Goin' about 80

I’m hitting 80 this week. Not 80 miles per hour, but 80 years of age.

I have rarely hit 80 on the speedometer, even in my younger years. But I’ve been creeping up to 80 years all my life, and now that I am almost there, I’m getting cold feet about it all. Not that my anxiety will do me any good.

Since middle age, I’ve been noticing that many of us get through our 70’s more or less intact, but at 80 things start to loosen and fall off. Of course, a serious illness or an accident can skew aging’s trajectory against any of us, but I’m talking about simply getting old.

Trouble is, at no age can you slam on the brakes and throw yourself into reverse. The age-speedometer just keeps revving higher and higher but you just keep moving slower and slower. 

(If you are wondering why I don’t compare aging to running up miles on an odometer, it’s because an odometer is rarely that interesting or important. And because I don’t want to.)

On the other hand, I have had the privilege of aging, both absolutely and relatively.

Absolutely because the alternative to aging is—as is frequently pointed out—death.

Relatively because I’ve lived a good and privileged life, wherein my work seemed worthwhile at least to me, my family thrives, and the worst of illnesses and accidents have missed me so far. I am comfortable financially, in part because of generational wealth. I was raised by a good and caring family, in a safe environment, and with access to sound education.

I live in a friendly and active retirement community, see a compassionate and insightful therapist, and most of all share life with my loving and patient wife. Our daughters and their families, including our granddaughters, bring us deep satisfaction. I have time and energy to enjoy activities and hobbies, including singing great choral music with large ensembles. I authored and published a small book about my favorite place on earth, Ghost Ranch, New Mexico. I’ve lived in states from Maryland to California and in between. I have visited much of our country and some of Europe and Africa as well. What more can a man what or need when he’s hitting 80?

There are some regrets: missed opportunities, investing less than I might have in friendships, fixing things that were really not that much better off for all my effort. I wish I could remember faces and names, good jokes, and humorous personal experiences. I would like to laugh more easily. I am calendar- and clock-driven when I probably don’t need to be, haven’t read all the books I wish I had, and refuse to try to keep up with pop culture. I have not spoken out about my political and societal convictions as often as I could have, and have rarely acted decisively on those convictions.

I am a quiet person in many ways, for whom public speaking and preaching served as foils to my introverted nature. I do not mind being alone as long as I know I will soon have some opportunity for human interaction—for a while. I am thrilled we will hear our Cleveland Orchestra play Mahler’s 5th on my 80th birthday. That’s about the best way I can think of to celebrate it.

I am grateful for it all. If you ask me to whom I am grateful beyond the people I’ve mentioned and the opportunities my U.S. citizenship has offered me, I’d say God. But my gratitude to God is more general than specific because I do not claim any special place in some divine plan for the universe. I have been and am no more worthy of God’s beneficence than any one of the other 8 billion of my earthly cohorts. If good has been my lot because somehow God chose me, it is because I was to share good with others. I hope I have done that.

With the Psalmist I know that the lines have fallen in largely pleasant places for me. Approaching 80, I am unambiguously grateful to God whose ways and purposes are limited only by a love far beyond my power to understand or predict.

“—Night is drawing nigh__”

For all that has been—Thanks!

To all that shall be—Yes!

Dag Hammarskjöld, 1953

Whither Witherspoon?

There’s a push on at Princeton University to remove John Witherspoon’s statute from its place of honor on the campus. The push is driven by the fact that Witherspoon owned two slaves.

As a Presbyterian I am concerned about anything that challenges the place in our history of the only clergy person to sign the Declaration of Independence. Yes, Witherspoon was a Presbyterian minister—a Scottish Presbyterian minister—who came here in 1767 to become president of what eventually became Princeton University.

