Seven-T-Nine

Today I am Seven-T-Nine. Did you know that 79 is a prime number, since it is not divisible by any number but 1. Does that mean I am in my prime? No. My prime is well behind me. 79 is an isolated prime because 79+2 and 79-2 are not prime numbers. Yes, I do feel a little isolated since we moved to Utah] (and out grandkids moved away) but fortunately, 79 is a happy number because (7 ²+9²)=130, 1²+3²+0²=10 and (1²+0²) =1. I have no idea why that would make a number happy but at 79 I am pretty happy as old guy happiness goes. Wikipedia (the source of all this number nonsense) also says that 79 is a lucky prime number. Why? Well, I am too far past my prime to dive into Wikipedia’s explanation (you can find it here), but I certainly feel I am a lucky man today

Playing Favorites (5/20/1944)

No, that’s not a typo in the title.  In spite of my advanced age, I know what year it is (2021, right?).  But I was born on this date in 1944, making this my 78th birthday (2022-1944=78.  See?  I is still good at math).  So the question of the moment is what a music loving septuagenarian music lover will play on his birthday.  The obvious (if not original) choice is the classic Happy Birthday we been forced to sing since we were kids.  My favorite version:

Happy birthday to you,
You belong in a zoo.
You look like a monkey,
And you act like one too.

Cute but hardly appropriate … monkeys rarely life beyond forty.   Or, I could find a page like 33 Best Birthday Songs Of All Time and choose one of the dozens of birthday songs that were recorded by various artists.   I could reach back to my youth and choose The Crests Sixteen Candles, but that would be about 55 candles short (see?  I is still good at math).  Besides, the song is about heartbreak and I am a happy old goat today.   I could choose Happy Birthday songs by The Beatles or Stevie Wonder, but as much as I love both artists, their birthday songs feel like half-hearted efforts.   I could go modern with 2 Chainz – Birthday Song featuring Kanye West and the lovely lyric, All I want for my birthday is a big booty hoe.  Not a freaking chance … we’re talking music here.  And it’s crap like that that makes me feel even older.

So, I’ll pick a birthday song with a brain by one of my favorite singers, Carly Simon, who tells a story in every song.   In her Happy Birthday song, Carly talks about all the things growing old has cost her, including caffeine and dessert.  It’s a great birthday song, but it’s also a reminder of all the things you have to do make it to your seventies.  And appropriately enough, she’s also a septuagenarian.  Be sure to listen to the lyrics (or read them here).

Useta

Looking back a bit on the eve of my 78th birthday …

I useta get up the day after a marathon with legs so sore I could hardly walk.  Now I don’t need the marathon.

I useta think my wife was lucky to have me.   Now I know that I’m the lucky one and that spending fifty years with her is the best thing in my life.

I useta solve complex mathematical and statistical problems.   Now I do Wordle and figure out how to fix the shutters in our office.

I useta ride a bike fifty miles a week.  Now I ride a stationary bike that goes nowhere for 30 minutes.

I useta think that people were basically good.   Now I look around at what’s going on in the world and I’m not so sure. That makes me very sad.

I useta be an engineer who thought he was meant to be a writer.   Now I am a writer who useta engineer.

I useta do triathlons … swim, bike and run.   Now do the old guy triathlon … I walk on the track at the gym, ride the stationary bike and shower.

I useta be a liberal.  Then I was a moderate.   Then a conservative.  Now I’m not so sure I want to be associated with any of them.

I useta think that 78 sounded very old.   Now I know I wasn’t wrong.

I useta know the words to virtually every song I loved.   Now I still do but I can’t always remember who sang them.

It useta make me sad that no one seemed to feel music like I do.    Now I know it is a gift that brings me untold joy and connects me to the Infinite.

I useta think I’d never move to Utah.   Now I am happily living there, ten minutes from my grandkids with a view of the mountains.

I useta be a seeker.   I still am and will be to the day I die.   I’m OK with that.

Pair of Sevens

Today is my 77th birthday.   A pair of sevens, not even good enough to open in a poker game.  This has been one hell of a year and I’ve groused about it plenty on these pages.   I have posted on my birthday almost every year since I started my blog in 2009.  The fellow at the left has, by the way, been part of almost every birthday post.  I thought it would be fun to revisit 22 years of birthdays to see if we can find any trends.

On May 2009 I posted Turning Sixty-Five.  I had spent a number of years managing my Dad’s Medicare, and now I had my own.  I did not handle that well but you’d never know it from my post, which talked about my Best Day, the day my wife Muri and I got pinned in college.   The next year, I posted Sixty-Freakin’-Six in which I observed that In the last year, a lot has happened, some of it magic and some of it tragic … and some of it just life on life’s terms.   And now, I’m Sixty-Freakin’-Six.   But I’m loved.   Alive.   In 2011, I posted some history, things that happened the day I was born, May 20, 1944.  In

Seventy-Five

Today I turn 75.   A little over ten years ago, as I was approaching 65, I started this blog.  For most of my life until then, I had prided myself on Feeling Younger than I was.  The approach of my sixty-fifth birthday changed that, hence my first post was titled Feeling Old.  I blame the arrival of my red, white and blue Medicare Card for the transition from Younger to Older.  After years of monitoring my Dad’s Medicare, it was suddenly me that needed monitoring.   But I also could see that in some ways, these were the best years of my life and I started Older Eyes – Bud’s Blog as a place to talk about both sides of the aging coin … as the Slug Line says, Reflections from an Older Perspective.

