The always erudite investment manager, Bill Gross, has
turned the Big Seven Zero. As he now
observes in his recent missive, A Sense of an Ending, “a 70-year-old reads the obituaries with a self-awareness as
opposed to an item of interest.” He conflates his own end of life angst with
the end of a market propped up by unsustainable central bank machinations. He also cites Julian Barnes’ novel, The Sense of an Ending, which similarly caught my attention, perhaps because Bill
and I are about the same age, although I reached the magic 70 mark a couple of
years ago, sharing the occasion with my family on a cruise.
Barnes should be the spokesperson for our generation with
his non-fiction work Nothing to be
Frightened Of required reading. I’ve
already quoted one of the brilliant passages from that book in a previous entry,
but it bears repeating: “It is not just
pit-gazing that is hard work, but life-grazing.
It is difficult for us to contemplate, fixedly, the possibility, let
alone the certainty, that life is a matter of cosmic hazard, its fundamental
purpose mere self-perpetuation, that it unfolds in emptiness, that our planet
will one day drift in frozen silence, and that the human species, as it has
developed in all its frenzied and over-engineered complexity will completely
disappear and not be missed, because there is nobody and nothing out there to
miss us. This is what growing up
means. And it is a frightening prospect
for a race which has for so long relied upon its own invented gods for
explanation and consolation.”
I’ve now had a couple of years to “look back” at the
consequences of turning 70. While
philosophically I agree with Barnes, it is the avoidance of despair during the
remaining years which is the challenge.
It’s probably why us herd of the retired “keep busy.” But as much as we try not to think about it,
for many of us turning 70 is like throwing on a light switch (or maybe, more
aptly, turning it off). Suddenly, the
body rebels at being kept going beyond its normal shelf expiration date. More parts wear out and medical technology is
more than happy to figure out a way to keep us going. As a friend of ours puts it, “I have body
parts on order.”
Unquestionably the worst part of the whole process is
watching friends battle unspeakable illnesses or going through invasive surgery
to keep the body going, with the attendant weeks or even months of
rehabilitation. As we all joke, it’s
better than the alternative. Hey, we're on the right side of the grass! But with
increasing frequency we hear about another friend, a relative, or a high school
/ college alumnus who has succumbed to the inevitable.
As readers of this blog know, one of the activities I’ve
steeped myself in since retiring (and therefore, “keeping busy”) is playing the
piano, mostly The Great American Songbook pieces. I recently came across -- buried in my sheet music
– some of the music of Paul Simon written in the 1960s. During those days, that was the type of music
I played, but have long abandoned. So I
found myself playing some again, particularly Old Friends which opens with two beautiful Major 7th
chords, A-major-7 (“Old”) and then E-Major-7 (“friends”).
I’m a "serial piano
player" and once I attach myself to a song, I play it over and over again,
trying different adaptations. My mind
wanders sometimes and, in the case of this song, remembering my thoughts of the lyrics when
I used to play it nearly 50 years ago. Today they have a significance quite
different than when I was younger, particularly the phrase from the B section
of the song, “Can you imagine us/Years from today/Sharing a park bench
quietly?/How terribly strange/To be seventy/Old Friends “
The true meaning of lyrics when I played the song back in
the 1960s seemed foreign, unthinkable. My
being 70 at the time seemed to be in a one-to-one relationship with
eternity. Eternity has arrived.
So, Bill, welcome to the club!
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| Fifty Years in a Flash |
