Three Score and Ten

Whereas I entered my seventh decade a year ago, I can now officially join the ranks of the septuagenarians.  It was 70 years ago this morning – at 4 minutes after midnight on March 21, 1951 – when Mrs. Rogers delivered a bouncing 8 pound, 9 ounce baby boy whose luxuriate cries echoed throughout the maternity ward of Holy Cross Hospital, on the southwestern edge of Chicago, Illinois.  It was a Wednesday, the first day of Spring that year, and my folks would bring me home to our South Side apartment on Easter Sunday.

The US president was Harry S. Truman serving his second term in office having been reelected in 1948.  US troops were still engaged in combat in Korea and would be for two more years. Just over a week after I was born Ethel and Julius Rosenberg would be convicted of atomic espionage and would eventually die in Sing Sing’s electric chair. "Rawhide," directed by Henry Hathaway and starring Tyrone Power and Susan Hayward, would be released four days later, one of the most popular films of 1951.  A hit song at the time was Perry Como’s "If (They Made Me a King)" written by Tolchard Evans, Robert Hargreaves, and Stanley J. Damerell, and recorded by Como in November 1950.  Boswell's London Journal 1762-1763, edited by Frederick A. Pottle and published by Yale University Press in 1950, was one of the best selling books at the time. Televison was a relatively new invention, and in early 1951 people were watching "Circuit Rider," an early drama about the lives of evangelical clergymen who traveled across the new American states in the wake of the Revolutionary War.  It aired on Sunday nights on ABC-TV between March 5 and May 7, 1951.

If you think about it, 70 years seems like an awfully long time.  But think of it as 840 months, 25,566 days. Or 613,606 hours, or 36,816,413 minutes, or 2,208,984,819 seconds!  That is pretty hard to fathom.  How many times has my heart pulsed since that morning long ago?   How many times have I blinked my eyes?  Oh, if I had a dollar for each.  And, if I got a good eight hours of sleep every night, which I almost never do, that would mean I have slept away a third of my life . . . just over 23 years!  Thankfully that has not been the case.  I have things to do.  Places to go.  People to see.

I have mixed feelings about this personal benchmark.  The first year of my seventh decade is one I would just as soon forget; a year of personal loss, a killer pandemic, an election that divided this country to a dangerous level and ended with an insurrection incited by the outgoing president that attempted to destroy American democracy at the very seat of power.  So where will this new year of life, the first as a septuagenarian take me?  What will I be able to accomplish?  Hopefully, at the end of it all, I will still be raising a joyful noise.  Regardless, I will just take comfort in my loving family and my many friends.  It has been a good life so far, and I look forward to many more years in your good company.