Point of View: ‘And a Pacemaker’
After congratulating me on my 76th birthday and hearing that I still played tennis in mad dog fashion, Matt Charron, who does our photos, said, “I hear you’ve got some titanium in you. . . .”
“Yes, two knees,” I said. “But that’s nothing. Joe O’Connell, who still plays, told me he has two knees, a hip, a shoulder . . . and a pacemaker. ‘God,’ I told him, ‘you sure know how to rub it in!’ ”
“Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser,” Cam Newton has famously said. “I am a bad loser,” I confessed to my daughter Emily, “so thank God I always win. . . . At least Mike Press and I always do.”
“Keep it up, Dad,” she said.
“And tell the kids I’m hitting the ball as hard as Cam Newton throws it.”
“Kids, Grandpa Jack says he’s hitting the ball as hard as Peyton Manning throws it,” she called out to Jack and Max.
Jane Bimson made her wonderful carrot cake muffins slathered in that irresistible cream cheese icing for Min Hefner and my Feb. 11 birthdays, and, of course, by early afternoon last Thursday I’d wolfed down three.
“I’ve got to stop or something bad will happen,” I said, “like a stroke. . . . Three strokes and yer out.”
One always worries at this time of life, or phase of life — my mother used to say periodically that I was “going through a phase,” in an effort, I thought, to render banal what I viewed as brilliantly uncategorizable behavior — that something bad will happen, but, as Dave Van Ronk sang in “Cocaine Blues,” they don’t tell ya when.
I gather from having read a pale ontologist who writes wonderfully, Richard Fortey, that life is owing to fortuitous chance by and large, being as we are descended from photosynthetic blue-green mats, and that, moreover, it’s wishful thinking to believe that evolution’s goal is perfectibility.
Still, though we all have our flaws (floss, too, if you’re of a certain age), there remains the urge to, if not strive for excellence, as our scholar-athletes are said to do, at least to steadily improve — to acquire knowledge and wisdom, and to attain every now and then the joy that comes when you’ve kicked your opponents’ butts in doubles, at the ages of 80 and 76.