CONSIDERING THE ALTERNATIVE
by Garrison "Garry" Minstone

I never thought it was going to be a joke to reach middle age. You look into the mirror one morning and there you see your mom or your dad looking back at you. Well, what does it mean when you look in the mirror and see your grandmother or grandfather taunting you? It means that you're turning 60, turning the big 6-0, turning one of the last pages in the book of your life that you always thought you would write a book about by now.

This morning that happened to me!

I was born in Manhattan not long before WWII. I was too young to understand what that was all about. Only its aftermath had affected me. The year I was born was an odd year, which made me a bit too old to be a Boomer. And so, I spent my formative years without television, which came to our neighborhood just after 'the war'. So, instead, I grew up on books, radio shows and opera music. By the age of five I could sing the entire arias of operas. So, you see, television is something I can approach critically -- it has not "always been there" for me.

Being born in a cusp year of two radically different lifestyles led me to face radical decisions when I became a teenager. Would my nature lead me to live a life modeled on the conformist 1950s, which were then winding down, or would I rebel against them? Which was it going to be? Joyce, Elvis or Pat Boone? Hip or square?

Little did I know that fifteen years from the end of 'that war' until the end of the fifties, that this would be my only window of opportunity. As the sixties approached, many people who took the position that "materialization" was evil denied themselves great financial advantages because they wouldn't let go of their idealism. Those unfortunates were our younger brothers and sisters, born after the war, the true Boomers, who morphed into consumer-oriented yuppies -- probably because television reached them earlier. A note: Bill Clinton is not of my generation, thank you very much.

The models in my mind for being 60 are, naturally, my parents and grandparents. By their 60's, their lives were pretty much done. Not that they were dead -- they had followed traditional paths -- caring for aging parents, marrying, raising children. Then life moved beyond them, but they lived on, watching television, talking to friends, burying husbands, babysitting for their grandchildren -- killing time.

That may be the image lingering in my head, but it's certainly not the truth about our lives now. Actually, I feel like I'm just getting started. I feel like I'm entering my prime. A lot of the doubts and fears that tormented me when I was younger are gone. I know exactly who I am, what I do well, and what I don't. And I know that it doesn't matter how I look. What matters is that I'm here. I feel powerful. I'm raring to go!

But please, please, don't tell that to my body. Sixty also means that I'm wearing down. The famous "indignities of age" have arrived in force, and some of them make me furious. I take pills to keep my bones from shrinking and becoming brittle; in fact, I take pills for a lot of things. I have aches and pains, bags and sags, lines and bulges.

And then there's that gray hair or no hair at all!

I still hike up and down mountains, but I also take naps. Twenty years ago, to face down turning 40, I started running but somehow, for some reason, I stopped! But, I'm happy to report to you that three weeks ago I started running again to face down turning 60. But this time I found that I couldn't read the dial on my watch without my glasses.

Turning 60 means that I'm coming closer to the end of my life. But when that thought gets me down, I just conjure up images of my parents and, while they didn't look like the 60's of today, they did conduct active lives. At 65ish my parents drove a van cross-country and camped out wherever they could along the way. The next year they waved good-bye as they boarded an Italian liner saying they would see me in about a year!

Based on that I plan to turn 60 by confronting it openly, partly by writing this column. Are you horrified? First of all, why would I go around telling people I'm turning 60? Because, dear reader, it's a hard number to face! Wouldn't you have a hard time with it? Looking back, I even had a hard time turning 30!

I have found that the biggest part of turning 60 is letting go of dreams. I'm never going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I'm probably never going to get that call from the editors of The New Yorker. And those secret MacArthur Grant "nominators" will probably pass me by forever.

Another part of turning 60 is accepting loss. There are relatives and friends I've loved who are no longer in my life, and I still miss them. I have friends now who are really sick, and I'm scared for them. I've already buried my grandparents, my father, mother and one brother. I've also buried much of my unbridled optimism about human nature.

But I consider myself blessed. I, who was once literally 'dirt' poor, starting out my adult life without a college education, made it! I survived all of the unnerving changes that have infected our society. So here I am today, a survivor of 60 years of hard change. My life has, for the most part, come out OK.