60 thoughts about turning 60

1. People who “hate getting old” are idiots. Every year is a privilege. Let me tell you, callow miserabilists: getting to 60 feels like a triumph.

6. When someone starts a sentence “I’m not being…”, they always are.

8. All these memories darting through my mind like discarded fairground goldfish in a sewer. The random kindnesses of strangers, how they glide and shimmer.

17. The scarier the world becomes, the more important it is to focus on the correct use of “less” and “fewer”.

35. There is not a single bad mood that cannot be lifted, however grudgingly, by reading a Larkin poem.

"When you’re young – when I was young – you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become. You want them to tell you that things are OK. And is there anything wrong with that?"

Julian Barnes | The Sense of an Ending

"It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others."

Julian Barnes | The Sense of an Ending

"The girl had no idea, as she plunked down their mugs of coffee, that her own arm would someday be sprinkled with age spots, or that cups of coffee had to be planned since blood pressure medicine made you widdle so much, that life picked up speed, and then most of it was gone - made you breathless, really."

Elizabeth Strout | Olive Kitteridge

"The mind, or the heart, she didn’t know which one it was, but it was slower these days, not catching up, and she felt like a big, fat field mouse scrambling to get up on a ball that was right in front of her turning faster and faster, and she couldn’t get her scratchy frantic limbs up onto it."

Elizabeth Strout | Olive Kitteridge

"God, I love young people,” Harmon said. “They get griped about enough. People like to think the younger generation’s job is to steer the world to hell. But it’s never true, is it? They’re hopeful and good - and that’s how it should be."

Elizabeth Strout | Olive Kitteridge

"She thinks of Eddie Junior down there skipping stones, and she can only just remember that feeling herself, being young enough to pick up a rock, throw it out to sea with force, still young enough to do that, throw that damn stone."

Elizabeth Strout | Olive Kitteridge

"What young people didn’t know, she thought, lying down beside this man, his hand on her shoulder, her arm; oh, what young people did not know. They did not know that lumpy, aged, and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm ones, that love was not to be tossed away carelessly, as if it were a tart on a platter with others that got passed around again. No, if love was available, one chose it, or didn’t choose it."

Elizabeth Strout | Olive Kitteridge

The Young Ones, Flip Side

In tight pants, tight skirts,
Stretched or squeezed,
Youth hurts,
Crammed in, bursting out,
Flesh will sing
And hide its doubt
In nervous hips, hopping glance,
Usurping rouge,
Provoking stance.

Put off, or put on,
Youth hurts. And then
It’s gone.

James Emanuel

72nd Birthday

    Sitting on
    the hill at
    sunrise with
    my coffee &
    cigarettes
    thinking
    fond thoughts
    of all those who
    hate my guts.

John Bennett

Prayers of Old Men

    I’ll bet you think the old men
    are praying to be young men
    with young lovers, but
    they kneel now beside your bed
    and pray for the things young men
    haven’t heard of yet -
    the high plateaus of you
    and the rivers rushing
    to the deep sea of you.
    Old men pray for height and depth
    and the quivering leaf of your ear
    touched by a tongue,
    for that quiet cove of you
    where they may lie sheltered
    for one more evening.
    They pray for the light
    of sunrise in your eyes
    and they pray to believe
    in whoever they pray to
    for they want to believe in everything,
    because believing in nothing didn’t work.
    And they pray for the touch of you on me.
    They’re all praying for you and for me,
    the high ground of you towering
    above me, and the river,
    they’re praying now for the river of you,
    and they’re praying for me
    to go adrift in the river
    to the sea of you,
    to the sea of you,
    praying I’ll be lost at sea in you
    and they’re secretly praying
    that this storm will drown me
    in the depths of you,
    because they are old men
    and they know I am a sailor,
    and they know that drowning
    is the only way for sailors
    to get home.

Ralph Murre

101 - Women →

Weighing In

What the scale tells you is how much the earth
has missed you, body, how it wants you back
again after you leave it to go forth

into the light. Do you remember how
earth hardly noticed you then? Others would rock
you in their arms, warm in the flow

that fed you, coaxed you upright. Then earth began
to claim you with spots and fevers, began to lick
at you with a bruised knee, a bloody shin,

and finally to stoke you, body, drumming
intimate coded messages through music
you danced to unawares, there in your dreaming

and your poems and your obedient blood.
Body, how useful you became, how lucky,
heavy with news and breakage, rich, and sad,

sometimes, imagining that greedy zero
you must have been, that promising empty sack
of possibilities, never-to-come tomorrow.

But look at you now, body, soft old shoe
that love wears when it’s stirring, look down, look
how earth wants what you weigh, needs what you know.

Rhina Espaillat

"Before I fell asleep, eventually, was thinking when I was a small kid how I’d try to imagine the end of the century and what a far-off wonder that was and I’d figure out how old I’d be when the century ended, years, months, days, and now look, incredible, we’re here - we’re six years in and I realize I’m the same skinny kid, my life shadowed by his presence, won’t step on cracks on the sidewalk, not as a superstition but as a test, a discipline, still do it. What else? Bites the skin off the edge of his thumbnail, always the right thumb, still do it, loose piece of dead skin, that’s how I know who I am."

Don DeLillo | Point Omega