Birthday, Interrupted

Today was my wife, Muri’s _____ birthday.   Really?  You thought I was going to tell you her age?   A man does not stay married to the same woman for going on 47 years by telling the universe … or at least that small portion of it that reads Older Eyes – Bud’s Blog … her age.  I have always made a big deal of her birthday.   I don’t know where that particular instinct came from … I don’t remember my Dad  doing so.   Making a big deal used to mean buying extravagant gifts, at least extravagant by our inherited middle class standards.   I am fortunate to have a very practical wife that, although she loves beautiful things like jewelery and designer purses, is most often too practical to buy such things for herself.  Happily, I get to indulge her for holidays like birthdays and Valentine’s Day.   However, as we push our way through our sixties (one of us having exited said decade), we find it harder and harder to find things we want for our birthdays.  Yes, we are lucky but we are also less drawn to material things as we age.  Making a big deal of Muri’s birthday can become problematic.

Seven-Oh

I really took my sixty-fifth birthday hard.  It wasn’t so much a physical thing … I was an active, energetic and passionate old guy that most people guessed was much younger, in spite of my bald head and white mustache.  But the arrival of my Medicare card after years of dealing with my father’s Medicare issues was a stark reminder that I was indeed getting old.  It didn’t help that business was so slow that I was being forced to contemplate what retirement might look like.  Only old guys retire, right?  But I carried on.  I started this blog which now has over 1,500 posts offering Reflections from an Older Perspective.  I found an alternate business working as an expert to attorneys and venture capitalists and gradually brought my business back to life.  But I always had my eyes on May 20, 2014, the day I’d turn seventy.  If sixty-five was bad, what would seventy be like?

A while back, my wife Muri asked me what I wanted to do for my seventieth birthday.  I told her, Nothing.  I don’t want to celebrate it.  I meant it.  But my daughter, Amy called and asked of I’d like to go to Disneyland on my birthday.  Truth is, I wanted to say no but I told her, Let me think about it.  Muri encouraged me to say yes … What could be better than spending it with your grandkids? she said.  And so, when this posts today, I will be on my way to Disneyland.  I’ve been posting … both here and on Facebook … about my impending birthday for several weeks now, so I’ve already been told several times that seventy is the new sixty, twice that you’re only as old as you feel, and once that all that happens is a number changes.  I have been told too many times that it’s better than the alternative.  To which I say, thank you, but I’m not one to sugar-coat reality.  I feel five years older than I did on that day my Medicare card came but I am still active and perhaps more passionate and I can be reasonably energetic if I can manage a nap now and then.  And for May 20, 2014, I intend to be a seventy-year old kid with my grandkids at Disneyland.  Space Mountain, here I come. 

Monday Smiles – 7/15/2013

In July of 1965, I missed my girlfriend’s birthday.   I didn’t forget it.  I just had the date wrong … I thought it was July 17th and it was the 15th.   I must have been doing something right, because a year later  we were still together … and I got the date right.   Today marks … well … a lot of years later and I haven’t missed one since.   Today is Muri’s birthday.  It will be a simple celebration this year, a few modest gifts (which she’ll help pick out) and out to dinner at the Original Fish Company.  Because after 48 years together, the best gift is looking back Through the Years and looking forward to another.

Monday Smiles – 5/20/1944

If you were one of the 65 people who stopped by yesterday, you know that this is my birthday, hence the date in the title.  Yes, 1944.  Sixty-nine years ago, a two-month premature baby boy was born into this world in New Haven, Connecticut, delivered C-section because my mother was suffering from toxemia.  Fortunately, the experience ended well for both of us.  If you’ve been a reader since the beginning of Bud’s Blog, you know that Older Eyes started as a place to talk about Feeling Older as my sixty-fifth birthday approached. The arrival of my Medicare card before my sixty-fifth birthday was traumatic after helping manage my father’s Medicare issues for many years but I was upbeat in my sixty-fifth birthday post, Turning Sixty-Five.  Each year, I’ve posted on my birthday, sometimes a bit cranky, like Sixty-Freakin’ Six.  Last Year it was Fifty-Eighteen, so I guess technically, this year I’m fifty-nineteen.  This  birthday feels like a bit of a non-event but I’m already wondering how it will feel to be sixty-ten.  Yikes.  THAT can wait a year.

Fifty-Eighteen

It’s likely that when you read this, Muri and I will be out in the middle of Freakin’ Nowhere, Arizona, on our way back to Southern California.  It will be my fifty-eighteenth birthday.  We’ll have celebrated it here with my daughter’s family on Saturday, which I love.   Muri and I will likely stop in LaQuinta and have dinner, turning the long drive into a Birthday Date Drive.  We’ll get to luxuriate in the 30-something degree drop in temperature from Phoenix to Anaheim Hills.  Having Muri in my life is the best present a fifty-eighteen year old man could wish for.  The truth is, even when I want to want a present, I have trouble coming up with things.   Muri and I agree, we have most everything we want materially and the things we’d ask for money can’t buy.  Happier children.  Friends not struggling with things like palsy, Alzheimer’s and cancer.  Still, by any reasonable measure, we are very fortunate.  I am very fortunate.

Sixty-five was traumatic … the arrival of a Medicare Card and the forced retirement of both Muri and I made it one of our most awkward years.  But we learned to be old(er) (semi-)retired people and for the most part, we’ve got it down now.   Sixty-Six and Sixty-Seven have seemed like small towns on the not-so-long road to that big city, Seventy.   Of course, there are no guarantees.  I’m going to explore the little town of Fifty-Eighteen for all I’m worth and savor what it has to offer.   I’m going to make the best of those times where life is in session in a way that I wish it weren’t.   After all, it’s my home town for one whole year.

I know this is Sunday and traffic on Bud’s Blog is light, so this may not be read by many.  If your do stop by, take a minute and wish an old curmudgeon Happy Birthday.   It will make a mostly happy man just a little happier.