Keeping Your Edge at 70
By Lee Gutkind
Photo illustration by Alejandro Cabrera Ramirez
As usual, that morning, I was the first Starbucks customer. Six a.m. on the dot, when the lights went on and the doors unlocked. Since it had opened 31 years ago, I’d almost always been the first customer any morning I was in town. The baristas know what I want, a takeout venti dark roast, and usually have it ready or start pouring when I walk in the door.
But that day, as I stood at the counter waiting, Tony the barista was taking longer than usual to fill my venti cup. And as I looked more carefully, I noticed he was leaning backwards, then suddenly he was falling, ever so slowly, hovering at first, momentarily balanced in midair, stiff and rigid, then gaining momentum, propelling downward, like a lumberjack’s felled tree. He landed, squirmed, and twisted on the ground.
How long did I stand there, frozen, processing what had happened? Maybe 15 seconds. But it seemed much longer. I wanted to help him, but I couldn’t force myself to move. I knew, as I stood there, what had probably happened, but my boots were glued to the ground.
A couple of weeks earlier, I had arrived at Starbucks in time to see the ambulance pull away. It was Tony then, too. He had had a seizure. So this was a repeat incident, I assumed. And yet I was hesitating, unable to act decisively.
Once in Oklahoma, while motorcycling the country for a book I was writing, my cycling partner, Burt, took a razor blade to his wrist. Burt’s moods had seesawed erratically throughout the trip. He had left his wife, three children, and a struggling business in a generic strip mall to join me for a few weeks on my nomadic cross-country odyssey. Motorcycling America was a dream come true for both of us, but his guilt over abandoning his family, if only for a short time, surfaced off and on in erratic waves, periodically overwhelming him.
“That incident with Tony scared the bejeezus out of me. My hesitation, my inability to instantly act, was not good—not me.”
The cut on his wrist wasn’t too deep, but there was a gash and some pulsing blood. I knocked the blade from his grip and pounced on it, so that he couldn’t get at it. Burt calmed down. Then I wrapped a towel around his bleeding wrist, borrowed a car from the owner of the motel where we had stopped for the night, and rushed him to the nearby hospital ER, by which time he had regained control of himself and begun weeping, regretting what he had tried to do. But I had reacted instinctively, correctly, back then—the nurses praised me.
Yet decades later, here I was, hesitating to dash behind the counter and help Tony. All kinds of scenarios ran through my head. Would I be accused of looting the cash register—or trying to—digging my gnarly old fingers into the drawer? Was Tony really in distress? Or would he suddenly jump up like nothing had happened and gaze at me like I was delusional and addled, an old fool, a lame and overly panicked gray ghost, for trying to help? And besides, what does one do for a person having a seizure? I hadn’t the slightest idea. Lift his head? Turn him around? Shake him? Slap him silly and tell him to wake up? What if I do the wrong thing, I thought, and kill the sonofabitch?
Then I suddenly remembered my cousin Shimmy. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about Shimmy, and I didn’t know him that well, just from family gatherings when I was a boy, but his stupid tragic story, often retold with shame and sympathy on those rare occasions, mostly funerals, when our cousins got together, periodically haunted me.
“Shimmy” is a Yiddish nickname for Sam—usually conferred on those Sams with a bit of personality and panache, which is exactly how to describe Shimmy. A character, to say the least—and, you might say, a trouper. He kept himself going well past his prime. Or, to put it another way, imagined and gambled on an extended prime.
Shimmy liked to sing and dance—and people all over loved and appreciated watching him. He was the life of any party. Sometimes he wore black-and-white saddle shoes with taps on them—he could dance like Fred Astaire—and he played the piano with verve, lots of ragtime. Long time ago, he sold his business and retired—I can’t remember what he did for a living, but he made a lot of money—and moved with his wife to Miami, where he could dance, sing and play the piano all the time.
Until that day, when he was on his way home, driving from the Jewish Community Center where he had been entertaining some people his own age, and confused the sidewalk with the street, which, when you are 88 and still have the ragtime in your head, and you are tapping your saddle shoes to the beat, maybe on the accelerator, is probably easy to do. Shimmy mowed down and killed two people who were standing on the sidewalk waiting for a bus, which is what Shimmy should have been doing. Waiting for a bus, instead of shimmying in his car. He never played the piano or tapped those saddle shoes again, and he died soon thereafter, from grief and old age.
Although I hardly even knew him, Shimmy’s story pops up in my mind from time to time, primarily because I don’t want to do what I have come to call “pulling a Shimmy,” by which I mean screwing up—getting too old, so old that you lose control and suddenly can’t do what you know you should, must, do. Right then, standing motionless in Starbucks as I stared at Tony, frozen like a fool, gawking, for those maybe fifteen seemingly endless seconds, I realized, I feared, that I might be on the verge of pulling a Shimmy.
“Aging for most of us is a silent process, of which we are often unaware—until a transition, an awakening, occurs.”
It required a massive effort to unglue myself, but finally I came to my senses and dashed around the counter. I laid Tony flat on the floor, put a towel under his head, and called 911 for help. It was easy, nothing to it, the right thing to do, instinctively, and yet I had hesitated. I felt so dumb, unraveling the way I did.
That incident with Tony scared the bejeezus out of me. My hesitation, my inability to instantly act, was not good—not me. I had never been a procrastinator. Ask the people who know me, work with me. I get on everyone’s last nerves because I am such a take-charge fellow. “Actions speak louder than words” is my mantra. I annoy people constantly by asking them, did they do their research, did they make a back-up plan, did they take advantage of obvious opportunities, did they follow through, did they act with authority and decisiveness? Now look at me: I can’t even act decisively and follow through to save a life.
“This will never happen again,” I vowed, as the paramedics arrived to tend to Tony. “No more backsliding or bungling for Mr. Lee!” But when you get old—too old—perhaps you lose your judgment. You don’t see or comprehend everything as instantaneously and unambiguously as you once did. At least, I don’t think you do. But how can I be sure? It’s hard to know what you really know at 70. You think you know a lot, age leads to wisdom and a rich bank of knowledge, but sometimes you behave like there’s a goddamn screw loose. You want to tighten it, but then you can’t remember where you put the screwdriver. Or what a screwdriver is.
Aging for most of us is a silent process, of which we are often unaware—until a transition, an awakening, occurs. When you are a kid, you want to be older, 16, 18, 21, so that you can drive, vote, and then legally drink. Later, it is okay to be a little older so that people will stop telling you that you are too young to understand life, marriage, politics, or too inexperienced to qualify for a job. Getting older to a certain point is OK, good in fact, until suddenly you cross the line and you’re too old—or even if you’re not quite too old yet, you’re very aware that age and over-the-hill-ness, as noted and judged by society, the world at large, is catching up with you. And you have to do something about it, fast, before you begin to circle the too-old, doomed-for-the-rest-of-your-life drainpipe.
This is an excerpt from Lee Gutkind’s just-released memoir, My Last Eight Thousand Days. Read our "Story Behind the Story" with Gutkind to learn more about how and why he wrote the book.
Lee Gutkind is the author of My Last Eight Thousand Days: An American Male in His Seventies and the founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction, the first and largest literary magazine to publish narrative nonfiction exclusively. He is a professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University.