Way 2 Age

It's Christmastime here in sunny wine country California where snow is exclusively an outdoor sport for people who can afford ski lift tickets and gasoline. Now it is a week and a half before Christmas, we are throwing a small party for the neighbors tomorrow and a Christmas tree is imperative. With appropriate trepidation off we go to find the perfect Christmas tree.

Now anyone with a bah-humbug attitude and certainly anyone who has to live with someone like me knows that the word "perfect" applied to a Christmas tree is likely to start a disastrous trek among endless malls, home improvement stores and sundry other big boxes. The traffic is snarling, the sky is gray and just the concept of buying such trivia as a Christmas tree in the midsts of this global economic crash could be seen as treasonous. How could anything go right?

In my head I roll the clock back more than half a century but everything goes blank. My father was driving a Hudson and my mother would take me by the hand to go to the corner fountain where what looked like an ancient man named Jimmy was the soda jerk. From there directly across a huge boulevard was the butcher shop where mom would buy a chicken for dinner. I remember that the chickens were running around in a cage and my mother would select one and point out the bird to the butcher. They had some strange conversation that didn't make sense or I can't remember. Maybe that was the perfect chicken but it soon met it's fate taking it's last two or three cocksure steps without a head. Butcher shops earned their name back then.

And maybe I'm not quite getting that memory right at this age but what I do know is that I grew up in a Jewish family in Los Angeles and therefore what could I possibly know about a 'perfect' Christmas tree today? But age brings along some insight and moments of clear headed thinking so using my time-honed skills I start by asking what I think is the cleverest question: Where do we get the cheapest tree?

Oh oh. Here is Mr. Perfectionist on the sure wrong track head-on collision with being self righteously cheap. I'm the guy that takes half of the stuff I buy at the low priced big box stores (I know you know which ones I mean. No need to name names.) back because they are of such cheap import quality. I even took back a loaf of bread to the grocer the other day because it was stale. The nerve of them to sell stale bread. (I won't even tell you how much I pay for bread because then you will know my cheaper-is-better rant is a pure con.)

So now the wise know-it-all culturally out of it Christmas tree shopper has to check out six stores, half of which don't even carry Christmas trees, before getting to the right selection in what must be the right store because the trees are now 25% off. What could be bad about that? And sure enough, after scrounging around among the left overs of the past weekend's buying mania, there is a perfect tree; it is symmetrical, the needles are plump and moist, it isn't too tall and it even has a very top stem for the beloved tip-top crown of the tree ornament.

And like the chicken in the cage, the outside garden clerk agrees that this is the perfect tree and carries it off to the slaughter table which is a sheet of plywood standing on a makeshift pile of cement blocks where some other clerk with the right slaughter training chops off the bottom with an electric chainsaw and then, rather than being plucked, the bushy, proudly spreading tree is dragged with a heartless yank through a hoop that compresses its branches and at the same time shackles it into a plastic netting to make it ride just perfectly on the rooftop car rack where the hip set carries there skis.

Mission accomplished. The perfect tree perfectly mangled to car top perfection.

Now off to the next assignment: Having a perfectly Merry Christmas.

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It's closet cleaning time. Well, it never really is closet cleaning time around my house until there just isn't anything better to do.

Life has come to a stand still. Everything that can be read has been read and nothing that needs to be written is just leaping from my hand to the page. TV is for people that don't mind it and I'm not one of those people. Spo that leaves closet cleaning. Practical, mindless and eternally subject to procrastination.

But its not that easy for me and the problem always ends up dealing with whatever "old" means. Take for instance these old sweaters. I picked them out of the free box probably ten years ago. I wore them until they were ragged. I like them and they're old.

So that means I can just throw them away? Now wait a minute. I'm old too. Does than mean I'm just as disposable as these old sweaters? Somehow that seems cruel and uncaring.

Yet keeping a closet full of clothes I'll never wear again could be seen by some as an early sign of creeping senility. Or at least a pretty solid indicator of old fuddy-duddy-ness. So now it comes down to whether I want to keep my old clothes as a defense against the disposable "if it's old it goes" society.

"Do you remember the time when we cleaned out you mother's closet," my wife asked.

Ooh. A stake through the heart. Senility is about to be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. Without losing a stride, I reach behind the shelves where there are three brand new, not old and previously used, very large moving cartons. With tape gun poised like John Wayne taking a last stand and knowing that this moment is about as important as that scene in Iwo Jima, I immediately start cramming the sweaters and anything else in reach into the box.

