I Am That Old

I Am That Old

Flash Memoir by Michael Field

What does it mean to be old? How do you measure aging? Using years is common, or maybe decades like marking birthdays with a 0 at the end of them. I am the youngest of three boys so, as a middle-aged adult, relativity to my relatives provided me with a barrier to feeling old. However, both my brothers are now in their 80s; thus, I am younger than ancient which is not so comforting!

Eschewing metrics to measure age, some people mark milestone events such as the first presidential election they voted in. I turned 21 in 1972, just in time for Nixon vs. McGovern. I was from a staunch Republican family but had become an anti-war activist in college. A vote for either candidate would have been a betrayal of my newly forged values. Away at college, I requested an absentee ballot and voted write-in for then Senator Ed Muskie who represented my home state of Maine. Muskie’s campaign had been sabotaged by a political trick, a forged letter. Then, when he got emotional defending his wife from a newspaper editorial’s scurrilous attack, people said he didn’t have the ‘character’ to be president.

Recently, I have started experiencing a new way to feel old. Increasingly, I have observed myself being “Get off my lawn!” old. I am often called to defend fundamental truths. For instance, one only needs two ears and a brain to know that there has been no good popular music produced since the ‘60s. Other defenses require pushing back against the winds of change, such as continuing to put two spaces between sentences in a paragraph only to have autocorrect be my undoing.

Then, one night, I was struck by a very telling realization. As my wife and I were walking out of the symphony, I turned to her and said, “That wasn’t the best Scheherazade I have ever heard.” As I listened to the words coming out of my mouth, I realized something more telling than my hair turning gray had changed in my world.

Seemingly, the time wasn’t that long ago when I had never heard an orchestra play live as, growing up in rural Maine, it was an unobtainable luxury. I was one of the ‘Young People’ Leonard Bernstein exposed to classical music, heard through the ‘low fidelity’ speaker of our black and white RCA TV set, its large, rich brown mahogany cabinet a fixture in our living room. I remember sitting in the Bailey Hall mezzanine my freshman year at Cornell as, for the first time, I listened enraptured to the symphony orchestra on stage. Experiencing Beethoven live was, in a sense, year one of my life as a music lover.

Years later, with circumstances changed for the better, I recall getting season tickets for the Bridgeport Symphony. Back then, two decades of yesterdays ago, when we looked down from our balcony seats, we noted the predominantly white hair of the patrons and felt young by comparison. Our next-door neighbor, Andi, was on the Symphony board and, through her connections, we went backstage after many performances. There we got to mingle with the white-haired patrons as we greeted the conductor and principal musicians. This firsthand, human connection to the production of great music took that experience up to a new peak.

This recent night, though, the experience had been turned on its head. Down was up and young was suddenly very old. As those words - “That wasn’t the best Scheherazade . . . ” - left my mouth, I felt a sudden sadness as if I had lost something. Gone was the magic of finding the picture book for the movie Fantasia in the attic of my family home. Gone was the magic of seeing the rerelease of Fantasia in Boston with the haze of marijuana obscuring the screen. Gone was the magic of a Broadway musical heard for the first time being a fountain of youth for my soul.

Now, it seems that not only do I have years’ worth, nay, decades’ worth, of symphony experiences accumulated, I have enough experience with a particular one - albeit a favorite one – to be making comparisons. I am that old. I am ‘talk about the symphony like it is not a magical experience’ old. That is not a good age. I want to be ‘Say you believe in magic, so Tinkerbell lives!” old again experiencing the joy of seeing Peter Pan for the first time!

Michael Field transitioned from a career marketing technology to creative writing. He specializes in flash memoir pieces, stream of consciousness essays, and insightful reflections. He has had multiple works recognized in literary contests including a first-place prize in the Friends of the Chautauqua Writing Center Adult Prose contest. His works have been published in magazines, literary journals, and an anthology, Memory as Muse.