By Edward H. Garcia
I know it’s not necessary, but is there really anything wrong with looking at the tube of toothpaste you’re squeezing in the morning and thinking, “Someday — and it could be any da — I will squeeze a toothpaste tube for the last time”? And the tube, no matter how new, will be thrown away by whoever has the bad luck to have to go through my “stuff” and dispose of it. Maybe that someone will feel sentimental about my hairbrush with the wispy white hairs entwined there, but no one will want to finish off the toothpaste.
Thoughts like that — and I have dozens of them every day — get me criticized for being morbid. I have noticed my wife rolling her eyes when I say things about being a short timer in this life. Even my friend Bill, who also lives comfortably on the slippert side of 70, encouraged me to leave out some of the “depressing” poems and use more love poems in the book we were working on. So I have decided to throw my critics a bone and talk about some of the good things about having turned 70:
1. You get to invent ages that 70 has become the new version of, as in “70 is the new 50.” Not to be negative, but I remember being 50 and 70 is not even close. I’ll give you “70 is the new 68.”
2. You are not going to die young, tragically before your time.
3. You will not be the victim of early onset Alzheimer’s. Dodged that bullet.
4. Fewer people will ask you to help them move. I would have said that no one asks, but my friend Bill recently asked me to help him move some things out of storage.
5. People will generally consider you innocent until proven guilty of all crimes except being old and dotty.
When my grandmother turned about 60, she quit buying “expensive” shoes — expensive would have been her word — the rest of the world would have said “Sears or JC Penney.” Her reason was, she said, “I’m not going to live long enough to get the good out of them.” She lived into her 80’s and wore out dozens of pairs of cheap shoes that practically fell apart on her feet, but I don’t think she was wrong. The obvious moral of her story is to live life to the fullest to the end and not worry about left over toothpaste or shoe leather. But I’m beginning to “get” my grandmother and see a different moral: live life aware that it can be taken at any moment. You don’t have to be depressed about it — she wasn’t — but don’t get cocky and imagine that anything beyond this minute is promised. Unfinished toothpaste tubes are not a problem; unfinished business is something else.
And that’s what it looks like from this side of 70.