Here’s a couple of excerpts from Arthur Herman’s 2001 book, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, about Witherspoon’s time at Princeton:

Once in office, Witherspoon proved to be the opposite of the stereotypical narrow-minded Evangelical hard-liner. He intended to make Princeton not only the best college in the colonies, but in the entire British world. (Princeton’s) curriculum would be (a) rigorous humanistic one… Witherspoon saw education not as a form of indoctrination, but as a broadening and deepening of the mind and spirit—and the idea of freedom was fundamental to that process. … Under his guidance, Princeton became a vital meeting ground of American’s Evangelical fervor and Scotland’s modernizing humanism—and a principle conduit for the flow of Scottish ideas into the culture of the colonies. (p. 243)

Later, Herman writes of the college-sponsored grammar school in Princeton that Witherspoon took over as headmaster: 

Witherspoon’s attitude was that even if you disagreed with a philosopher or thinker, you still needed to read (them) in order to appreciate (their) arguments and refute them. So Witherspoon’s students found themselves inundated with a host of thinkers Witherspoon disapproved of, but whom, “in the spirit of free inquiry,” they were expected to understand and digest. As a result, Witherspoon’s influence ranged far beyond his own views and positions, and pointed in directions he himself could not have foreseen. (pp. 244-245)

NOTE: That was what he expected students to experience in grammar school!

Finally, this from Herman’s book: “(Witherspoon) recruited Native American students and blacks, such as the future teacher and minister John Chavis.” (p. 245)

John Chavis was the first Black ordained Presbyterian minister in America.

I am not defending slave-holding or slave-holders. We must be upfront about the central place of slavery in our nation’s history and success, and slavery’s on-going impact in our civic life today. Even the defenses I’ve read of Witherspoon’s attitudes toward slaves and slavery are not sufficient to shield him from his human failure as a slave-holder.

But people are complex and history is complex. And complex people functioning within complex histories often makes evaluation of them complicated. There’s a balancing act involved. You can tear down anyone based on some particular facet of their being, particularly when they engaged in something we now find  wrong. Yet if you remove from sight everyone who doesn’t measure up to today’s standards, who do you have left? Where do you turn for inspiration and guidance when there’s no one back there good enough to make the cut?

Witherspoon, of all people, surely was aware of the insidious power of sin…that inescapable human condition that alienates us from our creator and from one another. He was enlightened enough that we may have some confidence that had he lived in a later time, he’d have recognized that slavery, like the racism that underlay it in the Western World, is sin, and have separated himself from it.

On balance, what John Witherspoon did for the good of Princeton and of our nation is worth remembering. One proposal is to replace his statute with a plaque noting both the positive and the negative aspects of his legacy. I am not sure I am okay with that solution to the problem. But, given the assaults upon free inquiry and speech in our time—especially from the far right, bolstered as it is by political power—John Witherspoon’s understanding of education and that understanding’s influence upon our founders and our nation ought not be hidden from our sight.

2023's January 6 assault on us

On January 6, 2023, we continue to witness an ongoing assault in the U.S. Capitol. It’s being carried out by some 20 Republican House members who are trying to force their will upon the rest of congress and the nation by blocking the election of a Speaker. The only really clear thing they seem to want is power. They do not trust our legislative process to accomplish what they want.

What they are doing is no less an attack on our democracy than was what happened two years ago today. Sure of their own rightness and righteousness, they will not back down or compromise even in the face of overwhelming evidence they cannot get their way through ordinary means. McCarthy keeps trying to mollify them (which has become almost as disgusting as what they are trying to do), but they will not be satisfied until they get the near complete control they want.

We elect people to represent us to fight for what we want for and from our government. I get that, and I vote that way. But I know they will not always get everything I expect immediately or without compromise. I do not vote for people to trash our government because they cannot get their way. I support those who both stand up for what I believe and play well with the others in achieving it.

I’ve been sitting for a couple of days on a post telling George Santos to resign from the House. But he and his lies seem small potatoes to me in light of the assault on our government by 20 of his would-be colleagues. They should all resign. Now.

