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Test-Driving Eternal Life By: Lorenzo Dee Belveal( 8-15-1918 to ??-??-???? ) =================== August 15 is a notable date in the pantheon of world events. In 1769, it marked the birth of Napoleon Bonapart. In 1945, it brought the unconditional surrender of the Japanese Empire, which effectively ended World War-II. In 1998, it brought me to the ranks of the duly designated and solidly certified octogenarians. Reaching eighty years of age is at once a unique distinction, and a highly improbable attainment. Globally, less than one person in one-hundred manages to do it, regardless of how careful they try to be. In view of such dreary statistics, it is an especially noteworthy achievement for one who, through a long and active lifetime, has showed only high disdain or total disregard for the generally accepted rules of prudent behavior and self-preservation. To say the least, surprising, and nobody is more surprised than I am. The Good Book tells us that, barring a plethora of unforeseen events that may foreshorten it, the life-span of homos sapien is at best, about seventy years. Actually the time period is set down as "three-score and ten" - which comes out to about the same thing. And, while nothing is said about how to stretch this number into a longer run at it, a long list of things may intervene to abbreviate one’s tour of duty in these earthly environs. Consider automobiles, motorcycles, shooting wars, and cigarette-smoking, for just four prime examples which come quickly to mind. Seventy years, therefore, is a kind of line drawn in the sand, beyond which our species should not expect to travel, except under what we may assume are highly benign and thoroughly unusual circumstances. In view of this, all of my life-planning has been based on seventy years as a most unlikely maximum, and a fraction of that outer limit has been accepted as a much more realistic de facto expectation. Having begun surreptitiously smoking cigarettes at twelve, and added cigars and a pipe at fourteen, anyone who can read must understand what large deductions were immediately entered on my Life-Expectancy balance sheet. I stand as one of the best friends the much-maligned tobacco companies ever had. Equitably, I have always thought that, sooner or later, I would have to pay for it. Debits for less-than-good behavior must come off the "threescore and ten" figure, of course. By this reckoning, my nicotine-and-tar intake must be expected to have put me back to - let’s be generous and say - a remaining life-expectancy of sixty-five. Then there is the matter of alcoholic beverages. Having sprung from a rich mix of western European forebears, who clearly outfitted me with a genetic tendency toward the grape and all of its delightful, if debilitating, by-products, another life-shortener - or several of them - hove into view. In addition to ulcers, cirrhosis, vertigo, eye problems and the associated risks of questionable (read: alcohol-drenched) companionship, the consumption of fermented and distilled beverages is sure to help send one off to an early grave. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Alcoholics Anonymous, and Billy Graham all enthusiastically agree on this grim prognosis. Who will make bold to quibble with such daunting consensus? Having discovered early on that I had a built-in affinity for the sauce, I decided to relax and enjoy the proclivity, rather than make my life miserable by fighting what I felt sure would turn out to be a losing battle. In testimonial to this decision, I have - over the last sixty years or more - pulled, drawn and popped more than my fair share of corks, caps and fancy patented closures, on my way to emptying a corresponding assortment of bottles, cans, jugs, Mason jars, flagons, flasks and demijohns. In the area of indiscriminate tippling, I have been able to make room for nearly everything from my sainted grandmother’s choke-cherry wine, to fermented yak milk, so much favored by the Nepalese sherpas residing in the Himalayan foothills. And a rich representation of the more main-line offerings in between. I have lived with but one inflexible rule: If it is more solid than liquid, and therefore something that requires chewing, I will not try to drink it without mastication. Except for this single common-sense precaution, when in my company, you may direct the Bartender to "decorate the mahogany" as often as you wish. Without any authoritative estimates concerning the life-shortening propensities of diligent, devoted free-form drinking, I must guess about this. Again, let conservatism be the watchword. In the absence of firm strictures rendering such indulgence either impossible or otherwise out of the question, I have done some drinking (a little or a lot, depending on incentive and opportunity) virtually every day of my life since I was old enough to vote - and, ipso facto, buy the stuff. What does this come out to, in terms of liquid measurement? God