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Randy Klein
06-25-2007, 9:16 AM
The following is an email I got from my Dad a few days before he turned 60. It is a long diatribe of free flowing thoughts and lots of humor thrown in. Enjoy.

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Family,



As you may have guessed from my many, many, many emails, I write often and to many groups & list-servers. I’m turning 60 this weekend, and I’m sending out the email below to those that have known me for decades. You get to read the following mind-burp before I send it out to several thousand folks that I know (most of them associated with the Air Force Academy), over the next few days.



You can share it with whom-ever you want and feel free to forward it to those that you think have 23 hours of free time to read it. It is long, detailed and has a quiz at the end. It is so long, that you will have to actually download it from the internet! No feedback is needed, but I will be able to sense your reaction by the tears, jeers, or running in the opposite direction when you next see me!



Good luck in reading it in less than a week, and I apologize in advance for any eye-strain or paper-cuts that you get!



Pierre











All,



This weekend I will say goodbye to a friend of mine. At exactly 8:48 pm on Sunday the 10th, he will no longer exist, as he fades into oblivion, known only to me by my memories of him. I’ve known him all my life; he has been with me every step of the way. Soon, he will be gone forever.



He is my younger-self, my youth. For on this weekend, I will become 60 years old. Yes, I’m going to celebrate my 39th anniversary of turning 21 years of age. It means that I have to start thinking seriously that I am no longer seventeen. I have put that off for a very long time!



How did I go from “oat meal” to “wild oats” and then have that turned into shredded wheat so quickly? Where did time go? Way back in my younger adulthood my friends hooked up and broke up; now my friends marry and divorce. Dinner and a movie ...today that is the WHOLE date, instead of the beginning of one. Heck, my childhood toys are in museums now!



The big day is fast approaching. I look in the bathroom mirror and ask myself, "How did someone as young as me, end up getting older, SO SOON?!" The reflection I see in front of me is telling me that my youth, the youth that I believed would be mine forever is gone. Time may be a great healer, but it's also a lousy beautician. I finally concede that time has indeed won in its relentless quest to rob me of my treasured youthfulness….



NOT!

You know, inside of every older person is a younger person…wondering what the heck happened! Well, I am not going to have conversations with people my own age that turn into "dueling ailments”. I’m still playing sports, games & with my kids, all at 100%! I run in marathons, volunteer more and I am now up to 75 pints of blood donated. I’m not ready for older-people games, like Musical Recliners, Spin the Bottle of Mylanta, Hide & Go Pee, or Sag, You're it!

I have reached a point in my life when I can stop worrying about my age and start bragging! I tricked myself into thinking it wouldn’t have an affect on me, turning, you know, that number. In fact for the past year, I’ve been using “60” & “Pierre” together in as many sentences that I could. During early 2006, even BEFORE I turned 59, I would tell people that I will be sixty NEXT YEAR; starting this January, I told everyone that I would be sixty THIS YEAR. I did it in hopes that I would get used to hearing it (assuming that my hearing doesn’t get worse). Did it work? Let me try it: I will be sixty this weekend….hmmm, not to bad. Doesn’t hurt.



BUT IT CAN'T BE!

When I was 49 I thought that fifty best described the number of states in the Union, not my age! Heck, my father & mother were fifty once! And now I'm going to be sixty? No, not me! Don’t get me wrong, sixty is a good number, just not a good one to describe me, age-wise. Sixty has a lot uses: it is the smallest number that is divisible by the numbers 1 to 6; it is the smallest number with exactly 12 divisors; it is the sum of both two consecutive primes (29 + 31) & four consecutive primes (11 + 13 + 17 + 19); it is the atomic number of neodymium, the number of seconds in a minute, the number of minutes in an hour, and the code for an international direct dial calls to Malaysia…..BUT IT ISN'T MY AGE!!!!!!



