Turning 65 - Officially an Old Fart

Saturday, September 1, 2018

Today is the beginning of my 65^th spin around the Sun. My Medicare A and B card arrived last week. And my mailbox is now full of offers from companies wanting to sell me supplemental plans. They’ve temporarily replaced the flood of political propaganda that jammed our box until last week’s primary election. I’m even considering joining AARP if for no other reason than the savings that membership can provide.

Let’s face it. As of today, I’m officially an Old Fart. And truth be told, I’m just fine with that.

A lot of my fellow Boomers lament the reality of leaving behind their youth. From my perspective, I’m just glad to have made it this far. In a life as intensely and unrelentingly  lived as my own has been, that was never a given. Today, I will celebrate having made it to 65.

Deo Gratias! 

I promised myself I’d never be one of those old people who got together and complained about physical ailments and treatments. Even so, I find myself discussing the little surprises our bodies spring on us with people my age and older. This is as close as our youth worshipping culture gets to badly needed rituals to gracefully let go of vitality and agility that comes with the aging process, not the least of which is the ever nearer presence of Sister Death.

And so we gently kvetch.

Truth be told, I am grateful to be in as good of physical health as I am. My primary weak point right now is my knees, both of which bear torn menisci. I have been undergoing a treatment called prolotherapy designed to stimulate reparative growth of knee cartilage. While the knees still ache, they are better than they were prior to the therapy. My goal is to avoid knee replacement surgery as long as possible. I’ve seen how rigorous that surgery and recovery is and I know that not all surgery is successful. Time will tell.

I also control mild blood pressure and a mild case of Barrett’s Syndrome with medication. I take a handful of supplements each day and give thanks I am able to afford all the forms of medication I need to remain healthy.  I know only too well that is not necessarily a given in a socially irresponsible culture like our own. Best part of reaching 65 is that I am finally eligible for Medicare.

A Rich Life of Study

As I look back over my now completed 64 years of life, my primary reaction is gratitude. I have never made a lot of money in my life and I’ve never commanded much power or social status. As alluring as those temptations may have been, they were never my callings. I’ve pretty much swum upstream all my life, drawing into question a culture which holds those  values as its ultimate concerns.

Little wonder I celebrate having survived this long.

But I have nonetheless led a privileged life in many ways, not the least of which was winning the genetic lottery. I was  born into a loving family of well educated parents who later produced two siblings and now their children whose lives I have always cherished sharing. I was born with a good brain which my parents insisted I develop to its greatest potential. And I was raised in a family whose values included a respect for the common people, an awareness of the suffering in the world and a duty driven by compassion to address that suffering as best I could.

Those have been my callings all of my life. They continue to be my callings today.

My life efforts have produced a modest monetary reward. My highest annual salary was in 2016, the year I retired from the university, when I made $62,000 working three different jobs drawing on three different graduate degrees. So much for the add-on value of higher education and the value of public service to our culture.

Even so, I have led an incredibly rich life. My husband often reminds me that when he met me at the Kappa Sigma fraternity house in Gainesville, he thought I was the most curious human being he’d ever met. I have little idea of how I compare to others on curiosity but a desire to understand the world and experience as much of it as I could has always been my deepest yearning. And given those desires, my life has amassed a wealth of understandings attained through study, work experience and travel.

I don’t think you can really understand people until you’ve shared a bit of their lives. My work life began in the fields of Sumter County where I was raised, picking peas, bell peppers and tossing watermelon. What I learned from that experience has stayed with me all my life.

Agricultural work is hard. It ages workers prematurely and ultimately beats their bodies to a withered pulp. I gained a great deal of respect for working class people during those summers. Our daily bread is never simply a gift dropped from the heavens to people who believe they are entitled to it. It comes by the hands of people whose faces we do not see and whose labor we often take for granted. 

If you want to enrage me, refer to the immigrant farmworkers who have long since taken the place of privileged men like me in those demanding fields as lazy. I've been there. I know better.

I also learned a lot about myself that summer. Many of my co-workers carrying those bushel baskets to scoop up bell pepper, paid by the hamper and then only minimally, would spend the rest of their lives in those fields until their bodies simply wore out. Even as I shared their experience, sweating like a pig, treating my sunburned lower back - exposed when I bent over the rows of pepper plants – with aloe and trembling when lightning or snakes appeared, I always knew that my time there was finite.

At the end of that last summer I knew I would be off to college, off to a life that most of these folks would never know. And at that moment, I recognized my own privilege.

Since that time, I’ve worked in a couple of department stores selling clothes, at several newspapers as reporter and copy editor, and practiced law for about eight years. I also worked as a summer intern in the halls of Congress. But the bulk of my employment has always been in education. I have taught students from fifth grade to doctoral work, the bulk of which occurred in higher education. It has always been my deepest calling. 

My curiosity drove me to study the subjects that I always cared about – history, politics, law, sociology, religion, theology. And my privilege (as well as my willingness to work while studying and to pay back three rounds of major loans) allowed me to study at state universities ranging from Florida’s two oldest universities to classrooms at Berkeley, Vanderbilt, East Lansing and on-site in Israel, Brasil and across Central and South America.

