Coffee Harbor

When I'm Sixty Four? 

When “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was released by the Beatles in June of 1967, I had just celebrated my 17^th birthday.   My friends and I loved the album and it became the soundtrack for that summer of ‘67 as well as the soundtrack for my senior year in high school.  Significant music for a significant period of life.

The lyrics for the “Sgt. Pepper” songs were conveniently printed on the back of the LP cover, and my friends and I spent countless hours parsing those lyrics for “meaning”.  We connected easily and intuitively to “(I get by with) A Little Help from My Friends”, “She’s Leaving Home”, and “A Day in the Life”.  Great stuff. 

However, the track “When I’m Sixty Four” seemed a little more remote--like a cute, lightweight ditty—written more for my grandparents’ than for me.  “When I get older?…losing my hair?..”  Relating personally to that was beyond the scope of possibility.  Preposterous!

But now the once ‘preposterous’ has become my ‘new reality’. 

And I’m having a little trouble getting adjusted.

My life of as a carefree teenager has morphed into that of an ‘aging baby boomer’. That transition from the ‘bloom of youth’ to the ‘brink of senior citizenship’ seems to have occurred in the ‘blink of an eye’.  Youthful optimism has given way to dancing around the inevitability of entropy.

I am not feeling sorry for myself.   Just adjusting to the new reality. 

I was blissfully unaware of  ‘personal loss’ for much of my life, as it had not really darkened my doorstep.  But that has changed in the last year and a half and ‘loss’ has apparently figured out where I live.   And I’m coming to grips with the reality that ‘loss’ is an integral part of living.

Of late, my wife has started to condition our future plans with “well, if something were to happen to you”.     Hey, I’m not planning on anything happening to me.   Not for some time, anyway.

I’m still planning on celebrating many more birthdays, anticipate losing (even more) hair…and, many years from now, I hope my sweet wife will still be sending me a valentine, birthday greetings and an occasional bottle of wine, and, most important of all, still needing me…(and still feeding me).