HUU Sermon Archives

Now I Am Ninety

James Geary
September 19, 2004

Well, here we are. It's September 19, 2004, well into the 5th year of the 3rd Millennium A.D..

I didn't expect to be here. It was always my hope — and I considered it highly unlikely — to live and remain alert to age 86, because then I would witness the beginning of the new millennium, and the ending of a thousand years of remarkable civilization. I didn't dream about reaching 90. On the very few occasions I encountered a man of ninety who appeared in good shape, I would be absolutely amazed. I considered that a very rare possibility.

Now I am 90. And let me tell you, there is no one more astounded, more disbelieving of that fact than am I. I try to realize it, but I can't really grasp it No male in my family tree, that I know of, ever reached that age, although my hard-drinking paternal grandfather did reach 88. But then my maternal great grandfather, a part-time Methodist minister and a teetotaler, was 86. So maybe whisky is not the answer. And Oh, incidentally, my mother, who abhorred alcohol, lived to 100.

Maybe living to 90 is not so rare after all. I read the other day of a woman in Idaho who celebrated her 93rd birthday by parachuting out of an airplane. And we have had four attendees of this little fellowship to reach 90 this calendar year.

So, now that I am 90, what do I do to pass the day?. Well, here lately, I fall a lot. And I take a nap every afternoon — as I have for the past 30 or 40 years. And what does one think about at age 90. In my case, I can't help asking myself, "how much longer? How many more summers will I witness?" So, at least occasionally, one thinks about death.

As I have said here, more than once, for me, there is no fear of death. I know that death means simply that the light goes out, puff, like an electric bulb. The unique, biological pattern that is Jim Geary will no longer exist. There will be no memory, no soul, no looking down from heaven to see how my widow or my children are doing. There will be nothing; just the end of everything. And that, to me, my friends, is a very comforting IDEA.

Well, enough of those macabre thoughts. In general, broadly speaking, with exceptions and caveats, I think about the same things I thought about at 65 or 70 —what shall I do today? where shall we go on vacation? why can't my children write or call more often? what's for dinner? who's on first? I do often dwell on those natural phenomena that tend to reinforce my basic philosophy — don't we all.

Certainly by the time one is 90, he or she should take stock. What has been the meaning of it all? And the answer for me, as many of you know, is there was no meaning, there is no meaning. It has just been a long life with tens of thousands of actions and millions of thoughts, like every other long life. No ultimate meaning; no ultimate purpose.

The only purpose in life, it seems to me, is to bring the next generation into the world , and /or to nourish it. Everything in Nature reinforces that idea. In that limited sense, I guess my life has had some purpose. I have helped bring children into the world, and I have helped nourish them.

I do feel my life has been a lucky one. I believe everything is luck, some good, some bad. My life, it seems to me, has had more good luck than bad. I believe good luck is one's greatest asset. I frequently ask myself, why am I so lucky? Why was I lucky in my inheritance? Why was I — like most of you — lucky in the country I was born in, in the places I've been domiciled in. Why was I, as a child, so lucky to have so many people who loved me.

I had good luck in my Navy assignments in World War II; I never heard a shot fired in anger. I was lucky in the jobs that I have had, especially the last two, creative jobs in which I was the boss. And it was an odd piece of luck that has enabled me to travel in many distant lands. . On balance, I think, I have been lucky in love, especially in my marriage to Pat. And finally, and most importantly, I have been lucky in never having lost a child or a grandchild. If I knew whom or what to be thankful to, I would be most thankful for that.

None of that is bragging. I take no credit for it. It has just been the way the cookie crumbled. I have been and I have done what fate meted out to me. And there could be a big change at any time in what fate has in store for me. I am always conscious of that. But no matter what bad luck should befall me, I will never ask a pusillanimous "why me?"

Ninety is also a good time to be honest with oneself and with one's friends. I must face the fact that I have not been the fireball that I might have liked to be. I was content, and didn't try harder to go further.

I'm afraid I've been a dilettante.. I've had too many interests to throw myself single-mindedly into any one pursuit for any appreciable time. And there is something else: I've had a hard time sticking with any one conviction. On some questions I've been — well, a flip-flopper. That doesn't apply to my basic philosophy of life and of existence, which has been essentially the same since I was a teenager. But on some ethical questions, and in my politics I have not been constant.

Lets take politics. I have been both a radical of the left and a conservative. I have voted for Democrats and I have voted for Republicans. And at one time, when I was quite young, if I had been exposed to a viable Communist ticket and I had the vote, I would have voted for that. I have been an isolationist, and a proponent for more world cooperation and interaction.

My concern with politics began in my teens. First I was influenced by my mother and my uncle, both of whom were quite liberal Virginians. And then, partially to be near a girl I'd met, I spent my high school junior year in Pittsburgh with my grandmother and my father's two unmarried sisters. It was during the bitter Great Depression year if 1931-32. There was very high unemployment, with none of the government relief programs that brought a modicum of help to families later on. During the winter, I saw hundreds of men sleeping on newspapers under the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad station as the ground sloped down toward the Monongahela river. Also, my Pittsburgh family had only one clerkship salary plus a bit of money my father sent from Philadelphia, to keep us to keep us going. My views took a radical bent.