might have kept a tally-sheet. I did not. It has occasionally been informally reckoned by myself (and all too regularly by a pair of hyper-critical ex-wives), as "enough to float the Queen Mary", or "this building", or "a loaded railroad box-car". Or any other hard-to-float symbol that came quickly to mind. Whatever the precise gallonage, suffice it to say, it certainly would comprise no less than my fair share of the potables extant on our green planet on that particular day and date. Drinking, we are assured by a long list of neurasthenic temperance workers and fire-breathing television evangelists, is a notorious shortener of human life. By just how much, at least within my hearing, they have never said. For these instant purposes, however, might we settle on ten years - as a fitting charge against my theoretical longevity for loyally persistent sins against sobriety. Factoring this deduction into the arithmetic brings us to fifty-five years remaining, out of the original seventy-year entitlement I (all of us) begin with. Fair enough? To this point we have only touched on the largest of the lurking hazards that beset an unwary traveler on the enticingly pot-hole riddled road of life. Especially should s/he harbor tendencies toward indulgent behavior. Add to these obvious threats to longevity, such things as overeating, sky-diving, bungee-jumping, driving race cars, flying airplanes, racing passenger cars, dating young widows and middle-aged spinsters, school teachers of any age, eating spicy foods, failing to floss, reporting on wars, attending revolutions and local insurrections, and SCUBA diving somebody else’s regulator. Each of these imprudent exposures carries its own price, as reflected on the Life Expectancy chart mentioned previously. This is just the short list. But they are all things that I - man and boy - have done. Not once or twice, but on many occasions. And each such event, according to those dour folks who seem to find their only joy in calculating such things, deducted some finite period of time - an hour, a day, a week or a month, from the total time allocated to me at the outset. Which, of course, was in itself such a generous number, only on the unlikely expectation that I would zealously "take good care of myself". We should all think about this - as I surely am at this admittedly late date. Having carefully calculated this list of large and small life-shorteners, it is abundantly clear that I should have never lived to graduate from high school, or get a drivers license, or fight a war, sire children, or bless the lives of a rich succession of grateful ladies, who succumbed to my blandishments for one reason or another. In the most liberal frame of reference, every minute after about age fifteen, has come to me as an richly undeserved existential gift. With all of this behind me, my eightieth birthday struck me at what seemed to be the approximate speed of an inter-galactic rocket. I felt totally unprepared for such superannuation. Eighty years, for me at least, was insufficient time to make the necessary psychological preparations for my eightieth birthday party. It came as a shock - and got me to thinking about life and - more particularly - death . It appears ever more likely that I may a modern exception to the long-standing and firmly established mortality rule. I have begun to harbor a suspicion that I may live forever. This is a contingency that has never crossed my mind until quite recently, so I am quite ill-prepared for it. My firm expectation has always been to live a while - and then die, just like everybody else. Isn’t this the universal program? Except for Methuselah, and a few easily overlooked "begatters" in the front end of the Old Testament, this is the way I thought the script went - for all of us. Especially me. Remember the old saying: "Nothing sure but death and taxes". Now I’m not so sure. "Too late smart, and too soon dead". Maybe we can't count on it. If I would have ever thought I was going to live so long, I would have taken a lot better care of my skin. Now it’s too late. My endocrine system feels like twenty, but my skin looks more like the eighty it is. This is a hard combination with which to work creatively. Especially if you’re trying to take a Conover model down to Cannes for the weekend, and doing the negotiating in broad daylight. In years past, I’ve heard people say things like "On a day like this, I wouldn’t mind living forever." Or, "If this (whatever it is) keeps on keeping on, I think I can handle all there is left". Things like that. In fact, I have made similar statements in unguarded moments. When I said it, I had no idea that it might come to pass. But now events have put me in a more reflective frame of mind, as you might have guessed. When the mortality equation comes into question, you can bet that everything else we want to believe in is also up for grabs. What it comes down to, perhaps, is this: Once you’ve done it all, how many times do you want to