As Yet Another Milestone Whizzes Past!

This is being written on the 29,220th day of my existence on a wobbling, troubled and self-destructive planet.

According to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which keeps track of such matters for me, a singular event in my life will be passed today: My heart will beat for the 3.4 trillionth time.

This excludes occasions on which it stopped, for example, during sneezes, or galloped wildly at times of stress or extreme joie de vivre.
 
In other words, I am celebrating my 80th birthday today, an event made celebratory by the inconvenient wont of my male siblings and antecedents of croaking before their fiftieth year.

This unexpected longevity can be attributed in large part to Firstwife, who nags me into regular exercise, keeps my eating and drinking habits under constant fire and stuffs me with more vitamins than a world-class athlete.

I have, remarkably, lived through approximately 35% of the entire history of the USA, including two world conflicts, the Great Depression and the onset of modern music.

On Saturday, September 18, 1926, the Yankees were in first place in the American League, a hurricane hit Miami, the League of Nations was engaged in a do-nothing General Session, and some European guy won the US Open Tennis Tournament (so, nu?).

I was born on that day in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, the site of a famous amusement park at which band concerts were sometimes conducted personally by John Philip Souza and attended by your humble scribe. (How's THAT for name-dropping?)

The average age of other boys born then is deceased and I am more than slightly pleased to have beaten that particular rap.

I am a contemporary of talking pictures, Prohibition, Mickey Mouse and Ford's Model T, then known as "Tin Lizzie."

I am ten years younger than Walter Cronkite, nearly as old as Bush the Oneth, and a half-century senior to Tiger Woods, who would, regrettably, still have been a caddy at age 30 if we had been contemporaries.
 
How does it feel to be 80? Mostly surprised, both due to the family history cited above and the fact that it sort a-kinda snuck up on me when I wasn't paying attention.

Most of the time, I view my calendar age with disbelief, because events of many decades past seem like entries in yesterday's diary. (Remembering, though, that today is Monday requires intense concentration.)

That ancient face in my bathroom mirror does not even remotely resemble anyone I know and the one on my passport is only vaguely familiar. (N.B. I view myself in full-length mirrors only when fully clothed; doing otherwise would be a frightening experience).

To shine the brightest light on my present situation, most of the time my attitudinal state has little changed since I first learned to drive; although the vessel I presently occupy has fallen victim to physical deterioration, deferred maintenance and functional obsolescence.

Aside: These are terms I learned in a real estate appraisal course, taught by a wise old bird who described all life as "an inexorable march to the junk heap."
 
Although the global community may little note nor long remember it, my life has been an interesting experience, shuttling between the heights of excitement and the depths of clinical depression - now settling at a much more comfortable level of serenity.

Along most of the way, I've been dogged by good luck, highlighted by the acquisition of a life partner who doubles as best friend and outsourced conscience.

I entered the service when World War II was drawing to a close and was spared a first-wave invasion of Japan by the dropping of atomic bombs.
My multiple begats, mostly pacifists by nature, owe their existence to that dark event.

Almost every setback I've encountered turned out to be a growing experience and/or a springboard to unforeseeable benefits in the subsequent future.

I have mixed feelings about growing much older. On the one hand, I see scary scenarios in the world ahead and moments of fear for our great-grandbegats.

I'm somewhat comforted, though, by the clear recollection of my father's absolute certainty, a long, long time ago, that the whole universe was then going to hell in a hand basket.

On that other hand, I'm constantly regenerated by an embedded love of life, inspired by a loving family and gratefully conscious of the fact that if I had been born a horse, I'd already have been dead for at least fifty years.