And speaking of turning fifty, ten years ago I remember what my wife gave me for my birthday present …rather, what I had asked for: I told her that on the morning of my 50th birthday, I wanted something sitting in the driveway, in front of our garage that can go from zero to 200 in seconds flat. I woke up that morning, looked out the window, and there it was…… no not a car, but a small box! Ok, maybe she just put the car-keys in it; that must be it! I rushed downstairs, ran out outside, picked up the box, tore it opened…and there it was……. a bathroom scale. Nowadays it goes beyond 200, just by me standing next to it.



BACK TO BEING SIXTY.

What will I become? What name-tag will I inherit, from the perspective of others: Old? I hope not! Older? Well from a chronologically relative perspective, yes. But my active life-style should not be subjected to the language of aging: Elderly? Senior citizen? How about "Seasoned Citizen"? I read somewhere that I should be considered in the "Metallic Stage" of my life, because of the SILVER in my hair, the GOLD in my teeth, the TIN ear I've developed, the PLATINUM credit card offers I'm receiving and the LEAD in my butt! I do know for a fact that I am in the “initial” stage of my golden years, as in: SS, CD's, IRA'S, AARP



No, the problem isn’t the chronological age milestone that I will achieve. It isn’t the fact that my single, younger brother can date someone half his age…and not break any laws. Sixty after all is just a number; it isn't like I'm going to be TWO BILLION SECONDS OLD (but I will be in 3 1/2 years!). It is just another candle on the birthday cake. Did you know that 60 birthday candles will produce 60 BTU’s or 15,120 calories of heat? You can boil almost 7 ounces of water with that many candles. Why are humans the only species on Earth that annually celebrate the fact that they are one year closer to death? No, sixty is just a number; I should count my lucky stars that we are a slave to the decimal system! In binary notation, my age would be 111,100; hmmmmmmmm, but in a base 20 number system I would be just 30 and only 50 in the duodecimal system. In Roman numerals it would be "LX" (extra large?) and 3C in hexadecimal (3C, is that Barbie’s bra size?) In the cardinal system, it is sixty; in the ordinal, sixtieth; and in the numeral system, sexagesimal (that one has to be pronounced very carefully!).



Gee, as a cat I would have at least nine lives. However in dog years, I would be dead!



But wait, I still do have a pair of puppies at home- my young daughters are 3 & 6 years old! Yes, I am an older father. My family is very much age-dysfunctional, since my youngest is 30 years younger than my oldest; my oldest grandson is just 6 months younger than his youngest aunt; and last year, my second YOUNGEST child started kindergarten in the same month that my second OLDEST child started his PhD. My now 25 year old son complained for years that he was the youngest; he said that he always wanted to be the middle child. WELL, NOW HE IS!!! Of course I could worry about how the girls will feel about having an older father; how old I'll be when they graduate from high school (71 & 74); and whether or not I will have enough energy to play soccer at age 65 (I coach AYSO). But you know what? If you live in our society and you are already in your 50’s, and you have no major health problems, you will probably live until your 80’s! Besides, I know that right now my two young girls think I’m terrific regardless of my age; but when they become teenagers I’ll be embarrassing to them, regardless of my age!



So, I have to stay in shape. But I’ve got conflicted ideas about that. We have all been told that cardiovascular exercise can prolong life, but is that true? Your heart is only good for so many beats, and then it will wear out. I mean, if speeding up your heart as the result of exercise can extend your life, then can you extend the life of your car by driving it faster? I think not! And now they have a new way of measuring your fitness: the body-fat ratio; what is that? I have a body & I have fat; does that make my ratio one? Good news: I can prove that chocolate is good for me- it comes from the Cocoa BEAN…hello, a vegetable!



But good physical health aside, another challenge is how to stay financially healthy as well; I will be working well beyond the traditional retirement age just so I can send my kids to college. So, I am being realistic, planning in advance, and buying more lotto tickets.



