Welcome back to Ancient Wisdom, our Sunday series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. Last week, Michael Tobin, 79, wrote a moving essay in which he reflected on how to keep your head when you’re losing control. This week, 96-year old Jack Miller looks back on a life well-lived.
At 96, almost all of my old friends are dead apart from one, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. I often use a walker because my balance is “substandard.” My back hurts all the time. I suffer from peripheral neuropathy, which makes my fingers and toes numb. And despite a lifetime of exercise and eating right, I have had a heart attack and am living with a pacemaker and four stents. Thank God for modern medicine.
All that said, would I change anything? Absolutely not. I have lived, and still live, a great life.
I was asked recently how my perspective has changed as I’ve gotten older, and I realized that it really hasn’t. I love sayings, and the one that applies here is “the old truths may be old but they’re nonetheless true.” The world has changed a great deal, but I have always been an independent thinker and followed a basic code of conduct: Be honest, respect others, focus on what you want, and work like hell to get it. Being 96 hasn’t changed that at all; it’s not for nothing that my business card reads “Jack Miller, Retiree—Sort Of.”
I grew up in Chicago and was in school during the 1940s when the country was at war. Patriotism was in the air. We collected and donated tinfoil from cigarette and chewing gum packages. Gasoline and some foods were rationed. My dad’s gasoline ration was three gallons per week. When we went to the movies on Saturday afternoons, we saw the newsreels that showed the battles in detail. We cheered every victory.
I always had a passion for hard work. I held a variety of jobs from grade school on, from setting pins in a bowling alley for seven cents per hour to delivering dry cleaning on my bike. I ushered in a movie theater, and delivered turkeys during Thanksgiving from my father’s poultry store. Later, I washed dishes for 75 cents an hour, packed railroad freight cars with 70-pound sacks, dug ditches with a jackhammer, and even modeled for art classes. My bathing suit stayed on.
