Codger
Walking around the block, Susan and I pass the Columbia Gas family playing in their yard. The young couple, maybe late twenties, with two kids, an infant and a toddler, are one of the few families consistently outdoors. I know I should be able to supply a name rather than reference the work-truck parked in front of their house every evening, but that would take friendly banter, introductions, something we’re unlikely to do.
The mom holds the infant and calls her tiny terrier close. The dad pitches a wiffleball to his son. The kid, not yet three feet tall, takes a clean cut and sends the ball across his property and well into the next yard. It’s the sort of hit an adult would smack and then nod with satisfaction.
Susan, the more quick-witted of us, shouts “Wow, way to go!”
Me? I hesitate for a moment and then call out “Man, that kid’s gonna to be the next Ty Cobb.”
The dad cocks his head, mouth agape, looks at me but doesn’t respond.
Susan and I walk in silence for five seconds. She turns to face me, “Ty Cobb?”
~
What? It’s an apt reference, if a little dated. Cobb was a hitting machine. He holds a record twelve annual batting titles, had a .300 batting average in twenty-three consecutive seasons, a .400 average in three seasons, scored more five-hit games than any other player in history. The kid and his dad should be proud of the Cobb comparison.*
Of course, Cobb’s playing career spanned from 1906 to 1928, almost all of which happened more than a century ago. He died before I was even born. I think there’s a good chance the Columbia Gas dad never even heard of Ty Cobb.
I suddenly feel old. As a fitness focused adult for the past forty years, I did a good job cheating the effects of aging. Over the past fifteen years, I’ve become accustomed to wide-eyed people saying “What? You’re HOW old?” Their guesses always took eight to ten years off my age. Those days might be over. Last week at a fundraising event, a woman I talked with asked me when I plan to retire. At sixty-two, my retirement date could still be five years away.
Until just a couple of years ago, my youngest was still in high school. This connection mentally rooted me squarely in Generation X. All the other parents were X’ers, so I felt like one too. My obsessions with rock music and a steady diet of Seth MacFarlane cartoons no doubt helped. Now that Eli has graduated and moved out of the house, I’m starting to look and think like the boomer I’ve always been.
Since my boss retired eighteen months ago, I’m the only one left on my organization’s senior management team in his sixties. The others are ten to twenty years younger. I’m picking up a vibe, not from my peers, but from the dozen or so under-thirty employees scattered around my company. I think I’m being chronologically lumped in with the four or five retirees who work for us part-time as something interesting to do with their days. These employees have each been retired from their careers for years.
In my first professional job, my massive government contracting firm was broken down into divisions of five to seven hundred employees. The finances for my division were overseen by a kindly old man with a gaggle of twenty-something “girls” doing the actual work. Ed Bailey sat at his desk and dispensed 1950s truisms and wisdom all morning and then took an hour-long nap at his desk in the afternoon. Every time I walked into his office and found him upright but sound asleep, I thought, Jesus, retire already.
Am I now Ed Bailey? Maybe this is a common feeling for recent empty nesters, or more likely for people still working in their sixties. I can’t shake the sensation that I’m overstaying my welcome. I suspect this is mostly in my head, but increasingly, I feel out of touch with the cultural references that surround me. I sense the same discomfort directed towards me that I displayed around Ed Bailey forty years ago. I guess I can take comfort from the fact that I don’t yet fall asleep at my desk. At least I think I don’t.
* No, I’m not a Ty Cobb freak, and I don’t follow baseball at all. I had to look up all of those facts and stats on Wikipedia, making it even stranger that I latched onto Cobb as a comparison. Pete Rose would have made a lot more sense. At least he’s from my childhood.
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