Point of View: Jack Be Nimble

“Have you noticed we’ve been watching a lot of movies about old people?” Mary said as we were viewing “The Last Laugh” with Chevy Chase and Richard Dreyfuss on TV. She paused a moment. “How did they get so old?!”

It’s true, I don’t look a day over 79, and Mary’s eternal youth is often remarked upon. She’s Irish, my valentine, with those high cheekbones, that’s why, and she’s got that Irish spirit. 

I guess that’s the way it is. One is always taken aback at how much others have aged, but in denial when it comes to oneself. I don’t feel old, mentally that is. I’m younger than springtime that way, though the joints need oiling. If steroids were widely available, with no harmful side effects, such as are rapidly ticked off in miracle drug TV ads, often including among the whispered risks “slight possibilities of coronary infarction and severe liver damage” — I would take them.

You do want to keep on keeping on as long as possible, to go while planting your cabbages or while planting a kiss, oblivious to oblivion. 

But some preparatory steps should be taken, I guess. Along that line, I was asked recently by one of our executors where I’d like my obsequies to be held. Perhaps at The Star itself. I’ve spent much of my life here, after all, and I don’t belong to any church or fraternal order or fire department or veterans organization that has a hall. 

Lewis Thomas said music was, in the end, humanity’s best invention, so I’ll make a playlist, beginning with “Stardust,” of course, and then go on to “Fly Me to the Moon,” a favorite of Mary’s, “By the Sea,” because that’s where we live, and “This Land Is Your Land,” because that’s how we ought to live. . . . Or, it occurs to me, I could get a Bose surround sound system and listen to all of those songs now right in my own house! Lugubriousness can wait.

Meanwhile, it’s Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the lone star tick.