On Reaching Social Security Age

It is official. I reach Social Security age tomorrow. Perhaps that explains why buzzards are circling my house.

All my life I watched people shake their heads whenever anyone reached 62 as if to say, “What a pity. Can’t believe a single word they say anymore.”

So, everyone just help me find my chair in the corner. I’ll go there and try to be merely ornamental, like the proverbial potted plant.

Actually, I never thought I would have any wits left at this point.

One day while remembering my forebears, it occurred to me that my grandparents were in their 50s when I was born. The thought was not entirely a pleasant one. You see, I was deep into my 50s when this idea first popped unbidden into my head.

And my boyish memories of my grandparents were of people so ancient that Old Testament patriarchs must have been spry in comparison.

Do I now look that old to a child of five?

Lord help me if I do. I have vivid memories of squirming out of reach in my jammies when my mother pushed me toward a primordial relative who at some point in life must surely have fought off a tyrannosaur or two.

Intimations of mortality creep up that way. So it seems as I start my 63rd year.

But I am not ungrateful.

I can never forget standing at my father’s hospital bed as he died at age 49. Or of saying goodbye to my best friend from high school as he succumbed to cancer in his 50th year. Or of uncles and aunts, friends and classmates who seemed like permanent fixtures in the world, until they were gone.

An old saying goes something like this: Death is the end only if you assume the story is about you and no one else.

So maybe the years I still have ahead are just my share of the burden and the privilege already borne by family and friends who came before, and that others will carry on in times still to come.

But that’s just another way of saying that all our lives are intertwined, that life itself continues no matter what happens to any one of us.

I will remember that as I read up about Social Security and watch those annoying birds circle in the sky.