I suggest you do the same.

Edit: After reading this blog, she asked, "So how long are those boxes going to stay in the garage?"

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I am an older member of the baby boom generation so I got the full ration of dissent as a youth. In the dissent department, one of the biggies was don't trust anyone over 30. Somehow people became evil after turning 30 and joined the establishment as if a body snatching had happened. It was clearly hopeless and irreversible.

Of course when we turned 30 life just went on and maybe we learned to be proud of getting to that age and at least I, for one, didn't think I'd sold out to the establishment. After all, I still harbored a strong hatred for station wagons and washers and dryers. To me, those were the milestones of becoming establishment so I steadfastly trudged down to the laundromat in my British sports car for decades to come.

Perhaps, though, not trusting anyone over 30 started a sinister progression of milestones simply based on getting to an age that is a round number. Forty was a nasty birthday for me. I was so shocked and disheartened about turning 40 that I arranged to leave the continent for my birthday. Well, I didn't get too far. Just 22 miles offshore in the most humiliating of circumstances for a self ascribed hippie. I took off as a crew member in a yacht race to Catalina Island of the coast of Southern California. What a dissenting youth is doing in yacht racing is yet another story but the point is I didn't want to admit I was getting older and I never mentioned a word about my birthday among the folks on that boat.

These days there are a new set of milestones that aren't based on round numbers. It's called 'Senior Citizen'. But just what age does that mean exactly? Never mind that it amounts to token brownie points and little else. Finally, last night at a local perfomance, the floating age of senior citizen, is that 52 or 65, came to a final roost.

"We don't have a specific age for senior citizen here," said the purple and okra dressed woman with a surprisingly full head of thick hair down to her waist. "You have to decide for yourself if you are senior enough or not."

My natural response was that I was slapped in the face for even bringing up the question. Certainly anyone looking at my blotched skin, silver beard and almost no hair at all would know that I'm completely over the hill and just being an idiot for even asking what the age of senior citizen was. But maybe I was caught again in being way too self conscious about my antiquity and I could quickly recover in front of this charming woman. After all this was only going to cost me $3.00 instant penalty for a little white lie.

"Oh, I guess I haven't quite gotten there yet," I said with the meekness of someone that isn't telling the truth and knows it.

But I got away with it. I got away with being officially young and all it cost was the senior citizen brownie point. I got away with skipping around the senior citizen milestone.

Or did I?

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Same noisy, crowded, sweaty local bar. Some people think the place is too sleazy to even step foot into. It's been a biker hangout for at least 50 years and well known in the San Francisco bay area.

Of course the bikers themselves aren't always the stereotyped bad ass, hard drinking hard riding gang. One of the bikes at the curb out front is so clean and exquisitly painted that it most likely arrived on a trailer. But bikers isn't the point here.

The real attraction is the THUGZ: Tribal Hippie UnderGround Zone and that is a well chosen descriptive name for this band. The two lead musicians are retired school teachers but more about those people later. Of late, the drummer has been someone new almost on a set by set basis. The latest is probably five or ten years my senior and he really keeps a hot rythm going no matter how strange the melody noodles gets.

As for me, the attraction is dancing to old rock 'n' roll from the 60s and 70s. The music is so familiar to me and the beat of the rock is so motivating that I just cut loose and dance my legs off continuously for about three hours. But what's the big deal about that?

The big deal is that I couldn't have done this even two years ago. The secret is aging and with that comes giving myself the permission to completely let go of what I think I'm supposed to do and how I think I should appear in the eyes of others. That freedom comes with maturity.

Freedom to do anything I want to on the dance floor also means I'm allowing myself the freedom to have desires and find pleasure just in the movement of my body by myself. In the past, I thought that bodily pleasure was completely limited to the standard entertainments such as sex, contemplative walks on beaches and back packing. But why should I limit myself to just those or just some other arbitrary list of activities? Why should I limit myself to thinking I"m dancing in a sleazy bar to a senior citizen band? Or why should I limit myself at all? Is it just because thats how I lived in the past? Growing up is not only taking responsibility for my actions but also taking responsibility for reviewing my life style and making decisions that are not based on what I did in the past.

So the lesson is that aging can be getting free from the past, becoming childlike again and being excited about growing up again to get more strength physically, emotionally and intellectually.

If we can honestly answer the poll about when does aging start as "never", then we also must accept that the question of when does youth end as also the same:

Never.

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