Enough about me; I'm not alone in turning 60; I'm a BABY BOOMER after all! And that brings up another age dysfunction in my household: I'm a second year boomer; Cyndie is in the second-to-last year of Boomers. Count to "seven"..... someone in the US just turned sixty! And in the time it took you to read that last sentence, two more just became sixty. By the end of the day, 13,000 more Americans will become sixty; and before 2007 ends, HALF-MILLION more of us will turn sixty. And my class year is not the only one; if they are lucky, tens of millions of Americans will turn 60 in the next decade and a half. It is getting crowded in my age group. Did you know that TWO-THIRDS of all men and women who have EVER LIVED beyond the age of 65 in the ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE WORLD are alive today? Right now, there are over 50,000 Americans over the age of 100. And it is predicted ONE MILLION Boomers will reach the century mark. Boomers… hitting the home stretch to social (in)security!



You know what sucks? The sixties (the decade, not my age) are now so far away! I mean in three years the Sixties will be a half-century old! I grew up in the sixties: I became a teenager in the beginning, and an adult in the end, and (children, please leave the room) a “man” sometime in the middle. It is tough comparing back then to now: keg vs. EKG; acid rock vs. acid reflux; Paar vs. AARP; the perfect high vs. the perfect high yield mutual fund; Rolling Stones vs. kidney stones; “whatever" vs. "Depends"; and being caught with a Hustler magazine vs. being caught by Hustler magazine!



WARNING!!! NOSTAGLIA AHEAD!!!

You will probably only remember the following if you grew up in the 50’s or 60’s; well, more likely, you experienced some of these, you may just have forgotten them! How many do you remember? Candy cigarettes, wax coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water inside, soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles with metal caps, milk in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers, newsreels before the movie, P. F. Flyers & Keds, 45 RPM records, Green Stamps, Hi-fi's, metal ice cube trays with levers (boy, did those things hurt when you tried to open them!), mimeograph paper (I can still smell that purple ink!), roller skate keys, cork pop guns, drive ins, wash tub wringers, the Fuller Brush man, reel-to-reel tape recorders, tinker toys, erector sets, Lincoln Logs, 15-cent McDonald hamburgers & 10-cent fries, and 5-cent packs of baseball cards (with that big slab of pink bubble gum inside). That was pretty much my childhood.



Ah the sixties! That decade opened with 4-cent stamps (but air-mail was 8-cents!), 31-cent gas, and a gallon of milk cost just 49-cents; the decade ended with 6-cent stamps, 35-cent gas, and milk at a dollar….and I thought those were high prices! That is the beauty of inflation: today’s high prices are tomorrow’s bargains! And it proves that you get stronger as you get older: when I was younger I couldn’t carry twenty-five dollars of food in both arms; now I can carry $50 of food in one hand!



We took family trips BEFORE the invention of the minivan, while riding in the back of the station wagon, facing the cars behind us. I remember when our TV had a “personal” remote control: “Hey, one of you kids, change the TV set to channel 11!” The TV had only 13 channels, it took five minutes for the TV to warm up and the programs were all in black-and-white. We watched the Mickey Mouse Club, Beanie & Cecil, Kookla Fran & Ollie, Spin & Marty, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Sheriff John, Engineer Bill & Dick Clark's American Bandstand. We had a rotary phone, with telephone numbers that used a word prefix (FRontier-3 XXXX)……and party-lines! You actually had to wait for a neighbor to get off of their phone for you to be able to use yours! Record players, 8-track, typewriters & slide rules. Baseball cards in the spokes transformed any bike into a motorcycle.



Wow, I think my childhood life is flashing in front of me!



Sitting on the curb or the porch, playing hide-and-go-seek, Simon Says and red-light-green-light. Lunch boxes with a thermos, penny candy from the store, hopscotch, jacks and Cracker Jacks, hula hoops and sunflower seeds, wax lips and mustaches, penny loafers, and Coke bottles with the names of cities on the bottom ( I still have one from Ft. Lauderdale, Flo).



Playtime decisions were made by going "eeny-meeny-miney-mo", mistakes were corrected by simply exclaiming "do over”, and War was just a card game.



Now as an adult (well, assuming as I got older that I also grew up!), I sometime wish that life can work like a PC keyboard, but with enhanced features. I wish I had pull-down boxes, like "Extend Weekend" (control+E), or "Reclaim Wasted Weekend" (control+W), or at least find those hidden settings, that I can change, like "crash after every XX hours"; or "crash after XX bytes of unsaved changes".