I returned to Virginia for my senior year, again, to some extent, because of my interest in another girl I'd met. I was a teenager. My Roanoke family also was stressed financially. And I came under the influence of my very liberal civics teacher, who had me read, unofficially, Edward Bellamy's socialistic Looking Backward. That really radicalized my political thinking. I became a devotee of the leftish magazines, the Nation and The New Republic. [I was fond of saying that a ditch digger ought to be paid more than the president of the Roanoke-based Norfolk & Western Railroad because the ditch digger had far more onerous work to do.][

But though I felt strongly on these matters, I was not and have never been an activist, either because of shyness or a feeling of futility..

I remained pretty much of a leftish radical through my college years, although my immersion in Darwinian evolution began to give me pause. Gradually I became more conservative, especially after graduating from college and becoming a newspaper reporter. I saw some of the workers in the new government relief projects looking bored, shuffling papers and cards, often in shoe boxes, and I began to think there was a lot of waste. [I voted against my long-time idle, Franklin Roosevelt, for a variety of reasons. One reason was I embraced the views of the America First party, which was against our getting involved in the war in Europe. But after Pearl Harbor, I volunteered for the Navy.

After getting out of the Navy in 1946, I soon quit my job on a newspaper and took one with the Veterans Administration for about a year. There I experienced how suffocating it is to work for the Federal government, even for an agency that was expanding so fast it was virtually new. It reinforced my belief that government bureaucracy is inefficient and wasteful.

In the post war years, I switched back and forth between the parties until Jimmy Carter. Since then I have voted Democratic. So in politics, at least, I have been inconstant. [A recent issue of TIME magazine had a passage that read, in part, "inconsistency is not hypocrisy." And you know what Emerson said about a foolish consistency.]

So where do I stand politically today? Let me say, I am against our making partisan statements about current politics during our services. So I will only say that I support our Constitution, I believe in separation of church and state, and I believe our laws should protect the poor and the disabled, and should try to equalize opportunity. Our laws should tend to level the standards of living of our people rather than increasing their disproportion. I passionately support freedom of the press.

I am probably not as liberal as some of you. I am still a Darwinian evolutionist. But we live in a society not in a jungle. The world may be a jungle, but we are a society. And societies, aside from morality, need to have compassionate and orderly governments for their own survival.

Something else, rather important, I feel, has happened to me as I have reached this advanced age. And that is I have recognized, at last, the foolishness and destructiveness of ego. Every great religion teaches that. The ego of building a grand house on a high hill. That is something I used to wish for. Or the ego of name dropping, or place dropping. I have been so guilty. I use to ache to tell you of important people I have known, or exotic places I have been. I foolishly thought that would make me more important in your eyes. So lately I have been trying to tamp down my ego.

It has been ego that has caused me over the years to save all sorts of papers for my daughters, or whoever else wanted to read about my life. Why, do you know I've filed neatly away in a filing cabinet the English compositions I wrote in college, and even high school and grade school papers. How is that for an exercise in hubris? I have the diary I kept for seven days when I was seven years old. [" Over at the new house today it was cold. I made a fire and got warm."] I must have thought I was going to be president of the United States, or the Shakespeare of the 20th century and scholars would be digging into my past.

Ego led me to write a long list of memoir sketches about happenings or phases of my life, as if they were important. I even wrote one about having dinner, drinking out of silver goblets, and discussing the great English novelist, Thomas Hardy— in a whore house. A one-time youthful adventure. To some extent, it was ego that led me to spend a lot of time looking into my genealogy.

But I have come to realize that a lot of what I've saved has been foolish. Some of my children or grandchildren may have an interest in the family genealogy some day. But it came home to me recently that it is highly unlikely they are going to read those papers I've saved or all those memoirs. And it is certain they are not going to care about clippings of newspaper features I've written, or letters saved over a lifetime.

This realization has come to me gradually, but recently it was strongly reinforced as I was making up an album and scrap book of my mother's papers and the few stories she saved from her days as a newspaper woman and a free lance writer. My mother and I were very close and she has been dead for 24 years, and yet, with the exception of two or three, I had never read those stories until this summer. I have read only one of her diaries. Why in the world would I ever think my daughters are going to plow through all that stuff that I have saved in the course of a lifetime, including a lot of dullish diaries of my own.

Have I, then, eliminated or conquered ego? Of course not. I'd be dead. That is what we living things are — ego. The all important I. A certain amount of ego is essential, especially for young people, who have to compete in a competitive world.

I have a towering ego, but it is about my mind, my philosophy. That is what leads me to make these talks, which are in themselves ego trips. The rest is just foolish ego, the ego of the insecure, the effort to bolster my importance in the eyes of other people, including family members..

Well, to summarize this self critique: I find myself wondering about how much time I have left. I think a lot about trivia, but also about those things that bolster my philosophy of life and existence. Having helped to conceive and nurture five daughters may have given my life some limited meaning. In taking stock, I find I've been lucky. Trying to take an honest look, I find I've fallen short of my expectations, I've been a dilettante, I've been inconsistent in my political and ethnic convictions. Finally, perhaps on the positive side, I've recognized that too much ego is destructive of inner peace, so I have been trying to bring it under control. Maybe I've learned something in my old age.

Well, there it is, my life in a nut shell. What does it amount to other than it's been a long life, a lucky life, and a good ride — so far. And life goes on. Maybe I have a few more years. If so, let it continue to be a good life, a good ride.. Let it be a dance; let it be a dance.

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