The plan is working, so far...

 

"Bust of the Collector," by Damien Hirst

      Not to try to find any kind of silver lining in our nation's collective stagger toward totalitarian dictatorship.
      But it does make the always relevant Juvenal even more spot-on.
     Looking around the chaos, decadence and folly of Rome 2,000 years ago, he observed, "it is difficult not to write satire." 
     I feel you, brother.
     Though sometimes the acid-witted Juvenal — born Decimus Iunius Juvenalis — can cut too close to home. Such as today, my 65th birthday. Over the weekend I was poking around his 10th Satire (there are only 16 that survive),  checking its famous "bread and circuses" line. (In my edition, it's "bread and games.")
     I happened upon this:
     "'Give me length of days, give me many years, O Jupiter!' Such is your one and only prayer, in days of strength or of sickness; yet how great, how unceasing are the miseries of long old age!"
      I don't know. My dad is 92. He might not know his children anymore; but he doesn't strike me as miserable. When I ask him if he's happy, he says he is. True, he has no volition, and lacks any interest in anything. Not the usual requisite for happiness. But he doesn't seem to suffer by it. Or even notice. If you ask him how he spent his day, he won't say the sad truth, "Watching television." What he will reply, every time, is, "That's a good question." A good question he can't answer and doesn't try. He lets the matter drop.
    Juvenal continues:
     "Look first at the misshapen and ungainly face, so unlike its former self; see the unsightly hide that serves for skin; see the pendulous cheeks and the wrinkles like those which a matron baboon carves upon her aged jaws ..."
    Big on appearances, the Roman were. And people are. Me, well ... here never having been especially gainly is an asset. Not that far to fall. 
   "The young men differ in various ways: this man is handsomer than that, and he than another; one is far stronger than another: but old men all look alike. Their voices are as shaky as their limbs, their heads without hair their noses driveling as in childhood. Their bread, poor wretches, has to be munched by toothless gums; so offensive do they become to their wives, their children and themselves..."
     Here Juvenal is perhaps led astray by the aged as seen in the crowded streets of Rome circa 95 A.D. No fluoride in their water pitchers. No C3-7 laminosplasties and hip replacements to straighten their posture and steady their gait. Juvenal himself died about age 40.
    "Their sluggish palate takes joy in wine or food no longer and all pleasures of the flesh have been long ago forgotten..."
     Not true. Well, yeah, the wine part is true, though Fre NA winelike liquid is a passable approximation.  And food is holding its own. True, a challah roll will spike my blood sugar. But I had one Sunday. As for that last part, well, umm, not yet forgotten.
     There's more. The old are deaf, unable to enjoy music or the theater — I did have my first audiologist appointment at Costco last week. No hearing aid ... yet. Noise damage in the left ear. All those NU frat parties, standing with a red cup of beer, my head three feet from a throbbing speaker. And I don't go to theater or concerts the way I used to, because that involves conveying myself somewhere, and why bother?
     "The little blood in his now chilly frame is never warm except with fever; diseases of every kind dance around him in a troop."
      Juvenal does seem to have been listening in on recent conversations with friends and family.
     "One suffers in the shoulder, another in the loins, a. third in the hip; another has lost both eyes, and envies those who have one; another takes food into his pallid lips from someone else's fingers."
      Brevity is not Juvenal's strong suit. He goes on, spiraling toward the heart of the matter.
     "But worse than any loss in body is the failing mind which forgets the names of slaves and cannot recognize the face of the old friend who dined with him last night, nor those of the children whom he has begotten and brought up."
     Worse ... for those unafflicted, so far. Though at 65 torturer time has certainly laid out his grim devices and I am paraded past them, like Galileo forced to view the Inquisition's flails and pincers and spikes. Sadly, I don't think renouncing my heresies will get me off the hook.
     Being Juvenal, he dives deeper, and finds worse — he has his tottering old fool disinherit those forgotten children to bequeath his estate to a streetwalker. Don't see that happening in my case; then again, you never do. 

     We eventually get to the crux.

   "He lives in a world of sorrow, he grows old amid continual lamentation and in the garb of woe," and "asks of every friend around him why he has lived so long, what crime he has committed to deserve such length of days."
     Is that coming? I don't know. Sometimes I think I can avoid it, because I am the king of the ordinary. Nobody enjoys walking a dog more than I do, or sipping that first cup of coffee, or savoring a tablespoon of Smucker's Natural Peanut Butter. 
     Yes, the dog, at 15, an old lady herself, is not a permanent fixture, much as I fervently wish her to be. The coffee can stay though, like most things, it doesn't seem to give me the kick it once did.
    I am not yet into deep age — check back at 75 — because I still consider myself very lucky. Healthy, with continual injections, not in pain, generally, blessed with a wonderful wife of nearly 35 years whom I love and sons and daughters-in-law who thrive, for now, whose company I enjoy and fancy maybe they do too. A grand-daughter arriving any minute — maybe this afternoon, a present beyond measure. A job I find satisfying — though yes, in a footrace with the dog to see who goes first — and some people appreciate. A big old rambling home, and an office with hundreds and hundreds of books — it isn't as if "Juvenal and Persius", translated by G.G. Ramsay and first published by the venerable Loeb Classical Library in 1918 is the only work of a Roman handy. 
    There are still good days ahead, and in honor of those, be they many or few, we find is meat more tender in "The Odes of Horace" translated by David Ferry. It contains a poem I feel entitled to end with — it my birthday after all. It's called "A Prayer."
     "What shall I ask for from the god Apollo," it begins. "As on his day I pour the new wine out."
     It isn't gold or ivory, not lavish harvests or grazing cattle.
    Horace — born Quintus Horatius Flaccus — dismisses the wealth of rich traders who ply "the dangerous Atlantic," then ends.

         But as for me, my simple meal consists

         Of chicory and mallow from the garden
         and olives from the little olive tree.

         Apollo granted that I be satisfied
         With what I have as what I ought to have

         And that I live my old age out with honor,
         In health of mind and body, doing my work.

     Yeah, that sounds like a plan. 

     Though as the great contemporary philosopher Mike Tyson points out, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." Until then...