Comments

There are no comments yet. Click here to start the conversation!

STORY TOOLS

• E-mail story
• Printer friendly

More Knoxville Magazine - June/July 2009

• From the editor: June issue of Knoxville Magazine
• UT football coach Lane Kiffin and his family get settled in Knoxville
• Luxury Inn Blackberry Farm gets back to its roots

Share and Enjoy

I recently endured a significant birthday, and it's gotten me wondering about some things. I hear some consolation, once a week or so, that 50 is the new 40. There's an assumption that we're living longer. Maybe we are, a little bit.

In the last half-century, the average life expectancy has risen by about eight years. But a lot of that reflects huge improvements in safety (seatbelts? standard?), a decline in childhood mortality due to diseases like polio, and the de-glamorization of smoking. It doesn't necessarily mean that people who've made it to middle age get an extra eight years just for breathing modern air.

If you'd asked folks in ancient Greece or Rome what the average life expectancy was, they'd have said 70 or 80. As in ancient Judea, where the psalmist remarked that the years of man are "threescore and ten or . . . fourscore."

That's about what doctors tell us today: 70, 80 if you're lucky. The bigger difference, and the reason that 50 seems like the new 40, is that we've decided it's okay for folks over 50 to wear shorts. I'm not sure 50 could be the new 40 anyway unless, at 40, you received your AARP card. That's what happens at 50, and that may be the birthday's biggest shock.

I'm not sure what to make of that organization. The AARP's magazine goes out of its way to include vigorous, young-seeming people. Alec Baldwin, Howie Mandell, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Prince. Their main purpose seems to be that people of 50 and older are still active - and not Retired.

But still there's that damnable R in their name. R stands for "Retired." And "Retired" can mean either of only two things. One is that you've made so much money you can now relax and travel or golf or work on your Harley Davidson collection. That doesn't describe my 50ish situation.

The other thing "Retired" means is the involuntary kind: meaning you're too old to do your job. I hope I'm not ready to join an organization with that particular R in its title, regardless of discounts.

Actually, I'm not convinced that in previous eras, 50 was considered to be quite as old as it seems today. Look at old movies, especially those made before about 1950. Old characters are more common in black-and-white movies than modern ones. Characters played by Lionel Barrymore or C. Aubrey Smith or Walter Huston. They're smart, they're having fun, sometimes they're wise, sometimes they're evil, but they're involved in mainstream life. And not just buffoons preoccupied with sexual inadequacy.

In old newspapers from 50 or 100 years ago, it can startle you how often old folks appear in advertising, even for commodities that aren't just for old folks, like beer. The message of an old man with a white mustache quaffing a pint of porter was, of course, that he'd been in quite a few saloons in his day and knew a good beer when he tasted it. What happened to him?

That's Madison Avenue. It may be more significant that before the mid-20th century, few 50-year-olds would countenance the word "retired" attached to their names. When George Washington turned 50, he was a well-known soldier who had just successfully concluded a rebellion; he had not yet gotten around to helping found a country. The Constitutional Convention and his presidency were years in the future.

When Andrew Jackson turned 50, he was an ex-soldier and ex-senator and failed presidential candidate, still waiting, with some impatience, for the Jacksonian Era to get going. And think about Ben Franklin, one of the New Republic's most influential patriots, for which he would earn an iconic statue in Philadelphia and a spot on the $100 bill. But when he turned 50, in 1756, Ben Franklin wasn't a national hero. He wasn't even on the national-hero career path.

At 50, Franklin was an interesting and useful guy, known for his cute aphorisms, for his innovations in fire safety and the colonial postal system, and for his interesting but then-impractical experiments with electricity, but he was still a happy and loyal British subject. In fact, he was about to leave America for London, a city he loved and where he'd stay for the next 18 years. Well into his 50s, he began to have doubts about his allegiances. In his late 60s, he became a revolutionary. But what if, on his 50th birthday, Ben Franklin had gotten his AARP card?

And what if his wife, Deborah, had spotted it and said, "You know, Ben, you're not getting any younger, and we've saved a whole lot of pennies. Why don't we just retire to the country and spend our days playing Whist?" We would never have heard of Ben Franklin the organizer and signer of the Declaration of Independence; or Ben Franklin the persuasive ambassador to France, America's crucial wartime ally; or Ben Franklin the co-framer of the U.S. Constitution. There's a chance we wouldn't have heard of the United States of America.

For him, I think, 70 was the new 30. But at least we can wear shorts now. That's more than Ben Franklin could say.