Were the Sixties a great decade?



I always think of the answer in terms of music & songs (ok, rock & roll!); the decade started with The Twist, Running Bear & Alley-Oop & ended with Dizzy, Take a Letter Maria & Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In. In between, there was Runaway, Runaround Sue, Duke of Earl, Soldier Boy, Peppermint Twist, The Wanderer, Johnny Angel, Surf City, It’s My Party, My Boyfriend’s Back, I Get Around, Out of Limits, She’s Not There, Leader of the Pack, The Name Game (Shirley, Shirley, bo-birley…), Help Me Rhonda, You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling (I put those two songs together because a girlfriend of mine (Rhonda) did lose her loving feeling for me!), I Got You Babe, Eve of Destruction, I’m a Believer, Summer in the City, Wild Thing, Good Vibrations, Happy Together, Respect, Windy, Gimmie Some Lovin’, and then those alliteration titled songs, like: Tossin’ & Turnin’, Sugar-Shack, Wooly-Bully, Hanky-Panky, Na-Na Hey- Hey, Sugar-Sugar, Monday-Monday, Mony-Mony, Yummy-Yummy-Yummy, Louie-Louie (did you ever understand those mumbled lyrics?), and of course, Satisfaction! The Beatles, Stones, Who, Beach Boys, Dave Clark Five, Righteous Brothers,….. I could go on forever, but I won’t…because there also was also TV!



What do the following TV shows have in common (besides they all started & ended in the 60’s)? Hawaii Five-0, Bewitched, Hogan’s Heroes, Batman, Green Acres, Get Smart, Bonanza, The Munsters, Gilligan’s Island, Petticoat Junction, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Lucy Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Gunsmoke, The Andy Griffith Show, The Untouchables, Perry Mason, & The Flintstones. Over forty years later they are still in rerun syndication!



And, don’t get me started on the movies! Psycho, Never on Sunday, Spartacus, The Magnificent Seven, The Time Machine, Inherit the Wind, Exodus, Elmer Gantry....and those were the movies that came out just in 1960!



Sports (Wilt the Stilt 100-point game, Sandy Koufax perfect-game & the first Super Bowl), books, they were all good.



OK, maybe not everything in the sixties was great, and sometimes they were very confusing! There were some weird dances, including the Dog, Swim, Frug, Watusi & the Monkey; Hee Haw premiered, but Sesame Street also began; CBS cuts the Smother Brothers Show, but Laugh-in opened in the same year; in 1968 Joe Namath buys a mink coat and Yale College admitted women.



And Tiny Tim sang “Come Tip Toe Through the Tulips”…….I can’t think of something good to follow that! Wait, I know, the final episode for the Fugitive was aired in 1967 and it got a 50% rating, meaning, that ONE HALF of ALL TV’s in America were tuned in! Urban legend has it that not one crime was reported during that hour (nine o’clock Eastern, eight o’clock Central).



The Godfather became a best selling book (I wonder, did they ever make movie out of it?). We got new words & phrases in our language: headhunter, hunk, command module, downers, uppers, flash cube, flower children, glitch, hippy, zap, flower power, discotheque, kook, dude, groupie, no way, way, status report, splashdown, corner back, peace corp, high rise, zonked, microsurgery, anchorman, sit-in, cosmonaut, laser, compact car, fake out, rat fink, psychedelic, Beatle Mania & British Invasion.



New products came out: Astroturf, felt-tip pen, rayon, Coffee Mate, Total cereal (fiber!), Diet Right, Diet Pepsi, Tab, Polaroid cameras, Pop-tarts, Zip codes, Lucky Charms, Apple Jacks, Kennedy half-dollars, and the Mustang.



New marvels appeared: digital display for the pocket calculator & electronic watches, Eco One was launched as the first communication satellite, Tiros as the first weather satellite, IBM’s “Selectric” typewriter came out (how could typing, excuse me, word processing, get any better?), and then silicon chips, Silicon Valley & silicon implants!



