Last Sunday, I turned 73 — a number that amazes me. If my knees didn't keep reminding me otherwise, I'd swear I was in my twenties. Oh — and another thing that reminds me I'm not that age anymore is how often people I think of as my contemporaries talk about their physical problems or die. I've written obits and/or attended memorial services for too many of them. I've even done that for folks significantly younger than I am.
I attended my first Comic Book Conventions in 1970. The cons of that decade were swarming with people I wanted to meet and maybe interview because they'd created the comic books I read when my age was in single digits or early teens. In the eighties and for a few decades beyond, I would host Golden Age Panels of writers and artists who'd made comic books in the nineteen-forties. Now, I go to comic book cons where there's absolutley no one who did comics in the forties or fifties and maybe/sometimes, one or two who did them in the sixties. This amazes me.
I am occasionally the only one on the premises — or one of but two or three — with credits dating back to when comic books cost fifteen cents. This too amazes me.
I met Jack Kirby in 1969 when he was 52 years old and I thought of him as an old-timer…and why not? He'd been in comic books almost since they began and he'd fought in World War II. I am now twenty-one years older than he was the day I met him. Also amazing to me.
Not counting my recent broken/almost healed ankle — which could have happened to anyone of any age — I am in relatively good health. I have things that are wrong with me but they're all the kinds of things that are quite fixable by good doctors and I have good doctors. It seems to have helped that I have never indulged in alcohol, recreational drugs or the smoking of anything.
A friend tells me that I should add never marrying to that list but I've been in enough relationships that somewhat resembled marriage that I don't agree that's a factor. I am in occasional touch with my third-ever girl friend. She is now a grandmother…another one of those chilling reminders of time gone by. I may live to see her become a great-grandmother.
I do think it helps that I do not operate under the assumption that my life has a firm expiration date. As I've written here in the past, I've known a lot of people my age or older who kept talking endlessly about their impending demises. They hit a number like the Big Eight-O and decided that death was but moments away. Some of them, I think, made it arrive sooner as opposed to later with that attitude.
If a wizened physician — someone who studied medicine at a real medical school and not YouTube — told me I had X months to live, I might (might!) assume he or she knew what they were talking about. But I have seen enough self-diagnoses proven wrong that I regard them as about as certain as a World Series prediction. A little later today or tomorrow, I'll post one story — of many I've witnessed — where Tom said that Harry was in horrible shape and was not long for this world…and then Harry outlived Tom. And often, it's been by a decade or more.