The Shepherd, by Frederick Buechner

 The Shepherd

from A Christmas Triptych, by Frederick Buechner

“Night was coming on, and it was cold,” the shepherd said, “and I was terribly hungry. I had finished all the bread I had in my sack, and my gut still ached for more. Then I noticed my friend, a shepherd like me, about to throw away a crust he didn’t want. So I said, ‘Throw the crust to me, friend!’ and he did throw it to me, but it landed between us in the mud where the sheep had mucked it up. But I grabbed it anyway and stuffed it, mud and all, into my mouth. And as I was eating it, I suddenly saw – myself. It was as if I was not only a man eating bread but a man watching a man eating bread. And I thought, ‘This is who I am.  I am a man who eats muddy bread.’ And I thought, “The bread is very good.’ And I thought, ‘Ah, and the mud is very good, too.’ So I opened my muddy man’s mouth full of bread and I yelled to my friends, ‘By God, it’s good, brothers!’ And they thought I was a terrible fool, but they saw what I meant. We saw everything that night. Everything. Everything!

“Can I make you understand, I wonder? Have you ever had this happen to you? You have been working hard all day. You’re dog-tired, bone-tired. So you call it quits for a while. You slump down under a tree or against a rock or something and just sit there in a daze for half an hour or a million years, I don’t know, and all this time your eyes are wide open looking straight ahead someplace but they’re so tired and glassy they don’t see a thing. Nothing. You could be dead for all you notice. Then, little by little, you begin to come to, then your eyes begin to come to, and all of a sudden you find out you’ve been looking at something the whole time except it’s only now you really see it – one of the ewe lambs maybe, with its foot caught under a rock, or the moon scorching a hole through the clouds. It was there all the time, and you were looking at it all the time, but you didn’t see it till just now.

"That’s how it was this night, anyway. Like finally coming to – not things coming out of nowhere that had never been there before, but things just coming into focus that have been there always. And such things! The air wasn’t just emptiness anymore. It was alive. Brightness everywhere, dipping and wheeling like a flock of birds. And what you always thought was silence stopped being silent and turned into the beating of wings, thousands and thousands of them. Only not just wings, as you came to more, but voices –high, wild, like trumpets. The words I could never remember later, but something like what I’d yelled with my month full of bread. ‘By God, it’s good, brothers! The crust. The mud. Everything. Everything!’

“Oh well. If you think we were out of our minds, you are right, of course. And do you know, it was just like being out of jail. I can see us still. The squint-eyed one who always complained of sore feet. The little sawed-off one who could outswear a Roman. The young one who blushed like a girl. We all tore off across that muddy field like drunks at a fair, and drunk we were, crazy drunk splashing through a sea of wings and moonlight and the silvery wool of the sheep. Was it night? Was it day! Did our feet touch the ground?

“‘Shh, shh, you’ll wake up my guests,’ said the Innkeeper we met coming in the other direction, with his arms full of wood. And when we got to the shed out back, one of the foreigners who were there held a finger to his lips.

“At the eye of the storm, you know, there’s no wind – nothing moves – nothing breathes – even silence keeps silent. So hush now. There he is. You see him? You see him?

“By Almighty God, brothers. Open your eyes. Listen.”

A cookie for one

“Making a single-serving chocolate chip cookie is the perfect outlet for a stress-filled day.” So read the caption under a picture of a pair of hands mixing cookie dough in a hand-sized bowl.

As the holiday season—propelled in part by sweets—rushes in upon us I cannot imagine a sillier, lonelier enterprise than baking one cookie at a time. At the same time, doing just that may represent the sorry excesses of our American individualism and divisions.

I started baking chocolate chip cookies several years ago in a quest for the secret to my mother’s recipe for them. Her chocolate chips were like no others. She baked an untold number of them for decades prior to her death at nearly 96 in 2015.

Mom could have never imagined baking to satisfy her appetite alone. She baked for family and friends. Her cookie jar was never empty, and was usually filled with chocolate chips. In her later years—much of her family scattered—she drove around our community on Saturday afternoons to give away cookies, breads, and rolls that had been isolated raw ingredients earlier that day.

I believe my cookies come pretty close to tasting like hers, though I am not sure exactly why. It’s taken some experimentation, and therefore some investment of time to approximate her secret. My experience has convinced me that making a single-serving chocolate chip cookie is an extravagant enterprise destined to lead to lonely consumption.