And in the same year (1960) that Dezi Arnaz & Lucille Ball divorced (I guess not everybody Loved Lucy), Ray Krock began a little hamburger stand, McDonalds!



Yep, good decade it was….but that was almost 50 years ago.



MY CONDITION.

The older you get, the tougher it is to lose weight because by then, your body and your fat are really good friends. Forget the health food. I need all the preservatives I can get. And now I’m rethinking, retrenching & regrouping my exercise regime. I read everywhere that working out is very healthy, and that it will extend your life, something to the order of: if you exercise just 30 minutes each day for the rest of your life, that you will live 1 ¼ years longer! But last weekend, I decided to do the math. Work with me on this: working out 30 minutes a day means you spend about 200 hours a year doing this. If you do this for the next 40 years, you will spend 8,000 hours doing the additional exercises. But there are only about 8,000 hours in a year! That means you will net only a quarter of a year of non-exercise time! So, I’ve opted for a quicker way of gaining a few more months of life: I will just ask doctors to work a gadget into my artery and up into my heart, and then they can suck out fifty years of desserts.



Last month my doctor put me on a diet. She said simply: "I want you to eat regularly for two days, then skip a day, and repeat this procedure for two weeks. The next time I see you, you’ll have lost at least five pounds." Two weeks later I went back to see her, and shocked her by having lost nearly 20 pounds! She thought it was amazing and wondered if I had followed her instructions. I said yes, but I had thought that I was going to drop dead that third day; no, not from hunger, but from all that skipping.



Turning sixty isn’t bad. Yeah, sure, I weigh more than I once did and probably should weigh less; when I’m asked, “what’s up?”, I respond: my blood pressure, cholesterol & body mass index. My neck looks like a turkey and I have bags under my eyes that the family calls “samsonites”. It takes me twice as long to look half as good. And more & more, my brain makes promises that my body can't keep.



At least, there's nothing left for me to learn the hard way! And my worst enemy is only gravity. But do I find myself repeating the same old stupid stories...wait, I've always did that! I’m in pretty good shape & my libido is in tact. I have lapses in memory once in awhile, and I'm starting to suffer from Mallzheimer's disease: when I go to the mall I forget where I parked my car. However, no fortune teller has offered to read the wrinkles in my face.



Am I slowing down? Well, I’ve always enjoyed the quiet side of life, so it is hard to answer that. I do look forward to a dull evening, my favorite part of the newspaper is the "20 years ago today” section and I'm the life of the party -- even if it lasts until 8PM. I don’t regret all those mistakes I made resisting temptation. However, I'm having trouble remembering simple words like..., hmmmm,…..,oh well, it will come to me!



END

(Not me, the email!)

Getting older doesn't always bring wisdom; it comes alone sometimes. If I don’t remember being so absentminded is that a positive or negative testimony to my memory? I don’t know! Well, Cyndie is watching me while I'm staring at the keyboard. I'm stumped as to how to end this email. She is probably wondering what I'm thinking at this moment. You know, the question asked by a wife, "what are you thinking?" is probably one of the toughest questions to answer. If the husband does not answer it properly (which is to say, lie), it may explode into a major argument. And all arguments between husbands and wives end with the wife having the last word. That is, of course, because anything said further by the husband, is by default, the start of another argument.



The true answer is that the husband is thinking about either about sports, sex or food.



The proper answer however (and said quickly) is: "I'm sorry if I've been pensive, dear. I was just reflecting on what a warm, wonderful, caring, thoughtful, intelligent, beautiful woman you are, and what a lucky guy I am to be part of your life" (by the way, she is and I am).



The logical answer of course, is: "If I wanted you to know, I'd be talking instead of thinking".

And while on the subject of wives, there are two important things about them that will help a husband live longer: First, as I said above, it is important to have a woman who is warm, a woman who is wonderful & caring, a woman who is thoughtful & intelligent, and a woman who likes to be with you. And it's very, very important that these four women don't know each other! All kidding aside, secret to a happy marriage? No husband has ever been shot by his wife while he was doing the dishes!

If you are going to forward this to my wife, please lose the last sentence. Actually, now the second-to-last sentence. Ok, now the third-to-last sentence. Never mind!

