On turning 63

I turned 63 yesterday, March 6 (which is also Michelangelo’s birthday, and the day the Alamo fell).

It was one of those “tagged” birthdays. On the day I turned 50, I felt the cool, unmistakable breeze of mortality on my neck. On the day I turned 60, I looked in the mirror and said, “Too late to plant any more trees.”

Yesterday, at 63, I looked in the mirror and said: how could all this change have happened in so short a time? I was assisted by a studio portrait of me that my wife has hung in the bathroom next to the vanity. In the photo, I am about four years old, wearing a white long-sleeved shirt, shorts, striped socks and brown, lace-up shoes. “Buster Brown shoes,” we called them.

I looked at him on the wall, and at myself in the mirror, and felt that the time between us was so very short. “Fifty-nine years,” I said. I could still see the world through his eyes. Outside the photo studio was parked a big black sedan with rounded fenders, running boards, and a cavernous back seat. We would drive home in that car, where before dinner I would listen to “Sky King” on the radio. Driving home, we would cross South 1st Street, which was also U.S. Highway 80, as it passed through town on its way from San Diego in the west to Savannah in the east, two-lane, all of it, and passing through towns and cities large and small, just like mine. On that highway, a traveler could proceed only as fast as the slowest truck or bus, and stop at all the stoplights in the towns every 50 miles or so.

Only fifty-nine years between us, yet in worlds so different. He lived on another planet. He had no idea what television was. His big media event was “Sky King” on the radio. At home, when she wanted groceries delivered, his grandmother called Baldwin’s Grocery on a heavy black dial phone in the dining room. Our telephone number was 7973. Four digits! How did we get from four digits to Google in only 59 years? When did all this stuff happen? There has just not been enough time.