High Points

The other day we spoke to an acquaintance, the oldest active person we know.  He’s 92 years old, was married for 56 years, and now lives by himself in his house in Brooklyn.  Slim and quick moving, he appears to be in excellent health.  He still drives, although he confesses that when he has to park downhill from his destination, he sometimes finds the walk uphill trying. 

During the Second World War he served in the Navy, at one point the radio operator for an admiral.  He served on seven ships, two of which were sunk from under him.  He participated in four invasions: Sicily, Italy, Normandy, and as for the fourth one I’ll have to ask him to remind me.  Clearly it’s something he’ll never forget.  The stories he tells about his time in the navy are colorful and arresting.  It’s fun to hear them even when we’ve heard them several times before.  The Second World War was, I believe, the highpoint of his life.   He continues to relive it, not only in the stories he tells his younger listeners but also in his volunteer service with the American Legion and the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum.

He’s not alone in regarding wartime experience as a high point in his life.  This is said to be true for the survivors of the Blitz, for example.   Perhaps it’s the combination of involvement in a great undertaking supported by the whole population, the adrenalin rush from danger, and the camaraderie forged in battle, siege, or bombardment that was responsible for the feeling that every fiber of their being was wholly alive.

What must it be like to reach the high point of your life when you are so very young?  Is your life a long anti-climax?  I can’t answer that question from personal experience, for my own high points have been spread out over my lifetime.   Between the projects that have so enlivened me, among them the Language Survey of Ethiopia and Mark Twain’s world lecture tour, I feel a sense of anticlimax as  I search for a new project that will recapture the thrill of total involvement.  I’m in one of those troughs between projects today.  Like Helen Trent, who refused to believe that romance was over at 35, I refuse to believe that engagement in a great project is over at 80.   So I continue to look.  In the meantime, I'm grateful for the peaks of engagement I've experienced.  Even if I never find another, life won't have owed me a thing.

2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved