dedalus_1947 | When I’m 64

Send me a postcard, drop me a line,
Stating point of view.
Indicate precisely what you mean to say.
Yours sincerely,
Wasting Away.

Give me your answer.
Fill in a form.
Mine for evermore.
Will you still need me?
Will you still feed me?
When I’m sixty-four?
(When I’m Sixty-four: Paul McCartney – 1967)

I turned sixty-four years old last month, and I intended writing about it right away. I thought it would be a straightforward story about what how I was occupying my time these days, and describing my impressions of turning three score and four years old. However, I’ve discovered that writing about feelings is an impossible task for me. It’s like trying to describe the rustling of a leaf in a windstorm. I found myself buffeted by so many disparate emotions and memories that I couldn’t string them together into a coherent narrative. My first try was a disjointed disaster, that hung on the delicate limbs of three scenes: hearing the Beatles song, “When I’m Sixty-four,” on my first trip to Big Sur as a freshman in college; disbelieving the news that my father had died; and marveling at the physical and motor developments of my 10-month old granddaughter, Sarah Kathleen. Thinking about it now, I realize that instead of writing an essay, I should have encapsulated those images into a poetic collage of some kind. Instead, I gave up and I put away my first draft. The story didn’t work – it was too fragmented with nonsensical feelings about growing up, getting old, and dying.

Oddly enough, all that changed when Kathy handed me a copy of Bishop George’s latest pastoral letter to his congregation, in which he reflected on his recent heart surgery. I’ve mentioned George in my blog before, and how one of his sermons helped reframe my perspective on Christ’s radical message of love and service while viewing the murals of San Francisco (see Murals of San Francisco). This serendipitous letter now gave me a vehicle to understand what I was struggling to express in my essay, and how to resolve it. George began by stating a rarely enunciated article of our religious faith: “that God’s grace is present for us in every moment, and in every circumstance, no matter how difficult or challenging or painful the moment is.” This is our belief as Catholics, he wrote, but in the moment itself, we can feel too afraid, confused, or distracted to make sense of how God is present to us, and acting in our lives. This is when God gets our attention by something someone says to us, or something we read. George’s moment of clarity came when he read and reflected on John Donne’s poem, “Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness”:

Once I am coming to that holy room
Where, with Thy choir of saints evermore,
I shall be made music; as I come
To tune the instrument here at the door,
And what I must do then, think here before.

George found in this poem a lovely metaphor of how to connect our life here on earth with eternity with God. Our life here was a practice session, a rehearsal, and we prepared for eternal life by living the life of Christ here and now. “I realized”, he wrote, “that the rest of my life, long or short, is for tuning and thinking, and, of course, daily practice and rehearsal.”

I first heard the song, When I’m Sixty-four, in the Spring of 1967, when my high school friends, Wayne, Jim, Greg and I went camping in Big Sur. Jim kept playing the new Beatles album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, over and over again. Wayne had just bought the new LP, and Jim brought along his portable, battery-operated, record player to play it. The only role Greg and I had in relation to the music was to listen and enjoy. When I’m Sixty-four was an easy song to learn for four college freshmen who had spent their high school years memorizing popular songs from the radio. It had a catchy tune, filled with silly lyrics, and we sang it a lot. It was a funny song really, because the concept of turning sixty-four years of age was the furthest thing from our minds. We were just turning 18 and 19 years old, and our own parents were barely in their early to mid forties at the time. The only really old people we knew were our grandparents, but we never ascribed a numerical age to them - they were just OLD.
“What’s so special about sixty-four?” I remember asking Wayne, during one card playing session. “Wouldn’t sixty-five make more sense,” I speculated, “since it’s the official retirement age?”
“I don’t think the British and American retirement ages are the same,” Wayne replied. “I read somewhere that Paul was 16-years old when he wrote this song, so the number must have significance for him. Maybe it’s as old as he thinks he’ll live. It might be like flying through the sound barrier. You know how people believed that there was a maximum, threshold speed, limiting man’s ability to fly faster than sound - only in this case it’s about getting old.”
And that’s how the number sixty-four became a sort of age barrier for me.

In many ways that Spring Break trip to Big Sur was a breakthrough event for me. It was our first, solo, travel adventure without the advice, assistance, or supervision of parents. We planned, organized, and paid for it ourselves. We rented the tents, borrowed the sleeping bags, and itemized the fuel, resources, and food we would need for a 5-day driving and camping trip to Big Sur, and the areas around it. This was the seminal experience that taught us that improvisation, humor, and accommodation was necessary for harmony on the road, and the keys to a great adventure. You see, in many ways the trip was a series of disasters that, somehow, resulted in marvelous experiences (and memories): we missed the San Luis Obispo turn-off to Highway 1; had a tire blow out near King City; took too much time traveling through Monterey; and arrived too late to reserve a site at the Big Sur Campgrounds for that day. We spent our first night trying to sleep near the highway, with the sounds of the wilderness and the Big Sur River rushing in our ears. The following morning, the park rangers told us that the only campsites available required our changing locations after two days. Yet these inconveniences proved providential, because they allowed us to explore the entire park, and introduced us to two very different sets of campers. Our first neighbors were two nurses from Long Beach who invited us over that night for cheese, crackers, and wine. Suddenly, four long-time friends were pretending to be sophisticated players, competing for the attention and affections of two older women. That night I had my first drink of Red Mountain wine, went on a late night run to a liquor store for more, and fell asleep clutching a boulder outside the tent as if it were a lifebuoy in a turbulent sea of dizziness and nausea. It was an occasion I will never forget, although many of the details are hazy. Our second campsite was across the road from a family with two beautiful high school girls, whose parents thought we were four innocent, clean-cut college boys. We visited their family campsite often and were allowed us to escort the girls to the camp bonfires hosted by the park rangers. We used the mornings and afternoons for exploration, and visited the nearby towns and sights of Carmel, Carmel Valley, Monterey, Cannery Row, and Nepenthe, a café and bookstore south of Big Sur. Four years later, after three heart attacks and a deteriorating angina condition, my father died at 50 years of age.

For many years I rejected Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ contention, in her book, On Death and Dying, that, “…in our unconscious, death is never possible in regard to ourselves. It is inconceivable for our unconscious to imagine an actual ending of our own life here on earth…” I was convinced that my father’s death had forced me to accept my own mortality, and that I wouldn’t live past 50. But it wasn’t death I was recognizing – it was the lack of a modeled life past 50. My dad’s death had planted the seeds of a tall, thick, and impenetrable hedge that I couldn’t see over. I couldn’t see myself living past middle age, but I never actually accepted death as natural or inevitable, even my father’s. In fact, I felt his death was an injustice! It wasn’t right for a father to die at 50, with a son still in grade school, and another in kindergarten. I was angry at the unfairness of his death. I was also angry with my father for dying, and with his doctors for not preventing it. Strangely, I never blamed God, and maintained a benign and ambivalent relationship with Him. I couldn’t believe that God had judged, sentenced, and executed my father to death by heart attack. I suppose I still held a childish image of God. He was some Santa Claus-like figure, rewarding good and punishing evil – only He wore flowing, white robes and lived in heaven, instead of a red suit at the North Pole. Actually, it was my friends, and the practitioners of Christian principles who provided the solace I needed after my father’s death. Soon after my speedy discharge from the Air Force, I began working at St. Bernard High School as a history teacher. In this Catholic environment, I was surrounded by men and women, religious and lay, who lived the tenants of Jesus Christ to love our neighbors as ourselves, and worked toward social justice. While going to Sunday Mass was a haphazard proposition with me in those days, I was faithfully accompanying and supporting the priests and nuns who worked on behalf of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union and their boycott against grapes. Eventually two nuns from that school would introduce me to Kathleen Mavourneen, my future wife (see You Look Wonderful Tonight), and initiated a sequence of events that would lead to the birth of a granddaughter named Sarah Kathleen.

I didn’t die when I turned fifty, in 1997. Instead, I was the principal of Shangri-la MS, in the midst of my own “dark night of the soul”. The insubordinate actions of a handful of teachers and staff members, with the support of a cadre of parents, had undermined my personal and professional confidence as a school principal and precipitated a full blown clinical depression. This was the darkest time of my life, which paradoxically, led to the most insightful revelations about my relationships with God, my family, friends, and career. God ceased being a remote Olympian figure and became a tender friend, a comforter, and a father.

In April of that year, I dreaded going to school. Every day promised a new catastrophe, a new crisis, or another emotional scene of defiance and confrontation with one of the opposing staff members or their minions. I could only compare my feelings to the “battle fatigue” that bomber crews experienced during World War II after countless missions over flak infested skies where they were sitting ducks for enemy fighter pilots and anti-aircraft guns. Yet, even at that point, I hadn’t hit the depth of my despair. It was not until the first Friday of the month that I realized how broken I was. I was driving home when the aftermath of the week caught up with me. The week was the same as many others that year, with the usual emotional incidents: the same group of parents going to the Office of the Deputy Superintendent to demand my removal; the coordinator and her community rep again scheduling a meeting with the Cluster Leader to report my unfair treatment of them; and the parent officers of the advisory council demanding my presence at a special meeting to answer their questions. These highlights flashed through my mind, and when I arrived home, I just sat in the car, without moving, for about 30 minutes. I felt shell-shocked and depressed. I was comatose – just sitting there, gulping deep breaths, closing my eyes, and then opening them to stare off, vacantly, into space. I’d spent the day dealing with emotional personnel and angry administrative interactions that had drained me. I was paralyzed and unable to think or make decisions. I felt helpless and overwhelmed by these never-ending problems and the constant realization that they were being taken “over my head” and delivered directly to my superiors. Feelings of failure and inadequacy welled up like a giant, black wave, and then came crashing down over me. I only had one wish – I wanted to feel whole and competent again. I wished I could once again act with confidence instead of reacting with doubts, fears, and uncertainty. That evening Kathy finally stepped in and, by telling me what she was observing in my actions and behaviors, put a mirror to my face and let me see for myself what I had become in the course of the year. I wasn’t sleeping through the night, awakening daily at 2:00 or 3:00 A.M. and not being able to return; I was experiencing gripping aches and pains in my back, neck and chest; I was coming down with constant colds and coughs; I had stopped jogging and exercising, replacing a healthy routine with daily cocktails at 6 o’clock, and drinking wine with dinner; I had developed an uncontrollable and annoying twitch in my upper eyelid; my handwriting had deteriorated so badly that my secretary could no longer decipher it; and I was always so sad, that not even my daughter, Prisa’s animated talk after her high school basketball games could cheer me. Kathy told me that she loved me, and would do anything to help, but if I could not recognize the symptoms for myself there was no hope. I was stunned, but not blind. I called Employee Assistance the next day, and scheduled a psychiatric assessment the following week. The psychiatrist confirmed what Kathy already knew and I suspected; I was clinically depressed, and had been for a long time. What surprised me most was my quick consent in accepting medication and therapy; a lifetime of stoic bravado, machismo, and hubris melted in seconds before my desire to be ME again – the intrepid, curious, and humorous man who found his job interesting and wanted to be happy as a father and a principal.

Looking back now, at my years at Shangri-la MS, I would call them the most satisfying and successful periods of my life. I fell in love with the school and its community, and learned how to be a leader. I learned from the people I worked and lived with by letting them help me and influence me. They all gave me challenges, insights, and behaviors that I incorporated into my new attitudes and actions. I let go of the illusion of the all-controlling and all-responsible principal and man, and focused on my immediate interactions with people. I concentrated on doing the right things (being fair, honest, and caring), or nothing. Freedom from this illusion allowed me the option of doing nothing, and letting other people, or other forces come into play. I recognized that something, or someone greater was in control, and I earnestly began a journey to seek, love, and serve God. By the end of my 50^th year, I knew everything would work out fine. God was in charge, and I knew He would make things right. All I needed to do was concentrate on the essential interactions of life, following the teachings of Christ, and leaving the grand strategy and future to God.