The article with that picture reported that it takes half-an-hour to bake one cookie. In around three hours I can mix, shape, bake, stow and clean up after the creation of 48 chocolate chip cookies. Do the math: my way is eight times more efficient than the one-at-a-time way. My mother, who no doubt made her cookies much faster than I can, would not have survived had she been so inefficient.

Advocates of small-batch baking (as they call it) may argue that not everyone can carve out a three-hour block of time to bake. I counter with, you make time to do what you want, don’t you? If you baked four dozen cookies in a single evening and preserved them (freezing works), you could eat one a day for a month and half without investing another minute or making another mess.

But of course, you’d have to eat each cookie all by yourself. You would not dare invite a neighbor in to watch you eat your cookie, would you?

This, then, is my real concern: loneliness; isolation; individualism. As in, I’ll do it myself for myself. Other people just get out of my way and my life.

That sounds extreme. But it is exactly the opposite of how my mother lived her life. Though she could be an independent sort, her overriding concern was always the comfort and good of others, particularly of her family.

Being so focused on yourself that you bake a cookie that simple good manners dictate you must eat by yourself sounds like much of what endangers our nation and world today.

In 2020, the BBC conducted what it called “The Loneliness Experiment.” It surveyed over 46,000 people of all ages living in 237 countries regarding their experiences of loneliness. Among its findings was this: “people in individualistic (vs. collectivist) countries reported more loneliness.”

In the name of individual and private freedom, many of us resist masking requests and vaccination requirements, laws that extend liberty to people not like us, to using public policy to share some wealth with poor Americans, and more. We think we can take care of ourselves without caring about people we do not happen to know. As long as I am okay—but even if I am not—I will not do what anyone else tells me to do, even to preserve the common good or to protect my neighbor. Because I am my own person, responsible only for my own self.

“America First”—when it means “America only” or “America in isolation”—is the macro-political equivalent of baking one cookie at a time and eating it alone. It seems so right…until we can’t get our hands on the things we need to bake just one last cookie because someone else controls our access to them.

How to overcome loneliness in our uber-individualistic and isolationist land? Here’s a start: bake a real batch of chocolate chip cookies…2, 4, 6 dozen. Then, share them. Give them away, or enjoy them and a cup of tea or glass of milk with someone else. The baking and the sharing will both do wonders for you. They will do wonders for others as well, and could be your greatest contribution to the flourishing of us all.

 

My red shoes

 

Dorothy had her ruby slippers. Finally, I have my red shoes, and I am many decades older than she was.

Buying shoes has always been a challenge for me. Like the rest of my body, my feet are long and narrow, requiring 12A shoes since I was a teen-ager. Many say that the unusual thing, given my height, is that I don’t need size 15 or more. Count me lucky.

Finding the narrow width was always the problem. Stores overflow with men’s shoes marked wide and extra wide. Sure, you can buy men’s A-width shoes if you are willing and able search hard for them, not be fussy about style, and pay a premium price. Sometimes I did pay that price.

But many times, especially for athletic shoes, I made do with shoes too wide for my feet. Tying them tight created folds of leather or fabric just in front of the laces. They rarely felt really comfortable no matter how hard I tried to pretend at first that they’ll be okay, thank you.

About 20 years ago I discovered that New Balance offered narrow shoes, and I paid the price for them. As with many things, it was worth it. There’s little that’s harder on one’s state of mind than an ill-fitting pair of shoes. Hurting feet can raise hell with the head.

Shoes suitable for riding a bike became an interest of mine when I bought my Specialized Cross Trail in 2015. I pretended I was young and agile enough to buy clip on pedals and shoes. In this arrangement, the shoes firmly attach to the pedals. Your shoes cannot slip off the pedals, nor can you lift them from the pedals. The advantage is that you can benefit from lift on the way back up, pulling the pedals up with a force somewhat less than the force you get from pushing them down, but nevertheless significant.

