An old friend sent me a link to a Roger Angell piece about growing old (he’s 93) from the New Yorker. I read it slowly and with a Kleenex box at the ready. In a moment of grandiosity my friend suggested that I might have written that, or something like it. There’s no way I could have done that, even though I could say “Amen!” after every line.

The most stabbing part of the essay was when he spoke of outliving so many people. This is a condition that sort of creeps up on you. You discover it when in some midnight hour you decide to find “old Joe” with whom you palled around with in high school and find that he died in Korea or succumbed to the big “C” a few years ago. If only you had known …

Angell lives in an apartment in Manhattan and talks of a large support community leaving cooked chickens at his door and here I am living in the lap of paradise – knowing dozens of people while hardly ever seeing anyone. I cook my own chickens, thank you very much!

It’s mostly my fault – not seeing people as much as I think I should be seeing people. I am not the conversational dynamo I once was. Being essentially deaf sort of puts a damper on conversation and rips the heart out of the desire to be around people in the first place.

I always wonder if anything I say is relevant to the on-going conversation. There have been times when I enter into a conversation only to be greeted by a stunned silence. Not because I have uttered some profound titbit of eternal wisdom but rather the unspoken response is more like, “What the fuck are you talking about!”?

I have a new bionic ear now that promises to deal with this condition and in fact it is working quite well. I feel very fortunate to have this technology available to me. I am more likely now to be able to keep up with conversations. It’s a work in progress – a process with which I am quite familiar.

One of my fantasies is being a part of a group of older guys who have breakfast somewhere every month or so to just be there and talk about stuff we all remember. I have an old friend out west who meets six or seven retired army and air force guys at McDonalds for 50¢ senior coffee. I’d pay more for better coffee, myself. I’d pay a lot more for better ambience. There was a time 50 years ago when I was in the clutches of purpose and calling that there was a small group of ministers who managed to have warm and supportive relationships with each other. We golfed, lunched and hung out. Of course, when I bailed out of the crusade, that was that.

There is today in Baton Rouge a group of my old high school buddies – all retired engineers – who meet monthly. I am in touch with one of the group who tells me that now and then I am mentioned. It’s a strange feeling, but I like it.

I’ve stopped trying to find old friends from long ago. It’s a dead issue – no pun intended. I have lots of live friends, albeit mostly the age of my children. Even so, we don’t see each other enough. What’s enough? It’s what it is.

The take-a-way from all this is this: Be in your life. Don’t think about it – live it.

Now if I can just remember to do that.