When I'm 64

"Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
when I'm 64?"

So, here I am coming up on the 'old age' memorialized in the old Beatles song. Sixty-four. I guess when I was young, 64 would have seemed old to me, but as I grew older myself, and saw my own father and relatives at that age, McCartney's lyrics and their picture of a man at 64 seemed rather exaggerated to me. And the question of whether a husband would be needed at 64 seemed absurd. Of course he would be! And probably more than ever before. But I suppose, as with most of McCartney's lyrics, the sound and the rhythm was the important thing. After all, if you play it in your mind, 74 and 84 just don't sound right, and 54 sounds far too young. 

But anyway, the stupid song has been going through my mind. Because I am about to be 64. 

Sixty-four certainly doesn't look the way I thought it would look when I was 24. This is very likely because the imagination of growing older was bound up with the pattern of what I saw in older folks such as my parents and aunts and uncles. I, too, would be a parent, I assumed, and even a grandparent, as in the song. Grandchildren on your knee--Vera, Chuck and Dave. 

Well, there are grandchildren, from my stepdaughters, anyway. Four, I believe. But I have only met one of them. And that was a long time ago. There is no wife--or rather, there have been three, which are now no longer wives (of mine, anyway). And somehow I have ended up on the other side of the world, single, alone, in a foreign land that I have no meaningful connection to. 

McCartney's 64 year old looks rather cozy, after all. Rather more like I thought I would be, after all. 

I remember writing a poem once upon a time for my second wife. It was titled "Old Woman Wife" and sought to describe her at a much older age, to paint a picture of beauty and character enriched by the years, etched in wrinkles of experience and wisdom. 

She was not pleased. 

Later, she would spend many thousands of dollars on plastic surgery--facelift, tummy tuck, so on and so forth. I saw her in the hospital, and it was a frightening sight indeed. Staples in her head, bruises on her skin, eye sockets purple. My God. I should have never wrote that poem! 

And you know what? She got old anyway, for the money ran out and the tummy untucked and the character of the years reasserted itself, saying No, you cannot fool me. 

I don't mind being 64. I have no use for being any other age at this point. And yet there is the suspicion that I am not who I am supposed to be. It is not a story I would have written when I was young. And yet, it was written by no one other than me. And there is at least one more chapter to be composed.