Reviewing seven decades of life, it’s still fun

I am writing on my birthday. In fact, Nancy and I are both having our 72nd birthdays today. Actually, I guess by the time you are reading this it will have been a week ago that we turned 72. The passing of time is a strange thing. Sometimes time seems to creep along; other times it flashes by in a hurry.

When you are young and wishing you were older, it seems to take forever to get to that next birthday. When you are getting older and wishing the passing years would slow down, it seems like each year just rushes by. I’m stunned that 2011 is already over and done. It seems to me it only began a short while ago. But, if you look back over all the things that took place in 2011, it was a very full year, and I guess it passed in the usual amount of time.

When I was a boy of 5, I remember how old the old people seemed to me when they were 72 years old. That was way older than my Grandpa and Grandma Nichols. In 1945, Grandpa and Grandma were in their early

Columnist 60s and to me they seemed pretty old. At that time, the oldest people I knew were Mr. and Mrs. Coleman, who attended church with us. The Colemans lived near the west end of today’s Green Street. They would have been about 72 years old then, and to me they were really old, as old as I could imagine. In those days it was really something if a person lived to be 90 and to reach 100, as a very few did, was almost incredible! I recall that the Rev. Wade Sikes, one of the old Benton County Civil War veterans, lived to preach a sermon when he was 100 years old. But that was really a rare thing in those days.

When I was 5 years old, one of the most popular comedians of the time on stage and on radio was Jack Benny. Mr. Benny was 39 years old. Of course he had already had his 39th birthday several times. Every year Mr. Benny celebrated his 39th birthday. But while Jack Benny was trying to put the brakes on getting older, I was wishing at the time that I could get older quicker. I couldn’t wait to be a big boy, and I could hardly wait to get big enough to drive a car and a truck and a school bus.

We have several ways that we categorize the stages of our lives. Commonly we think of infancy, childhood, teen years, young adult, middle adult and older adult. I’m thinking there are three stages in life.

First, there is the stage in which we wish we could get older quicker. Growing up seems to take forever. The school years feel almost like 50 years in passing.

Then, secondly, there is the stage in which we try to hold onto the age we are. Those are usually the 20 something years, during which we are hoping that we can live 100 years, but still stay like 20 something all our lives.

Thirdly, there is the stage when we can no longer pre- tend that we are young anymore, but we are trying to stay younger than our years say we are.

Although, once in a while I wish I could go back and relive some part of my earlier years, I am actually pretty happy and content to be 72. In many ways, I like living year by year with the experience of my previous years behind me. A few of those earlier times I would not want to live through again. Some years I’d rather just remember, and be glad that I don’t have to go through them again. And, after all, if I weren’t turning 72 now, I wouldn’t be here, and I’d rather not go to the grave any sooner than necessary.

I have resolved to stay active, to eat healthy food and to do some things to stay as young as I can, but I have also resolved not to do the artificial things to try to keep from looking old. My hair has been gray and white ever since I was 45, and I resolve not to dye it. I used to have a full head of dark, curly hair. Over the years, my hair keeps getting a little thinner and a little thinner. But I am not going to try to transplant a new crop up there. I have long heard that a good man comes out on top. So if more and more of the top of my head keeps showing out, so be it.

When I was in the eighth grade, Mr. B.J. Wagner was our teacher. One day, as he often did, Mr. Wagner asked the class a question. It was to make us all think, even though he actually directed the question to me. “Jerry, do you think kids have more fun, or do older people have more fun?” My answer then was, “Kids.” He went on to tell how he was having more fun as an older person than he ever did as a kid. As I get a little older every year, I think I understand now what he meant.