Reflections Upon Becoming 83

[Ted Robinson]

After all the bumps and breaks my weathered hide absorbed during this journey, reaching the far side of 83 comes as a welcome surprise.  I once thought people this age were supposed to go someplace and expire, but here I am, still walking straight up, about as physically able as ever, still cogitating with passable mental functionings and now gunning my new metallic-Bordeaux Maserati down long stretches of highway.  I plan to use my post-80 years as what, to my mind, they are.  Bonuses.  After 80 we play with house money, age-wise.

Even so I no longer buy any green bananas, since ancients like myself have to consider the reality of their mortality about now.  Karmic questions arising from that reality began to surface awhile back from my smattering of physics, ranging from forever dimensions at quantum quark-levels up through the Newtonian yikes-size universe.  The formation of trillions of similar sun-dependent planets, popping up from a speck the size of nothing, is just one of the clues that we've only peeked at through the keyhole toward layers of discovery yet to be uncovered behind those rigid scientific doorways.

Nonetheless a "Higher Intelligence" just cannot be?  Pshaw, considering mysteries like our popped-up existence, entanglement, multi-dimensions and dark matter that must be there but isn't, what's beyond belief?  These could be the tells of our poker-faced Cosmos, I suppose, although I doubt if the predictions they might lead us to regarding any next-phase after we shed these husks would be anything like the humanized Elysiums described in our religions.  Each True Religion carries its own version of multi-virgins and golden calves to salve the need for soul sanctuary, apparently, creating cocoons of communal ritual, woven together with oftentimes confusing beliefs.  Trouble is, the providing of such needs, though comforting and often beneficial, occasionally breeds dreadful masters.  Once control centralizes, both democracies and religions can devolve into depravity and suppression with an intensity that would make Caligula wince.

Until recently I had little time for these musings.  I was busy stumbling through life trying to become competent at a variety of disciplines, even achieving more than that at a few of them.  Unfortunately accomplishments both big and small, except for the shadows that remain awhile in a few memories, fast-fade into flyspecks within the tumbling continuum.  Getting accepted into intellectual societies was gratifying, though, except as an old commercial developer my personal perspective and interests may or may not be well-fitted into hi-Q or professional groupings.  I intellectually flop around in them like a landed tuna, but, eh, at the age of 83 you can still write an autobiographical/philosophical sketch like this, since it now falls within the forgiving penumbra of old-guy doddering.

My background for all this introspection includes a scrambled beginning, a bouncing around in kidhood after my father died of TB while I was still in the low single digits, then getting raised with my sister in various places on our widowed mother's waitress income, interluded for awhile by a mean-drunk stepfather.  Sometimes we lived in noisy little rooms of tired old brick hotels and once, circa WWII, even in a converted chicken coop with oil lamps and no inside plumbing.  But don't get me wrong about that part.  The coop was not bad at all, being located next to a trout stream and near a corral of elderly horses that we kids were free to exercise with bareback rides into the back hills and bat cavelands of New Mexico.  A childhood Nirvana, it was.  Kind of.

When we came back to the city I couldn't follow a nagging inclination to go out for sports for the first couple of years in high school because money was needed for the family.  I instead spent most of my sophomore and junior years sleeping in an enclosed back porch and working after school in a shop retreading truck tires, which required two or three hours a day of pretty heavy weightlifting.  When I did go out in my senior year I made the football and basketball varsities with those years of heavy lifting as a possible advantage, and being over 6'5" with acceptable running speed and ball-catching hands the size of baseball mitts, I became a first string end on both offense and defense in football.  But I had no real experience in football or basketball and don't recall doing anything special in either sport.

My mother never actually saw me play football, though.  She came to a game once and left almost immediately, because those were the days of leather helmets and no face guards.  There was blood on our faces and a player was being carried off the field, and she of Scottish birth and upbringing did not understand this game.  She did not want to watch it.  I could see her point there, but then I would catch and run with the ball and hear the crowd yelling and see my teammates trying to keep the opposing players from bringing me down.  The cheering crowds and the existence of teammates were experiences both new and uplifting for me, a sort of reattachment with society.

I went on to play football at UCLA but when injured too seriously to stay with it I ran for and won the editorship of the Daily Bruin instead, and luckily met and married beautiful Jean Mahoney the Prom Queen.  Then began the raising of two well-adjusted kids, acquiring two masters degrees at night, and writing "The Godhead" while going through the usual mundane jobs, layoffs and wrong turns.  Eventually I found my footing because of two good friends, the first one talking me into joining him in commercial real estate sales.  Since it required just a decent amount of thought and effort, this kind of work seemed akin to finding money, but then the second friend, twelve years later, convinced me to follow him into commercial development.  His name was Brian Bertha, he of the wild-man reputation and the only full business partner I ever had.  But on February 28, 1983, at the age of 42, Brian went down with his Beechcraft Baron into the Sierra Nevada mountains and, despite a massive search, was not found until five months later, after the snows had melted and some hikers came upon the wreckage.

Anyway it's been a life full of rough negotiators, strong family and friends, precipitous risks.  I've been in projects where any number of variables could have wiped us out.  I've also been alone and adrift in the Pacific Ocean on a broken sailboat for seven days, gotten beaten up as the sparring partner to a professional heavyweight boxer, and served two years as a draftee Army grunt on Okinawa with the reactivated Merrill's Marauders.  I began working at the age of 11 selling newspapers on a corner in a place called Atwater and ended up owning a number of commercial properties with no loans on anything, gotten written up a few times in Money Magazine, taken my family – now 13 strong with the addition of new grand-spouses – all over the world, and now have a 400-yard commute across the bay from my home dock on Lido Island to the office building and marina I built and own over the water in Newport Beach for my headquarters.  So I've sufficiently survived and, in the end, considering all this material stuff, thrived.

We're now closing in on 60 years of a great marriage and close-knit family and all the extraordinary people we've met in every socioeconomic phase of our path through this lifelong diorama of passing faces and places.  Now I'd like to imagine that when the time comes to discover whether oblivion or something else be our end-destinies, I could don that young mantle again.  I'd like to catch one last ball and feel that uplift once more, running with boundless energy toward whatever it happens to be, again wearing an old leather football helmet.  And I'm not sure I care how that final revelation turns out.  It'll be a new adventure, and this should be the way we look at it.  Otherwise we're just crew on the Pequod here, fussing over some unknown fate that we're all being steered toward.

Do these latter-day reflections, this life review, accomplish anything?  Or for that matter, matter?  Well they do to we seekers of context who want to tidy up, maybe even make sense of, our unfettered beginning-to-end stories.  But those need to be so clean and honest that when it comes time to write the epitaph for our headstones, all the honors and ornaments can be pushed aside and we'll instead carve into that stone just the one all-embracing truth of our experience here.

It would read, simply, "I have lived."

[swansont]

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Moderator Note

Ted, you need to get a blog. This is a discussion forum. The two are not the same thing.