Welcome back to Ancient Wisdom, our weekly series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. Last week, John Stossel, the famously libertarian former ABC and Fox journalist, explained why, at 78, beach volleyball has helped him stay young. This week, David Margolick describes the pleasures of being 74 with a mother who’s almost 102.
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When my new book, When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy, recently appeared, my mother mobilized.
First, she ordered a dozen copies to send to her friends—which, by momentarily jacking up my Amazon ranking, made her middle son feel good. She quickly turned her dining room table into a command post, covered with the promotional flyers she’d had me commission from my publisher and the envelopes into which she’d stuff them. She began sleeping fitfully, hounded by nightmares of not getting to the post office until just after it closed.
I guess the proud mothers of many authors would do the same thing. But two weeks ago, I turned 74. And come this March, my mother will turn 102. Having a parent so old, and remaining someone’s son so long, proves one thing about aging: It happens at different rates for different people. In my case, in this as in many other respects, I am a late bloomer, a perpetual Peter Pan. For better or worse (actually, it’s surely some of each), I still feel very youthful. Or very immature. Or both.
While all of us regularly remember that we’ll die, I don’t dwell on it much more than when the realization first hit me as a boy. True, scrolling all the way down to my birth year on all those online forms now seems to take forever, like reaching Wyoming under “State.” And while my synapses fire more slowly now, making names and adjectives and even the spellings of elementary words ever more elusive, I don’t assume I’m losing my wits, or that my best or happiest or most productive years are behind me.
In fact, freed from various past constraints (and thanks to an insistent editor), I feel this new book of mine is my best: I’m finally finding more of my own voice, with still more of it, I hope, to unearth. At the age, to repeat, of 74. (Just FYI, Ernest Hemingway was 61 when he died, and F. Scott Fitzgerald was gone at 44.)