If you don't learn to laugh at trouble, you won't have anything to laugh at when you get older. I am now at that the perfect age in life, somewhere between old enough to know better and too young to care. And I'm beginning to realize that aging is not for wimps or sissies. I still have the demands of earning a living & raising children. But I do have my health, my mind & sense of humor (which I am sure that you are doubting at this point in time). I'm going to master new skills, experience more and worry less, with a goal to present the image of what younger folks want to be when they grow up. I'm not going to sit down or stay STILL, and I will not have others to put the word "STILL" in front of my routines, like is he STILL running marathons, or is he STILL telling the same story? Good judgment comes from experience & experience comes from bad judgment; I've got plenty of all three! I can appreciate more & separate the important from the unimportant.

So, Sunday will merely mean that I've reached the second intermission of a three-part play; just the end of the sixth inning; the "wall" in a marathon; the start of the 4th quarter (how many sport analogies can I come up with?). I still have a long way to go, and anything could happen before I cross that finish line. Is SIXTY the new FORTY, or is sixty just plain older? I don’t know. But if I have crossed over into the THIRD half of my life, I'm doing it kicking & screaming; I'm sliding in head first, yelling "what a rush"! I'm happy and very much in appreciation of the fact that I made it this far already. I'm not going to be retired; I'm going to be rewired! Call it the Sage Age from now to eighty; Geri-Active when I hit eighty; and Life 101 when I hit the century mark. It is all Prime Time to me!



Look, the only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth, and I am not in any rut! I had a glimpse of my future last week, which has been my life all along: I was at work for 14 hours on Friday & I spent 10 hours on Saturday doing volunteer work for the local youth soccer region. What was I looking forward to do that evening? Early to bed? No! Watching the Ducks or the Cavaliers play on TV? No! I even turned down free tickets to see the Galaxy play soccer. Nope, what I did that night, and was looking forward to do for weeks, was to escort my 6-year daughter to a Prince/Princess dance held by a Girl Scout troop. Afterwards, as we were walking back to the truck, she said that the dance was the best ever, & then she hugged me. I assure you, that glow & memory will not go away!



As far as I’m concerned if this is the beginning of "old age" for me, well, I'm still vertical & ventilating, all monitored systems are functional and I am off to a flying start! And as for not being seventeen any longer, youth is not something that you will find on a calendar. It is not the number of years in your life that is important; it is the life in your years! It is not a number that defines your age, but the way you think, feel & your attitude in general that makes you young.



But still……SIXTY?!?!?!?



Pierre

(Yes, one letter for each decade!)

Robert Miller
06-25-2007, 9:44 AM
Thanks for sharing this email. It brought back a lot of forgotten memories for me.

I grew up in the sixties also , I also remember the milk in glass bottles with a cardboard top. We actually had a milkmanthat delivered to our house.
Are there ANY milkmen left?
I don't think so, I remember my Mom getting chocolate milk, orange juice, milk and cream on the top for her coffee.
I remember the Nehru jacket and little round glasses. It was "groovy"
I had almost forgotton about wax coke bottle candy and candy cigarettes.
I do remember how excited I was when I got my first guitar and drove my brother nuts while I learned " Day Trippper" by the Beatles. I payed it over and over.
When I talk to him on the phone ( he lives 1500 miles away) he ALWAYS askes me if I've finally learned the damn thing.
It makes us laugh.
The height of the sixites for me was when I actually saw The Beatles perform live at the Chicago Ampitheatre in 1966.It turned out it was the last tour they ever did together.
I also saw the Dave Clark Five remember them?

Please tell your Dad happy b-day and thank him for helping me remember the sixites again!

Reed Wells
06-26-2007, 6:42 PM
Randy, I will turn 60 in August. Your father has just taken me on a trip through the happiest years of my life. As little Jonnie Denver would have said, "Far Out!" You should ask your dad to please write more, whether it be fact or fiction. He is a very talented writer, and placed a very large smile on this "old timer's" face. Please thank him for me! Reed Wells