here’s how the Hulu log line describes the show:
Two cousins work through the Atlanta music scene in order to better their lives and the lives of their families.
That’s Hulu’s pr department trying to make it sound like a funky Modern Family. The description is so white bread it makes me wonder if someone was trying to intrigue me or chase me away. The weird photo makes a statement of its own. I’m not sure what it is but it sucked me in.
I punched PLAY.
Atlanta took me to a world I’ve never known, where everyone is black and speaks street slang in a dialect that was difficult for me to follow. I turned on captions and it helped but I still struggled a bit to understand what was being said and what it meant. Finally, I just sat back and let the characters develop. I was drawn in.
These people are just like me, but different. We live in very different versions of America.
I’m a white man in my middle sixties.
I’ve never experienced racial discrimination nor knowingly committed any but I’ve always known that it exists and is a damnable sin. I admit to being slightly uncomfortable around people of different classes and cultures. That’s just human nature and it has nothing to do with skin color, sexual identity, religion or nationality, it’s just a matter of “different”. I’m no anthropologist but I wonder if it isn’t an instinctive thing going back many tens of thousands of years to isolate and identify threats from other tribes. I don’t know. I’m just spitballing here. Regardless, we all experience that and almost all of us struggle to eliminate the built-in sense of fear that many people today would label bigotry.
Atlanta is just a TV show but in the comfort of my white middle-class family room it admitted me to a world I’ve never known and can’t visit in real life.
I watched all ten episodes of the first season and I’m all in. I care about the characters and their relationships. I like them. I want them to succeed. I want them to be happy. I love seeing their world through their eyes. It has opened mine.
But this isn’t a TV review. Here’s the point:
Each segment of our lives is a series of doors leading from one place to the next.
At 66, I’m allowed to ease off the pedal. Fewer doors, fewer choices, no hurry. I don’t have to immerse myself in long term goals and obligations; my kids are grown and raising their own families. My career is achieved and I can stop reaching for the next rung on the ladder.
In many ways I’m just starting to live life on my terms for the first time. I’m learning to let go of insistence and think about what I want to do just because I want to.
Lately I’ve enjoyed stocking bird feeders and watching finches jostle for position.
I find myself saying hello to strangers with greater regularity and sincerity.
Old black men go through this same transformation.
If you’ve not reached this point you have an exciting time of life ahead that you’re probably dreading because you think getting old means wearing out.
Nope.
Getting old means getting free.
When it happens you’ll be amazed by how it clarifies your thinking; you’ll reassess beliefs and assumptions you forged long ago when you were gullible, impulsive and bulletproof. You’ll find yourself saying, “Maybe I was wrong” and being right about that.
In this sense growing old is a gift shared among people of all races.
Atlanta is just a TV show but it opened my eyes to a world inaccessible to me. The characters and their stories are fictional but I trust its cultural authenticity and insights.
In one scene Alfred, aka the rapper called Paper Boi, explains in a moment of frustration why he needs to be successful in music so he can stop selling drugs for a living.
“I scare people at ATMs,” he says. “I have to rap.”
That hit me like lightning.
I’ve never scared anybody by my mere existence. I’ve never had to think about how some might fear and maybe even hate me as a stereotype.
This is what people mean when they talk about white privilege. I didn’t get it until now because I’ve only heard that term as an accusation from other white people who live in my own culture. They try to teach me something while strongly implying I’m a bigot simply because I was confused and defensive. It was a revelation delivered to me in anger. They throw down the gauntlet of shame: “If you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem.” It demands I choose sides and smacks of condescension. It makes me frightened, angry and defensive.
“I scare people at ATMs.”
That’s when I got it.
I have white privilege, I understand that now, no thanks to the message delivery system.
It doesn’t mean I should feel guilty about it. It’s not my fault and nobody can tell me it is. It’s just sad and wrong. It’s human. Maybe in some small way my understanding can help fix it.
June 2020:
My Age of Aquarius, the 1960s, was a time of cultural revolution that was shocking and frightening to my parents’ generation. We who were young found it terrifying and yet exciting. With one foot in the world of Leave It To Beaver and another in bloody Vietnam the activists and advocates for change set their sites on the hopelessly lofty goal of universal peace and love, no more wars or discrimination; flower power, Woodstock and all that. Immediately.
Peace advocate faces National Guard troops, People’s Park, Berkeley, CA 1969 Photo titled “Jan Rose Kasmir”
They advocated world peace by shouting, “You’re either with us or against us!”
And today, “If you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem.”
This is where most people pay their check and go home. You can’t insult people into understanding and accepting your view of life.
Between generations of change our culture needs a nap.
We grow tired of fear and anger. We grow up, grow families and want our comforting lives back so we take a break for a decade or five. We want our children to have the secure, carefree lives we insist on remembering. To some extent they do, but yet they don’t.
Eventually, our kids or theirs gear up for another fight, one that inevitably beats others into confused submission and thus advances the bar of human evolution just a tiny bit before they take another break and bring the next generation in off the bench.
It is frustratingly slow but we have frustratingly short lives and so much living to do between protests.
As an old man who has been there and done that I am glad for the effort. Positive change is inevitable, I think. We do make progress but it is painfully slow, especially painful for the young and anxious.
I’m tired. That’s not a good excuse, it’s just a fact.
I have no great wisdom to impart or solutions to offer. I can only say that I wish people would stop shouting long enough to listen, really listen with open minds and hearts. We might find we have more in common than we believe.
My special friend and blogging partner, Anita Garner, just posted an insightful piece called The Way You Make Me Feel. You should read it. It will make you think.
When I was young I was quick to judge others for their attitudes, words and actions. I was young, strong, handsome, wise and cocky.
The only part of that I have left is wise and I’m less sure about that the more I learn about life and myself every day.
Many years ago my adult son asked about my relationship with his mother from whom I had been divorced since he was four.
“I can’t see what you and Mom could have ever had in common,” he said.
“You didn’t know us when we were seventeen,” I answered. “We had a lot in common. We were in love but we grew up in different directions.”
As I am dragged kicking and screaming into my golden years I find great peace in learning that we are all still growing up in directions we never would have expected.
I’m still a flawed mortal, I do pass judgments on others but these days it’s usually judgments on social media squawks from people I don’t know and will never meet. We all need to identify the idiots in the world, right?
But, I’m deeply satisfied with myself these days for having been relieved of the burden of critical introspection in realizing that I have no way nor reason to judge the paths others have chosen or the perspectives and opinions they’ve developed along the way.
I’m interested in your life but I can’t share the millions of moments that have shaped the person you are right now.
We’ll both be different the next time we meet. I can’t wait.
