11/21/2023 0 Comments White pages clinton iowaI still have my teeth, in contrast to my grandfather, who I vividly recall storing his choppers in a glass next to his bed, and have so far steered clear of heart attack or stroke (I pray I’m not tempting fate by my stating this fact). “Bodily decrepitude,” said Yeats, “is wisdom.” I have accumulated somewhat more of the former than the latter, but Biden seems fairly spry (why do I feel I have to add “for someone his age?”). It’s the dwindling capacities that go with aging. It’s not death that’s the worrying thing about a second Biden term. The other day, after lunch with some of my graduate students, I caught our reflection in a store window and, for an instant, wondered about the identity of the short old man in our midst. I remember a New Yorker cartoon in which an older reader of the obituaries sees headlines that read only “Older Than Me” or “Younger Than Me.” Yet I find myself reading the obituary pages with ever greater interest, curious about how long they lasted and what brought them down. My mother passed at 86, my father two weeks before his 102nd birthday, so I’m hoping for the best, genetically speaking. Where will it end? There’s only one possibility, and that reality occurs to me with increasing frequency. Joe will be on the cusp of the gravy train. “After 80, it’s gravy,” my father used to say. Modern technology and Big Pharma should add at least a decade and a half. Three score and ten is the number of years of life set out in the Bible. After all, it’s now thought a bit disappointing if a person dies before 85. Yet I confess to a certain loss of, shall we say, fizz.įorgive me if I’ve said this before (I’m old and occasionally repeat myself), but Joe Biden could easily make it until 86, when he’d conclude his second term. I feel fit, I swing dance and salsa, and I can do 20 pushups in a row. I’m now a spritely 77 - lightyears younger than our president.
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