On Being Seventy Five
By Foy Valentine

“Whatsoever things are...lovely...think on these things”  Philippians 4:8

    Today I am seventy five.  Exactly half way between the Bible’s vaunted “three score years and ten” and the “four score” years which “by reason of strength” get meted out to a few.

    It is a milestone calculated to invoke mellowness, if a body could only keep from nodding off.

    Old Omar Khayyam hit the nail on the head:  “The Bird of Time has but a little way to flutter—and the Bird is on the Wing.”  I have to tell you, I can feel it in my bones.  Somewhat.  Yes.

    The wise old man of Ecclesiastes had himself been there and done that.  Else he could hardly have understood the situation well enough to chronicle so insightfully the vivid realities of these yellow leaf years.

Years when, as he says, “the sun grows dark, and the light goes from moon and stars.” (Cataracts?  Glaucoma?  One garrulous eye specialist who headed his department at the University Medical School where I had gone to get the very best analysis available, chattering to a half dozen eager young medical interns standing by as he peered into the inner recesses of my poor eyeballs through grossly dilated pupils gave this casual diagnosis:  “Senile macular degeneration.  Yuck.”  Hardly a bedside manner likely to guarantee those young whelps an early retirement from the practice of medicine as caring eye specialists.)

Years when “ladies at the lattice lose their lustre.”  (Must we wallow in specificity? Could the media drag out the details for months or years?)

Years when “the sound of the mill runs low, when the twitter of birds is faint.”  (For me the loss of hearing has crept up on padded cat’s feet so that everybody mumbles, nobody enunciates, and I couldn’t understand one single word of what our granddaughter just said.)

Years “when old age fears a height.”  (Old bones heal slowly, so be careful out there and don’t fall.)

Years when “even a walk has its terrors.”  (Dragons and demons may be lurking and who know what bankruptcies or black holes might engulf you?)

Years when the “hair is almond white, and he drags his limbs along as the spirit flags and fades.” (Arthritis?  Ministrokes?  Altzheimer’s?)

Until in due time we go to our “long, long home and mourners pass along the street, on the day when the silver cord is snapped and the golden lamp drops broken” (Ecclesiastes 12:1-8 Moffatt.)  [Do read this whole fantastic passage in James Moffatt’s hauntingly beautiful translation.]

    I mention these matters not to wallow in morbidity or because I relish this cataloguing of the infirmities of old age.  On the contrary, I came here to celebrate.

    Here goes.
    I’m here.  Lots of folks I’ve known aren’t.
    I’m alive.  Lots of old friends aren’t.

    I’m still happily married to Mary Louise to whom after 51 years I still sign all correspondence, notes, cards, complaints, and kudos, no matter how trivial or inconsequential, with Greek words which freely translated mean, “My life, I love you,” and with whom we have together been blessed with three wonderful daughters, fine sons-in-law, and splendid grandchildren not a few.

    I remember good parents and a good home.  Many are not so fortunate to have such good remembers.

    I remember good teachers.  How blessed I was, and how blessed I am to this good day because of them.

    I remember church.  Some good and some not so good.  But for me, far more good than bad.

    And I remember friends.  Without them life would have been thin and poor.  And without them life today would be immeasurably thinner, infinitely poorer.

    A fine passage in Anton Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard catches Yermolay Alexeyevitch, a new-rich business man who has just come from the auction in the city where he has bought for 90 thousand rubles the ancestral home of the bankrupt aristocrat, Madame Lyubov Andreyevna:

The cherry orchard’s mine!...If my father and grandfather could rise from their graves and see all that has happened!  How their Yermolay, ignorant, beaten Yermolay, who used to run about barefoot in winter, how that Yermolay has bought the finest estate in the world.  I have bought the estate where my father and grandfather were slaves, where they were not even admitted into the kitchen....Music!  Play up!

     So, today, as the happy owner of memories more precious by far than “the finest estate in the world,” I have invited you in, where the music is, to join me in remembering, in celebrating, and in giving thanks to God for his immeasurable grace.

    Many happy returns of the day.

Updated Thursday, July 08, 2004