“WHEN I’M 64”

A broken shoelace waylaid me. Damn.

So I curse the inconvenience and go rummaging around in my tricky-drawer, frantically searching for a replacement lace, already running late for this-or-that meeting or whatever. Groping unsuccessfully, my hand comes across a swatch of cloth that looks like it was torn from a bed sheet. A crude peace symbol is scrawled on it in black felt tip. I pause. My furious rush-rush instantly seems to be so much less important as I am overtaken by bittersweet reminiscence to which I have grown accustomed as a sign of onrushing middle age.

This ragged cloth strip lying untouched for three-plus decades is the peace armband that I wore to my college graduation in 1970. Kent State. Cambodia. Jackson State. The Chicago Seven. The Peace Moratorium. Resisting the draft. My classmate, Larry Nelson, God rest his soul, coming home from ‘Nam with his hand blown off.

Funny. I finger the armband and I feature myself neither sage, nor witness, nor fossil. Oddly, the only feeling that I feel is unrepentant. An unrepentant liberal. We were naive, too easily co-opted by the shenanigans of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and largely incapable of perceiving the myriad shades of gray in a world that we insisted was stark black-and-white. And sometimes we were downright stupid.

Time has made us less naive. Experience has made us less gullible. Our own need to be understood has made us more understanding. And even our stupidity seems to be abating. However, I am not so much struck by the changes as I am by the ideals and impulses that time and experience have not changed. I think to myself, maybe just a little too smugly, that beyond my shiny blue Volvo and a couple of pinstripe suits, there is a lot about 31 years ago for which I do not feel a particular urge to repent.

We have, many of us 60's liberals, turned our bleeding-heart inclinations toward feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, and defending victims of AIDS against the discrimination born of homophobic paranoia. We are the ones who are still committed to building bridges between black and white, Jew and Christian, Israeli and Arab, powerful and powerless. We are the ones who still wonder aloud whether it is better for Nazis and Klansmen to march in the open or to be shoved underground. We are the ones who still wonder aloud whether putting even the most hardened criminal to death has any redemptive value, and whether the reality of poverty at our doorstep is any less “real” than the “reality” of “reality TV.”

We are the ones who still have a healthy skepticism of authority and institutions and power and bureaucracy and political manipulation. (I overheard myself recently being described as “a fossil of institutional anarchy”!) We are the ones who are confused and frustrated by our children's ideal-less-ness and narcissistic materialism. Yet we, unlike our own parents, are not so abhorring and judgmental of our children's music, clothing, antics, and vague glimmers of individualism . . . memories of my Dad, who got up and summarily changed channels three notes into the Beatles' first appearance on Ed Sullivan.

For however stupid we might have been, I still believe that the world is better off for the presence of unrepentant liberals on their collision course with middle age.
So for the first time in the longest time I pop my "Sergeant Pepper" tape into the nifty player in my shiny blue Volvo. "I read the news today, oh boy, about a lucky man who made the grade . . . “

Maybe and maybe not.

"Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64?"

I think to myself: I am a whole helluva lot closer to 64 than I am to those heady, deliciously naive days of 1970. And I lay the armband carefully in the drawer, and I find a new shoelace, and I lace up my shoe, and I straighten my tie, and I drive off in my shiny blue Volvo just a bit more sure of all that has changed and all that must somehow, some way, endure.