72 Is the New 27

The flip side of the “27 Club” is the “72 Club.”

Music lovers have all heard of the “27 Club,” personified by Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, Cobain, et al. and no doubt knew people personally that died of overdoses or suicide at that age. Statistics don’t actually bear out that exact age, but a term like “late  adolescence,” might apply. The insurance company actuaries were well aware of the impulsive nature of brains that were still developing into their later 20s. When I was 24, I bought my first (only) new car. I was surprised to discover that in spite of my clean driving record, I had sky-high premiums, based on the fact that I wasn’t yet 25 years old. Recent studies involving fMRI  scans push that age even higher. “Functional” scans of the brain as it “functions,” light up the screen where “the action” is taking place, based on blood flow, hence the term “lights up.”

The last few years there has been a rash of musicians such as Johnny Winter, JJ Cale and Lou Reed who have died in their early 70s. This led to another of my “bright ideas from a dim bulb” and transposing “27” into “72.” Like the 27 Club, “72” is useful only as a dramatic label and easily remembered meme. George Harrison’s lung cancer did him in, in his mid-60s.

The folks that escaped death at 27, but continued abusing their brain and body, are now dying of avoidable causes and, of course, aging means that there even more people we knew personally who died way too young. Some of my own friends, who severely abused alcohol or illegal drugs in their younger years, actually wound up perishing at the hands of mankind’s deadliest drug scourge, nicotine.  And some never abused any drugs but nicotine.

Sadly, I lost two classmates this spring who apparently lived not only highly useful lives, but basically healthy ones. One to cancer, perhaps from his addiction to golf on chemically-treated turf, the other who shared with me at our 55^th Class Reunion last year that his father had a sudden heart attack in his 50s.

And some, like myself, who pulled out of their nosedives just in the nick of time, are snatched up by carelessness as they forget that even a healthy 72-year-old doesn’t have the balance and reflexes of days gone by. It seems like every time I hear about people crushed by a tree they were felling or breaking their necks falling off ladders while cleaning their gutters, they are in their late sixties or early seventies. I’m talking to you, Pete, and that’s not idle speculation.

In spite of having thought about this issue already, on the Fourth of July, 2015, I was pruning branches with a pole as I stood on a ledge I had built years ago out of concrete highway-paving-test cylinders. I was aware of the balance issues, both in looking up for too long and losing my balance or the possibility of the branch suddenly yielding to my shears, allowing me to be propelled backwards as the resistance vanished and the branch used judo on me.

As it happened, the pole just slipped off the branch, producing the same result, and I was falling backwards, aware there was nothing behind me but either sharp or hard objects and some of them a couple of feet below the elevation of the retaining wall I stood upon. My feet are fast and biking 2K miles a year keeps my legs strong, but I instantly sensed I wasn’t going to pull out of this one by getting a foot behind me. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a small plum trunk and grabbed it with my right hand. It was a dead trunk that snapped at the root, but it retained just enough connection to slow down my free fall and enable me to plant my foot behind me. No trunk to grab? Busted head. No sliver of connection? Busted head.

Just to add to the possibility of a bad outcome, no one knew I was back there, let alone back there with me. I’m grateful for the health I so casually risked, so I hope I learned a lesson, but I probably didn’t.

Just because I feel so damn good doesn’t mean I can’t lose it all in seconds, so I need to accept that aging brings physical limitations that need to be respected. Once accepted, I need a policy in place that eliminates activities that exceed my current limitations. Once I decide upon a policy, I need to follow it. Always. Impatience is not a valid overriding reason. A policy “broken at will, becomes a mere procession of vagaries” (Wolfe, N).

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