Time, Flying

“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”
- (a Paraprosdokian favored by retired genetics teachers)

“Ve get too soon oldt und too late schmardt.”
- Said to be a “Pennsylvania Dutch” proverb

(5/2108) Did someone say time flies? April is slipping away… the fourth month of 2018… and what still seems to me like a brand new year is actually one-third gone. And to make it worse, in a couple of weeks I will reach another birthday. It’s an odd feeling, and I don’t seem to get much help from my peers in coping with it. For one thing, every time I turn around, there are fewer of them left. A few seem proud of it, in a strange way; they appear to enjoy exaggerating and bragging about how old they are. I almost caught myself doing that; instead of saying I would be 85, I was going to try to make myself sound more venerable by saying I had reached the mid-point of my ninth decade.

Some folks seem not to remember their age, but whether they forgot about it on purpose isn’t clear. In the case of the great rag-time pianist, Eubie Blake, someone made a mistake in his age on the cover of one of his early recordings, and he never bothered to correct it. Years later, when he really was only 94 some friends planned a big party for his hundredth birthday, but he got pneumonia and died just a few days before it; and the papers said he was 100. A few years later someone discovered the error, but it never was clear whether Eubie had really forgotten or if he was just going along with the idea of a good party. When I hear one of his recordings, it’s easy to imagine that somewhere in the background I can hear him chuckling about it.

Things like that used to be easier to get away with. When I was in college, some textbooks still told stories of villages in places like Kazakhstan or the Andes Mountains where there were said to be many individuals over 150 years old; but as methods of checking such claims improved, it turned out that such ages could not be verified. Baptismal records were commonly cited as evidence, but when checked carefully they usually turned out to belong to a grandparent with the same name as the proposed sesquicentennarian. Even now you can occasionally find Internet references to such individuals; I just found a picture of an Indonesian man named Mhab Ghoto, who recently died at a reported but unverified age of 146. He was said to be a heavy smoker who had outlived four wives (both circumstances which raise suspicions). Anyhow, the oldest verified age was reached by a French woman, Jeanne Calmet, who was 122 when she died in 1997.

In 1933, when I was born the average life expectancy was about 61 years. Thanks to a lot of things… improved diet and health care, good heredity, and simple good luck, I have now surpassed that by nearly a quarter of a century. It is not possible to say how much longer I will last… I could make it to 100, like Aunt Ruth, or I might not finish typing this sentence. But the actuarial tables say three of every four men who reach my age will live another three years, while only one in four will survive another ten years. Life expectancy is a tricky thing to calculate, because it keeps changing all the time.

For example, when my Dad was born in 1902, his expected life span was 49.7 years. The corresponding number for his brother, born two years later, was a year less because there was an epidemic of typhoid fever going on. Things like that were more common in those days before antibiotics; and now, as the world becomes more crowded, there are indications that life expectancy may begin to drop, even in developed countries. As our national wealth becomes more concentrated in the hands of the wealthy class, we see nutritional standards dropping and the distribution of health care becoming less uniform for the average person. Worse yet, over-use of antibiotics is increasing the development of resistance among the agents that cause disease. While this predicts problems for developed countries like ours, it foretells absolute disaster for places like Africa, now facing increasing risk of famine because of climate change, and India, which will soon surpass China as the most populous country on earth.

One of the things you tend to think about at this age is how your brain can think about yourself when it’s your brain that is doing the thinking. In a way, it’s actually scary; if our brains can think about themselves, could we make a computer that could think about itself? And if we did, would it be able to stop us from doing really dumb things? And if it could do that, what would prevent it from taking control of us? It used to be that this happened only in science fiction, but people are now seriously concerned about it. One of the comforting things at my age is that I don’t have to worry about it happening to me… but for my grandchildren, two of whom are working in computer science, it could happen in their lifetimes.

The brain of a newborn child is not quite a blank slate. It has flexibility built into it, but it is also pre-programmed with many patterns of behavior that enabled our ancestors to survive. If you know a bit of genealogy and can also remember your childhood, you begin to understand how you got to be the way you are at 85. In my case, because of the profession I chose I had to spend more years learning facts than many of my contemporaries; it didn’t make me any smarter than they are, but it made me think differently.

My basic values were formed early; my family and the people they introduced me to taught me to tell the truth and to be honest in dealing with others. They taught me the rudiments of distinguishing between fact and fiction; it was OK to make up stories for fun, and there was an art to telling preposterous tales with a straight face like Grandpa did when I sat on his lap, but do not do that when dealing with serious topics. By the time I was in school, I understood that George Washington may or may not have cut down that cherry tree, but “I cannot tell a lie” is an important lesson. Having this attitude, living in the political climate we have now is stressful.

One way or another, we all cope. Every now and then, I read a poem by A. E. Housman that helps understand both myself and my children:

“When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.”
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
“The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
’Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.”
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.

And if that doesn’t help, there is always Psalm 90. It is presented as “A psalm of Moses,” but I suspect it was really written by Solomon in his later years; scholars estimate that he may have lived to about 80, and judged by the way time flies, that was a lot longer then than it is now:

“The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away…. So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”

Let’s hope.