You get out of clip-on pedals by sharply kicking your heel outward away from your bike. This releases the shoe from the pedal so you can put your feet on the ground and keep yourself upright when you stop. It’s a tricky maneuver that takes some practice. It also requires an extra second or two before you do stop.

The shoes I bought for this two-wheeled, self-powered, integrated man/machine were black with red accents.

There are many stories of cyclists meeting the pavement because they had not freed at least one foot fast enough. Fortunately, that never happened to me. I am an extremely cautious rider. I anticipate problems like most people anticipate food.

But as the pain in my arthritic knees got worse, I lost confidence that I could kick my shoes free from the pedals in an emergency. So, a couple of years ago I got plain old flat pedals and returned to riding with athletic shoes. It was kind of come-down, but I was less likely to fall down.

When I bought a new Jamis step-through bike early this summer (another concession to age’s advance), I decided I’d buy some shoes primarily for riding. Don’t ask me why. It seemed appropriate. But I did not want to spend too much on them, so Maxine and I went to a shoe warehouse sort of place rather than to a New Balance store to see what I could find.

I found all-red, almost ruby-red, Pumas. Their black laces nearly wrap around the entire upper part of the shoe. Very cool.

They weren’t the first shoes I’d found that day that might have worked for me, and their fit is not perfect. But they were relatively inexpensive, and felt good on my feet. Perfect for cycling, I told myself and Maxine.

But did I dare? Red shoes on feet the age of mine? I liked the thought of it. Just a little bit daring, outside my retirement community’s norm of clunky white walking shoes. Maxine assured me they were great. I snapped a picture, and texted it to my daughters, and they said go for it. So, with the unneeded but appreciated assurances of those who could afford to be honest with me, I bought them.

Since getting my red shoes, I’ve noticed red on the feet of other men, all of whom are decades younger than I. Wearing red Pumas fools no one about my years, except maybe myself. I imagine they make my aching knees feel a little stronger. Plus, they work well on my bike, as I’d hoped. And they are almost as much fun as that bike  whether riding it or walking the pathways of our peaceful neighborhood.

On the existence of high winds

From time to time when I’ve driven the great stretches of lonely highway in America’s Southwest, I have been confronted by an official road sign advising me that, “High Winds May Exist.”

I am sure the sign is intended to warn me that, without warning, a gust of wind might blow my car where I do not want it to go, or even overturn it altogether. Semis and recreational vehicles are particularly vulnerable to such winds, but regular automobiles are, too, if the wind is really high.

I am never sure what I am supposed to do with the sign’s statement while managing my car at a 75 m.p.h. clip. Instead of making me more alert to what’s going on around me, the notice that “High Winds May Exist” sends me into a philosophical rabbit warren.

For one thing, high winds do exist. Yes, the philosopher will demand definitions of “high” and “wind” and “exist” in order to fully trust the truth claim of the assertion. But common language usage leaves no doubt that high winds certainly do exist. Just ask anyone who’s been through a hurricane.

But the statement painted in plain letters on that isolated sign tends to sow a tiny seed of doubt: if high winds may exist, one must consider the possibility that they may not exist. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and using the right tricks of the philosopher’s trade, it is possible to argue that high winds do not exit.

After all, who has ever seen the wind, any wind, low or high? You can see evidence of what seems to be a high wind’s existence, but that doesn’t prove that high winds exist, however you define existence. You might conclude there’s no such thing as a high wind at all.

Of course, my existential concern when I see that sign is supposed to be whether a high wind exists or is about to exist right where my car is. It’s not the theoretical existence of high winds that should concern me, but the actual presence of high winds on this road at this moment. I am, I believe, being advised to be very alert. But it’s hard to think about the here and now when my mind is adrift in a metaphysical whirlwind.

Thus, something we all agree to be true is challenged by a carefully contrived statement that sows doubt without directly confronting the agreed-upon truth. It’s easy to distract people from the realities around or near them just by asking a question or suggesting an alternative to something they, for good reason, take for granted. Politicians do it all the time, and the nation slides into a metaphysical warren from which there is no escape for anyone but a rabbit.