My last post was about “aging exuberantly” – making life worth living, no matter your age. 

Here is another take on old age– enjoying the ride. It’s excerpts from Garrison Keillor’s book Serenity at 70, Gaiety at 80: Why You Should Keep on Getting Older

The world belongs to the young, I am only a tourist, and I love being a foreigner in America.

Life is good as your future diminishes; the scarcity makes your days more delicious. Instead of nostalgia I feel the love of right now.

Once I knew about stuff and took a cool ironic view of pop culture and celebrity and now I am completely out of touch. I am off the grid, like the Amish, and I feel lighter for it. I have put away the clock and now I enjoy the time.

I was a big shot once and journalists wanted to interview me, which was fun, but nobody is that interesting for long and it’s a comfort to become a tourist in old age, a sot of weightlessness, and enjoy my irrelevance.  People resist vaccination mandates as the rate of infection increases – not my problem. Freighters wait to unload at ports, docks are piled with containers, supplies are running, projects are delayed—not my problem.  All over groups are pledging to challenge patterns of discrimination and privilege, and oppression and colonization and exercise a morality of inclusion and diversity.. “Goody goody gumdrops” though it is not my problem.  I am no longer from here.

We reach old age through sheer good luck. We have the benefits of drugs unavailable to our grandparents and things surgeons do to our heart, knees, hips.  We avoided drowning and falling in with people whose hobby was opiates.  My cousin drowned at 17; and a dear friend at 43. 

The first step to a good old age is gratitude.

Well-to-do, middle-class, broke,
Whether you doze or are woke’
If you’re alive’
At sixty-five
Remember this, Jack
There’s no turning back
You’ve joined us elderly folk
And you won’t get out till you croak. 
So take sheer delight 
In today and tonight 
Though you are early baroque .
Delight in the days,
Let each one amaze.
Life is a pig in a poke.
The music, the talk,
The afternoon walk,
Every ding of the clock at the stroke.
Thank God for each breath
And remember that death 
Is the punchline of the whole joke.

I look at the newspaper, but only briefly and if the headline is More Of The Same, I read no further. The anguish of pundits is of no use to me whatsoever. I am an old man in love.  This is the natural state of things: anguish is for your thirties, not your seventies

An old man takes pleasure from the ordinary.  Twenty years ago I took my little girl to visit my dad as he lay dying at home in the downstairs bedroom that had been my room when I was 17 and declaring independence, smoking Pall Malls, reading Hemingway and Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, leaving the books out where he could see them.  She was three and he was delighted to see her.  He moved his foot under he blanket and she reached for it and he moved it away and she grabbed again and missed and again and again, and then she got him in hand, which delighted her.  They played toe tag for 10 or 15 minutes.  He was 88.  He and I were not capable of reconciliation, but less is more when you are 88 and I had given him one more granddaughter and it was enough.

Old age is a heroic role you’ve been preparing for decades and now comes the easy part: walking tall, exemplifying wisdom and maturity while maintaining humility and retaining the right to freedom of expression and that includes talking to yourself, and despite your eccentricities and crochets, being beloved. Belovedness is the point of it all. Why would you want anything else.?

Keillor puts out 23 rules. He calls them suggestions for achieving and keeping belovedness.  Rule 12 is the best:.

Rule 12 :  Don’t fight with younger people, even if you are right, which you probably are .  When they say outrageous thigs, say “That’s very interesting, I’ll have to think about it.  These people will be writing your obituary, and why give them an excuse to put “contentious” or “embittered” in there or accusations of misogyny or cultural appropriation or lack of inclusivity. If you enjoy dispute, go after your elders.

Rule 13 isn’t bad either:

Get out of the way You’re old and slow, don’t be an obstacle. We are visitors so let us get out of their way. Our shift is over.

Every year I pass the date
When my balloon shall deflate.
My mom entered heaven
At age ninety-seven,
And I aim to reach ninety-eight.
But if the shadows should fall
Tomorrow, and I get the call,
I hope to have time
To speak one last line: 
”Thank you, Lord.  Thanks for it all.”