repeat the experience? (With perhaps the single exception of taking that foxy Conover model down to Cannes for a weekend.) Anybody who lives to see a healthy seventieth birthday has ‘beat the system’. Obviously! Seventy is the red-line, and just about everything you do in life that you really enjoy, is supposed to subtract from that start-up time inventory. It makes sense. So, why would anyone want to change the eternal rules in the middle of the game, even if they could? That’s where I find myself: What’s to do? Here I am, ten years over the supposedly divine time limit, and still trying to decide what I want to be when I grow up. The alternatives are not unlimited. There’s no perceptible market for superannuated cowboys, over-aged astronauts or octogenarian movie stars. And I’ve already done everything else, at least once. Understand my quandary? Must I find a new career for my "golden years? Give me a break! I don’t want to be a school-crossing guard, or a grocery-bagger in Kroger’s. I’m beginning to feel obsolete. Like a single-speed bicycle - or a wind-up watch. It hasn’t all been time wasted, however. In eighty years I have learned some things that I wish I had known when I was twenty, or forty, or even sixty. In the interests of plain sociability and improving the species, I’ll share some of these insights with you. People who talk about aging, and don’t know really any better, will tell you that your memory is the "first thing to go". Not so. Memory lasts as long as you keep using it. Most people begin to die from the haircut, down. They are brain-dead for years, prior to their actual funeral, and all because of lack of intellectual activity. The most vulnerable components in the physical machine are the knees. Too many birthdays make your knees hurt. Check it out. If you want to avoid "knee problems", don’t hang around too long. If you do, you will have "knee problems". Ask any octogenarian! Age used to bring cataracts, glaucoma, and related eye problems leading to visual dysfunction and, ultimately, blindness. No more. Most sight problems can now be corrected by timely treatment or surgical intervention. For example, an ingenious bit of quick, easy, and painless surgery can supplant cataract-opaque lenses with crystal-clear Lucite. Not only will you see again; but you will see better than you can remember ever having seen before! I’ve had this operation on my own eyes, so you can safely trust me on this one. Next, there’s the matter of sex. As the birthdays add up, so does the time allocation required to "fly to the moon" - or whatever other figure of speech you prefer. And so do the intervals between trips. But don’t begrudge the extra time required. Just view it as taking all night to do what you used to think you wanted to do all night. All that’s required is a small mental adjustment. And, fortunately, there’s Viagra now, for those who have truly run out of natural steam. There is no gainsaying the fact that the "miracle" impotence pill is a great boon for those who need it. So are crutches, for people with serious locomotion problems. But don’t opt for the artificial supports until you really do need them. Whatever the function might be, nature probably does it better, for as long as nature does it at all. And remember the old axiom that nearly always holds true, regardless of what may be involved - "use it or lose it". So this is where I find myself. I’m ten years on the high side of the biblical offer, and at least thirty years beyond all of the statistical probabilities. And the hell of it is, that it never occurs to me, on going to bed at night, that it’s no better than an even bet that I’ll wake up in the morning. You don’t believe me? Check out your insurance agent’s actuarial chart. You’ll see! The cemeteries are stuffed with people lots younger that I am. This is what leads me to believe that I may be what the scholarly set chooses to call a "statistical aberration" I may be the one guy in a million who lives to be 150, or 900 (like Methuselah). Or even forever? I’m not the least bit sure I’m up for that. Nor my knees, for that matter. Seventy years is a good, solid, sensible number. Eighty? That represents a ten-year bonus for good behavior, I guess. Ninety? Most ninety-year-olds I have known didn’t seem to be having a lot of what I still call fun. One-hundred? Pure exhibitionism. Nothing else. Just showing off, to see how long they can keep on breathing. But forever? That number won’t compute for me. This is why I’m kind of test-driving this eternal life notion. One day at a time, and taking it easy at my life’s busier intersections. Stay in touch. I’ll keep you filled in as often as there’s something new to report. It’s too damned bad that Methuselah didn’t keep a diary. Had he done so, I could have some notion about what to expect next. If I knew, then I could tell you. =============THIS IS NOT THE E N D ================ Lorenzo Dee Belveal, Author
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