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“Golden Years” is what they call this time in my life. I sure don’t understand where, or who came up with that name. I know David Bowie sang a song about it*. I liked the song but never really understood how it related to me.
I’m also not sure if your Golden Years start when you go on Medicare at 65 or when you retire at 67. At any rate, mine started with colon cancer at 64. I turned 65 the following January the 3rd and Medicare paid for my last chemo. We were lucky; my wife, Janie, who worked for cancer doctors, had very good insurance. So, along with my life insurance, I had a cancer policy that covered everything.
No one ever walks away from cancer without paying a price. You live with the knowledge that it can come back at any time. Plus, the chemo damages your body in many different ways. The upside is, you’re alive.
I worked until I was 67, because I’m two years older than my wife and I was waiting for her to enter her Golden Years. In 2012, we moved to Costa Rica. I thought I had found my Golden Years indeed. We were there for four of those years and loved it. Janie got sick and we had to move back to the States, and that ended our short-lived Golden Years.
We made it back to the States in time to see the American people lose their collective minds and turn over the top seat of government to a moron. I watched on TV as gray-haired men and women carried signs and shouted praises for this waste of human flesh. This must have been their Golden Years – they sure seemed happy.
While people are dying by the hundreds in this COVID-19, his supporters are willing to pack their churches to sing praises to a man they have made into the image of their God, virus be damned. While they empty store shelves and their kids pack the beaches, I, along with many, many others, are huddled inside our houses without toilet paper. (I do have TP, actually; I bought it before the shit hit the fan.)
This pandemic has brought home the folly of mankind. It may very well be the last warning we get. I’m hoping that, as the experts say, “Come the hot weather, the virus will slow.” If it does slow, we will have the chance to save ourselves – if we can find the will to do so.
I guess I have lived too long already, because all I can picture is Trump announcing that it’s over and he has saved the day. His people will throw open their doors and flood the beaches, parks, stores, and restaurants, thanking God for such a great leader.
But come another winter, the virus will come back, and it’ll be bigger and stronger. It will kill thousands in a day. Stopping it then will be impossible if we don’t stop it now.
I guess the people who reached their Golden Years back during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic felt as I do: it’s very hard to look upon such times as being Golden Years.
If a better man were in the White House, one who had more character than this President, I believe we would be able to survive this pandemic. But when the desire to be re-elected is the paramount driving force behind his actions, what hope is there? We can only pray he has a come-to-Jesus moment before we lose half of our people to this virus.
Be safe and enjoy these Golden Years!
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| Copyright © 2020 by Ed Rogers |
I’m not so sure about the term “Golden Years” either. I certainly don’t think of the years I’m living now – or the same years that my father and my mother lived – as our “Golden Years.” What’s supposed to be “golden” about them, anyway?
ReplyDeleteI guess I could look it up....Huh? What do you know, Merriam-Webster even has a definition for the phrase: “the advanced years in a lifetime.” So, “golden” is some sort of synonym for “advanced”? If I say a mango or a banana is in an “advanced” stage, I’d likely mean it was over-ripe, and I’d better eat it today or throw it out tomorrow.
Throw it out! That’s it! We in our “Golden Years” are ripe to be thrown out....
Ed, a wonderful and thought-provoking piece, as usual. Years ago, while working on an advertising campaign with some much older co-conspirators, one of them mentioned that the term "golden years" was coined sometime in the 1950s for a retirement community in Arizona. I don't know the facts of that, but I remember he said he wasn't sure what the term was supposed to mean, but maybe it had something to do with tan, cooked golden brown, whatever, because average temperature there was well above 100 degrees EVERY DAY of summer. Anyway, if his story was true, "golden years" was a term created to convince people to buy outrageously over-priced desert property, which means it had its roots in a scam.
ReplyDeleteSo I guess it is no shock that today the term still feels rooted in a scam, much like the popular modern saying "65 is the new 50." People who believe that are delusional: they have either never run, or have never used a stopwatch. When I by some miracle made it to 50, I celebrated by running three miles in 20 minutes, and doing 200 pushups. When I turned 65, I took my five-year-old son to the playground, watched him play two hours until he wore himself out, then barely beat him in a half-mile "race" that re-injured a quad muscle I had originally injured barely beating him in a previous half-mile challenge. I followed both of those "races" with 50 pushups, not 200, because I was still recovering from a triceps I apparently tore roughhousing with said five-year-old.
In my 20s and 30s, I often ran 20 or more miles at a time, and frequently trained with friends who were Navy SEALs. Looking back, those years seem much more golden than my current years, where my daily goal is to conjure some new trick to avoid being run into the dirt by a son who just turned six.
Jesus, to think that anyone could have been attracted to a retirement community named “Golden Years,” which just reeks of hype and glomp and saccharine. But...considering how desperately some humans cling to this or that religion’s promise of a heavenly afterlife, I guess it’s only to be expected that the Golden Years Retirement Community could have sounded like a preview of the glowing eternity they expected to follow it.
DeleteThank you, Paul, by the way, for enumerating some of your physical exercises, which help me by reminding me of some things I can do while the weight machines at the local fitness center are unavailable to me (or to anyone else) - it displays these days the forlorn sign “Currently Closed Until Further Notice.”
For the past several months my son and I have busied ourselves planting and transplanting trees and bushes and doing various other landscaping tasks on the property we are renovating in Virginia. If you want to get plenty of exercise, and maintain maximum social distancing, just pick up a pick and shovel and have at it. I can almost guarantee no one will get anywhere near you if they think there is any possibility you may hand them a pick or a shovel and ask them to start digging.
ReplyDeleteGreat jibe!
DeleteJust remembered a line in a song by Brandon Flowers, lead singer of the music group The Killers, something about the fountain of youth being reduced to a drip: may be the perfect description of old age, but I don't see how anyone but an ad hack could call it golden.
ReplyDelete