My mother, in the last thirty or so years of her life, would turn to the obituaries first thing every day when she got the newspaper. I was in my late 20s when she started doing this and it never failed to irk me.
“Ma,” I’d half shout in that impatient way kids confront their parents, “that’s creepy!”
“Don’t say that,” she’d rejoin in that barely patient way parents respond to their kids. “Someone I know might be in here.” And she’d go right back to running her finger down the alphabetical list of the recently deceased.
This exchange did nothing to clear things up. Why in the hell would anyone want to go looking for news about dead people? At one point, I played armchair shrink and concluded she was succumbing to some deep depression similar to the one daddy-o had tumbled into toward the end of his time on this planet.
Every once in a while she’d come across a familiar name. So-and-so died, she’d announce, as if the news meant anything to me. “He was only 60 — so young!”
So young? Sixty years old? He was a dinosaur!
There’s a progression in how people view the years, a sort of time dilation. When I was nine years old, I thought kids who were 12 and 13 were grownups. One night when I was 21 and out dancing at a punk nightclub, I spotted a couple hanging around the periphery. They must have been thirty or so. I was mortified. What were such weird old fossils doing around here?
When Ma got to a certain age, any time someone who was a day younger than she was died she’d lament, again, “She was so young!” Ma said this every time even as she hit 90 and the dead person was 88 or 89.
I’m now at the age Ma was when she was already regularly scanning the obituaries.
My contemporaries are keeling over left and right. Celebrities born the year I was are collapsing seemingly every day. It makes me think of the first rock ‘n’ roll era star I can recall who died naturally. Bill Haley, who, with his band the Comets, kick started white acceptance of R’n’R back in 1954 with their single “Rock Around the Clock.” That was two years before I was born and by the time I became a transistor radio geek at the age of eight, Bill Haley was as passé as Rudy Vallée. When Haley croaked in 1981 at the age of 55, I figured, hell, he’s an old man, what’s everybody so surprised about?
Of course, it isn’t just the years that appear to shrink or contract as we age. The four or so weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas seemed to be an eternity when I was a fifth-grader. Summer vacation was endless. For four years I dreamed, almost wetly, of the day I could get my drivers license and start wheelie-ing around the neighborhood in Dad’s car. That span of time from age 12 through 16, as I experienced it, was as lengthy as the Paleozoic Era. When I was grounded for a week or two, as I was more times than I could count, I may as well have been sentenced to life imprisonment.
Now, as any who’s reached my age knows, the seasons are as weeks and weeks are snaps of my fingers. This is a phenomenon impossible to convey to anyone still callow.
I figure if I’m lucky I might have a good 25 years left hereabouts. That is, if everything goes well, I avoid getting hit by a truck, cancer doesn’t come back, my deformed heart doesn’t start fluttering madly, and the nations of the world don’t start lobbing nuclear-tipped missiles at each other. That quarter century, I’m guessing, would be the maximum I have left. My earthly stint likely will end sometime before the year 2049.
But I like to think optimistically so twenty five years it is. That’s as big a chunk of time as the span since I was hanging out with the Lampreys in the East Pilsen artists’ enclave on the near south side of Chicago. Yeah, those were great days. Such fun. Such creativity. Such scintillating friends. Such a wide world and a big city to explore. Stories to write. Galleries to browse. Parties to attend. Grants to apply for. Life to gobble up. Another world, another lifetime ago.
But, oh god, that was 1999! All of us are gray-haired, thicker around the waist, our faces creased, our steps so much slower. Some even dead.
My new life, my new world, is in Bloomington, Indiana. New work. New friends. New challenges. Yet 1999 seems like last summer. But within even that snap of my fingers I’ve met people and had to say goodbye. People like Peter LoPilato. He was the editor and publisher of The Ryder magazine, the first publication I wrote for after I arrived in this town. He and I shared a love of baseball and every time we’d meet we’d regale each other with memories and statistics and predictions about this team or that player. He was a New Yorker, originally; I a Chicagoan. We didn’t let that come between us.
Peter played softball in a league up until a very few short years ago. I wished I could have joined him but I was crippled by arthritis in my hips. I have two new titanium and plastic hip joints now but I’ll never be able to play catch with Peter LoPilato because he died this week. He was about 72, by my math.
Damn. He was so young!
