Age Tax

April 26th, 2004

This morning I happened to think of John Trumbore. John was my favorite Hellertown character. A one time council man, he claimed that he had been banned from Borough Hall. When I wrote a column for The Valley Voice, John was the source of many wonderful political tidbits. And he endeared himself to me by using every opportunity to stick pins in former Borough Manager Jim Sigworth who well deserved to be a pincushion.

John died a few years ago. He was not a close friend but I liked him a lot. Unfortunately, I did not learn that he had passed away until some months so I did not attend his funeral.

Now a very close friend of mine, Ellen Buzbee, is within days of death. I have known her and her husband for forty-five years. The pain of her passing will be terrible, although a relief from a long illness which has tortured her.

My 97-year-old friend, Norman Corwin, once said on the occasion of the passing of our mutual agent, that the loss of friends is the tax we pay for growing older. It is a very hard tax to pay. It severely depletes our capital of people we love. Hopefully we will find new people to love, and I do from time to time, but the ones who have been with us the longest are the most valuable.

In the depression that follows a fresh loss, one inevitably wonders, why them and not me? There is no virtue of mine that I think is being rewarded or fault in them that is being punished. For example, it would certainly be hard to find a woman who lived a more exemplary and useful life then Ellen. The answer, no doubt, lies in some mixture of luck and heredity. My father died at 92 still as rational as if ever was, which, in his case, is a limited endorsement. If I live to be his age I will probably have as many people dislike me as disliked him. Old age has that tax too.

There are two other problems of aging, assuming one retains one’s health. The first is the loss of influence. Our society does not venerate age, nor, I think, should it. One might venerate accomplishment. Getting older does not make a stupid man wise, nor a wise man stupid. I would certainly argue that the older wise man, if he be flexible, is wiser still by reason of his experience.

By influence I also mean that one loses ones ability to make a living or to be useful in other ways. The “old boy” network that supported you in middle years either no longer exists or itself has lost influence. Therefor, the contacts one use to rely on to make a living or move mountains are no longer there. This loss of usefulness is especially telling and accounts for why hoary heads like mine fight for the opportunity to serve the community.

The second problem of aging is, strange to say, the loss of youth. An older person may well think the way he thought when he was younger. He may still like to look at the girls in their summer dresses, but no matter how successful a roue’ he was in the past, he has to realize that his chances of success are somewhere between slim and none. He may see himself as the athletic star he once thought himself yet has to know that the first time he is tackled he will be out for the season. He may still have the desire to conquer the same worlds he had when he was twenty-one yet . . .

The age tax is worth paying, I suppose, when it is accompanied by curiosity. When I think of friends long gone I think that they have missed the victory in World War II, My Fair Lady, the thrill of the Kennedy Administration, and so on. They have also missed the horrible events of our time. I am happy I have missed none of them. The bad things were painful indeed. The good made them worth having.

There is a line from a poem by A.E. Haussmann that explains why I have two scotches a night.

“Malt does more than Milton can,
To justify God’s ways towards man.”