The understanding of what it means to be human I have been able to develop from this life of study and travel has been rich indeed. And for all of that I am deeply grateful.

A Rich Home Life

Where I truly realize my good fortune is in this home we call New Coverleigh (Coverston + Moberleigh, Andy’s ancient family name). As I write this day. I look out my office window to a yard full of trees, flowering shrubs and vines. Interspersed among the vegetation are statues honoring the symbols of faith traditions from Sts. Francis and Clare (complete with a Wolf of Gubbio!) to Shinto stone lanterns delineating a sacred space to the Buddha and Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion, who oversee our beloved jungle.

Within my home live my life’s greatest treasures: Oscar Dachshund, Saidy Beagle, Magadalena, Romero and Frida, the cats who own us, and my gentle spirited husband of 8 years and life partner of now 44 years. The walls bear the art and photographs from my travels as well as bookshelves holding thousands of books from 17 years of higher education.

We had to rebuild our beautiful home after it was destroyed by Hurricane Charley in 2004. We were out of our home for nearly four years and we had two contractors begin work on the repairs and leave before they were completed. We ultimately took out the permits to finish the work ourselves. 

Little wonder this place is so dear to us. 

My ability to retire from the university three years ago was predicated upon our ability to pay off both the remaining mortgage on our rebuilt home (we lost $30,000 on the reconstruction above insurance) and my ability to finally pay off my student loans for my last round of graduate education. So I have much for which to give thanks in my life.

We live in a progressive, highly diverse city, a cosmopolitan and relatively compassionate blue island amidst an angry red sea. There is a modicum of safety in this oasis even as it is always tentative in the polarized times in which we live. I pray this oasis does not ultimately prove to be a mirage.

I love being uncle to my brother’s three children and my sister’s two. My siblings both live within an hour and a half of me and I am grateful to see them fairly regularly. My parish, St. Richard’s Episcopal in Winter Park, is the center of much of my life activities these days. I cherish the friends I have there and the ministry I am able to offer there.

There are many nights I lay in bed just before dropping off to sleep, listening to the gentle snoring all around me. I look across the room to the smiling images staring back at me, hanging from the Tree of Life above my ancestor altar, and I tell myself “You are the luckiest man in the world.” And in all honesty, I really feel that I am. 

For all of these things I am deeply grateful this 65^th anniversary of my birth.

And Now for a Little Solitude

One of the ways I know I am 65 is how tired I feel just laying out my account of this very full life. I have just completed an 18 month period of serving as executor for my Father’s estate. That has included the selling of our homestead in Bushnell, a labor fraught with no small amount of emotional baggage. My Dad, Brother and I had cleared the property on which we built our house, the house my best friend’s father designed and constructed.

Though none of us were willing to move back to the woods of Sumter County, letting go of Edenfield, our family home with its banks of azaleas that bloomed each spring and its 300 year old live oak Tree of Life, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my life. At the end of that long process, I am feeling pretty drained.

This fall I chose not to teach and I have ended my contract work with the Florida Humanities Council. I’ve also trimmed my ministry in the parish to a minimum. But it’s not like I will have much time to sit on my laurels. I still have a house full of photos, books and household effects from our family home to sift through and dispose of. That includes several boxes of the genealogical materials my Father slaved over to try and discover who we were and where we came from. To his credit, my recent 23 and Me report verified exactly what he found and what I’ve told people for years: We are Celt and Kraut to the bone. 

I find myself at the odd place of craving silence and solitude for the first time in my life. A screaming extravert from childhood, I have come to love the early mornings I spend on my meditation bench in my garden as the sun rises through the trees to a chorus of birds. I have come to crave my afternoon naps curled up with my two dogs and three cats, a book laying open across my chest.

I’ve recently bought a loom and hope to begin learning to weave. My Mother’s family name was Webb, German for weaver, so I guess it’s in my DNA much like teaching (fifth generation of teachers in the family, great-grandparents named Reed and Wright). I’m even on occasion playing my piano which has sat ignored for years.

Most of all, I cherish my time in my garden, rooting cuttings from our family estate, planting seeds from fading heads of flowers snatched from roadsides and trying to stay one step ahead of a vibrant jungle more than willing to take over if given half a chance. Touching the good Earth provides the grounding my tired soul needs at this moment.

Even so, my guess is that my public life is not over yet. I have a sense that I am simply catching my breath. Once I get through all the materials from my family home, I intend to devote myself to writing and doing some photography. I believe that ultimately, I will engage the world of public scholarship once again. And I believe my rich life of learning and experience may well provide me something of value to offer that  world.

Before this Labor Day weekend is over, I will have spent my birthday at Cassadaga, one of my favorite places in Florida, received my birthday blessing at St. Richards and celebrated eucharist there Sunday night. On Labor Day Andy and I will walk the beach at Cape Canaveral and end the evening with supper at one of my favorite places there. It’s been a perfect way to launch this 65^th spin around the Sun.

Today, I give thanks for a rich life and a fortunate existence. I offer my gratitude for making it to old fartdom and living to tell the story. And I thank you for taking the time to read it.

Deo Gratias!

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

 frharry@cfl.rr.com

hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993) 

 © Harry Coverston 2018

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