On Turning Sixty-Five Notes from the Field

NOVEMBER: The Dumpster Project "Says I to myself " should be the motto of my journal. -Henry David Thoreau, November 11, 1851 As a sixty-fourth birthday present to myself, my plan was to rent a Dumpster, park it in the driveway, and clean out the house and garage. Toss in the accumulated clutter-unwearable clothes, dead appliances, bicycles, skis, car tools, decades of abandoned projects. A ton of paper. It struck me as an appropriate way to start off my sixty-fifth year: as if preparing for a move, although we weren't going anywhere. It's a foolish dream, I suppose, to catch up with the mountain of stuff we seem to keep pushing ahead of ourselves. Clearing out the trash of youth and middle age. I'd yearned to do it for years. It was the birthday, of course, and not the clutter that was driving this extravagant if not hysterical plan. I'd recently watched a friend turn sixty-five, receive his first Social Security check, and sink into depression: the government had officially declared him an old man. Seeing him struggle was instructive. It had entirely sneaked up on him. I hadn't given sixty-five much thought either. I don't like being blindsided any more than the next guy. Not that age wasn't already landing the odd sucker punch. I had begun to find winters, for example, harder to take. A writer's days are insidiously sedentary, and in winter it becomes far too easy just to sit still. Brooding ensues. The previous winter had been a severe one in New England, not in the least conducive to physical activity other than perhaps shoveling snow. I couldn't run, or didn't want to, and vegetated instead-and took a serious hit from the aging process as the price. Sitting still is the specific winter problem: how to obtain sufficient movement? I used to ski, and have known skiers who continued into their dotage, but the thought of a ski slope now makes me shudder. I guess I got tired of being really cold. Age does exacerbate that. ("When you're old, you're cold"--the late Dr. Benjamin Spock.) I swam through several winters, in indoor pools, and really enjoyed it, but overdid it, developed overuse injuries, and had to quit. It's a quandary, lack of movement. By the time last spring arrived I was startled to find myself feeling, for the first time in my life, positively frail. Well, I thought, I'll get that right back, and plunged into a hashed-up exercise program, almost immediately reaggravating the bum neck that had made me quit swimming in the first place. Weak spots do have a way of quickly turning painful, particularly as we age. Getting strength back took longer than seemed right, and it didn't all come back. My wife, Chris, and I love wilderness canoe trips, but the previous summer's expeditions had been shockingly hard. Ordinary household tasks seemed to leave me unnecessarily tired and sore. I was suddenly not so bullish. A lot of plans, professional as well as personal, looked due for revision--downward. The high point of the summer, on the other hand, had been some exquisitely enjoyable lake swimming in the Adirondacks, after my neck had quieted down. I decided I'd try swimming again as winter exercise. If I eased into it maybe I wouldn't have problems. Only a couple of days a week, swim a quiet thirty minutes or so, and see if I couldn't manage to keep moving a little more consistently over the winter to come. A friend, hearing of my Dumpster plans, referred me toWalden. Thoreau attends the auction of a deacon's estate, and, not uncharacteristically, is mockingly aghast: As usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had begun to accumulate in his father's day. Among the rest was a dried tapeworm. And now, after lying half a century in his garret and other dust holes, these things were not burned; instead of a bonfire, or purifying destruction of them, there was an auction, or increasing of them. ThJerome, John is the author of 'On Turning Sixty-Five Notes from the Field' with ISBN 9780812992335 and ISBN 0812992334.