A friend of mine turned 90 this week, just as I will likely turn 68 at mid-month. There is nothing inexorable about turning 90, or even 68, even if the continual rotation of the clock’s hands remind us that the passage of time is. We are either here or not to celebrate our birthdays when the hands reach the appointed hour. Time just keeps moving; it cares nothing for the clock, for clocks, no matter how sophisticated or precise, are nothing more than mankind’s puny attempt to bring it to heel. After all, time will surely outlast the clock; will surely outlast us.
But when the clock’s hands do reach the anniversary of our moment of birth, it is a moment for celebration, and meaningful celebration requires reflection upon how a life has been lived. While it’s perfectly proper to blow a birthday horn in recognition of someone merely having outlasted, once again, the clock’s turnings for one more year, such an act of celebration seems more relevant for a one-year-old than a 90-year-old. The newly born have the grace of an innocence derived from a lack of significant experience; 90-year-olds can make no such claim, nor should they wish to.
My friend has much of which to be proud, and no doubt a few sorrows and misgivings as well. But sorrows and misgivings are private things, and surely should remain so. For each of us is singularly ill-prepared to judge our own worth, eccentricity being the essence of existence. When one is a tree, the fact of the forest is lost. A tree’s consciousness stops at the bark, ours at the skin. Only the forest, only the collective consciousness, is able to judge us for what we’ve become.
My friend has done many things in a long life, things that most of us can only wonder about. He fought in a war once, exhibiting such significant bravery that he earned a Silver Star, a medal some argue was insufficient reward for the lives saved by his continuous acts of courage. He returned from war to go to law school, taking up his place in his community by practicing law at the sort of stellar level that causes lawyers – beings defined by their parsimony of praise – to grudgingly recognize publicly a few of their fellows for their abilities and skills. This recognition came to my friend not once, but repeatedly. Upon his retirement from practice, he decided to engage in further studies of life, of writing, of travel, of the experience of everything under his sun – for his is an ever inquiring mind.
But his was only a retirement from the practice of law, for in this so-called retirement he determined to wrestle with the devil he knew best – memories of a hot August sun on a hilltop in France where death was all about him, north, south, east, west. In so doing he exhibited his courage anew, for this was a wrestling match with his own deep-rooted emotions and regrets – emotions and regrets honed and quickened each year when the clock’s hands celebrated anew those seminal weeks of a long-ago August from which they sprang. The most obvious product of this wrestling match was a book; the less obvious product a sense of self-acceptance and peace within himself for a job well done. For, when finished with his writing, he’d come to understand he had done all that anyone could possibly have asked of him given the cards he’d been dealt in the heat of that French August, the kind of understanding achievable only by consciously wrestling with one’s most powerful demons.
I will see my friend tomorrow at his birthday celebration, and have been asked, along with all other attendees, to be prepared to provide an anecdote of his life. I find this an extraordinarily difficult assignment. How can I, in a single anecdote, celebrate someone who is simultaneously mentor, role model, partner, fellow conspirator, fellow instigator, and friend? How, after all, can I celebrate a life that has risen to heights I’ve never trod?
Every forest possesses one or two tall trees that stand out from any vantage point from which the forest, in its totality, may be observed, those one or two trees always in search of the light. One of those tall trees in the forest in which I am privileged to stand is my friend, my friend who turned 90 this week.