I turned sixty-four on Thursday, September 22, 2011, and I spent it babysitting my granddaughter, Sarah Kathleen. On that day, she was 10 months old, 50 days shy of her first year birthday. Being with Sarah is the most enjoyable event of my week. I don’t need to prepare, organize, or plan anything – all I do is show up and take care of her (although I must confess I bring my camera along, and take a picture or two, every now and then.) It’s a wonderful job, and I’m always amazed by how quickly she is growing up and the speed of her physical and cognitive development. Development, yuck, what an ugly word to describe what I see happening to my nena chula every week! I sound like a professional educator describing a subject in an experiment. There is a better word I like using in Spanish because it describes what is truly happening to Sarah, its called desarrollar. Desarrollar means, “to unroll, or unfold.” That is what I see in Sarah – the gradual unfolding, or revealing, of all her latent physical, mental, and sensory talents and abilities. She is like a magic spool of golden thread that is unwinding every day – and every inch of that gossamer strand increases her strength, dexterity, intelligence, and grace. She is never the same baby I left the week before. While watching her play on the front lawn, in the sunshine, I see that her hair is thicker and blonder, and her features sharper and more defined. There is always something new to hear or watch her do. At her baptism in May, she couldn’t roll over onto her stomach, now she is crawling and scampering along floors, down hallways and through rooms. She sits unsupported, while trying to connect blocks, and can raise and balance herself into a standing position, holding onto furniture. Instead of simply bouncing in her Einstein Jumper, she now steps around its circumference, using the framework for support. She manages double syllable sounds, such as dadada, mumumu, and bububu, when occupied with a task, such as knocking two toys together, or striking a drum with a stick. She also understands simple commands, such as “no, no,” and “up”, and waves goodbye when visitors leave.

Actually, my babysitting duties, and watching Sarah desarrollar over these last months, has reminded me of the times I was most eager to leave work and get home. The imperative of getting home quickly is my clearest memory of those early family days when Toñito and Prisa were infants. I would hurriedly pack up my briefcase and teaching materials and rush home from school. Sarah has awakened those old sensations associated with seeing, holding, feeding, and playing with my own children before they grew out of infancy. In Toñito’s case, the long drive through Laurel Canyon and along the 101 Freeway from West Hollywood only whet my appetite to see how much he had changed in that day. The longer I drove, the more I wondered if he had smiled, turned his head, grasped an object, talked, or done something completely unexpected. By the time Prisa was born I worked a short 6 miles away along Victory Boulevard at Van Nuys High School, but I still felt the same compulsion to get home and see if I had missed anything in her desarrollo. Every day was a surprise and a wonder.

Near the end of George’s pastoral letter he discovered a hidden dividend about death, in the third line of Donne’s poem: I shall be made Thy music. “We are not going to an eternal concert,” the bishop pointed out, “where we will listen to God’s music, just as we go to an all-Beethoven or greatest Broadway hits concert here. Instead we become one with God’s music, the profound and eternal music of creation, redemption and holiness.” It was this same oneness with God that my siblings and I imagined for our father when we asked that the words, “His spirit touched God and he died”, be inscribed on his headstone. Only now, the musical metaphors that I read in George’s letter and in Donne’s poem sounded better because they could apply to my granddaughter, my father, and myself. I could readily see Sarah as a marvelous new instrument that was steadily revealing her structure and music. I could look back and recognize the arrogant college student and teacher, and humbled principal, who steadily tuned the instrument he had become, and learned to play it better and better. And I imagined my father, on All Saint’s Day, the day he died, pausing at “that holy room” to “think here before,” and for the final time, “tune the instrument here at the door” before going through.

Thank you George, for introducing me to a poem by John Donne that helped me make sense of my essay, and hearing a better way to understand birth, life, and death.