When I'm 64
June 28, 2006 | 12:00am
And so the inevitable happened: Sir Paul McCartney turned 64 earlier this month, causing baby boomers all around the world to shake their heads and mutter, "My sweet Lord, could it have been that long ago?" "That long ago" was 1967, when the Beatles came out with their musically mindboggling "Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, among the wildly eclectic songs of which When I’m 64 stood out as a sweetly singable ditty, a paean to enduring domestic love.
When McCartney wrote When I’m 64 in 1966 he was 24, presumably unaware of the many and sometimes spectacular turns his life would yet take, from Band on the Run to Heather Mills.
When that album came out, I was 13 and in high school, desperately and futilely wishing for facial hair – at least enough fuzz for a decent moustache and sideburns, which every pop idol worth his Nehru jacket seemed to sport – and meanwhile memorizing everything churned out by not just the Beatles but the Dave Clark Five, the Monkees, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, the Buckinghams, the Hollies, and Herman’s Hermits. They were all great bands, but there was something about the Beatles – and especially "Sgt. Pepper" – that drew out the adventurous in us, but adventurous in a fun-loving way, well before punk rock and groups like the Sex Pistols changed the whole equation between music and meaning.
When you come to think of it, there’s no song more patently un-revolutionary than When I’m 64, from its very first bar down to the last: "When I get older losing my hair, many years from now, will you still be sending me a Valentine, birthday greetings, bottle of wine…." It’s about growing old nicely with one’s mate – how reactionary can you get? And then again, in the context of the late ‘60s – when the world seemed to come apart just a little more at every turn with Vietnam, LSD, civil rights, the Apollo program, the Black Panthers, and Woodstock all pulling you hither and thither – that was probably as fresh and as bold a statement as anyone could make, a plea for constancy amid its opposite.
The plain and plaintive truth of that voice could be why the song has survived so well and never fails to put singers and listeners in a bouncy good mood. My pals and I have been singing it for 40 years without even noticing the time – and soon, yegads, I’ll be 64 myself!
But not that soon. Lemme see – I’m 52, and so have 12 years to figure out what 64 will be like for me. Never mind the losing-my-hair bit; that’s already happened. What is it exactly that I’d like to do or to have happened by my 64th birthday?
1. Write five more novels. Not very likely, at the rate I’m going, but I’m convinced that if I’m hoping to be remembered as more than a lousy badminton player, I’ll need to ratchet up the fiction, which sticks in the mind more than anything you and I can say about fleeting facts. Mind what the Bard said in Sonnet 55: "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme." Or, as Hippocrates said, "Ars longa, vita brevis" (often transposed the other way around into "Life is short, but art is long"). If we write to be remembered, then we should first write – and write something memorable.
2. Own and be driven in a brand-new car. Forget the Nobel Prize: I’m sick of driving wheels two registration series behind (like driving a Honda with a T-plate when everyone was sporting W-plates, or a Suzuki with a U in the time of Z). I want that new-car smell without paying for that ridiculous "new-car-smell" perfume vial. And I’d like to sit in the back seat, for a change, twiddling my thumbs while dreaming about No. 3 below.
3. Visit Rio de Janeiro at Carnaval, before my eyes get too fogged up to distinguish between a carioca and a caracoa. It’s the last unrealized item on a list of four travel wishes – amazingly, I’ve already made it to Oktoberfest in Munich, the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg, and Macworld in San Francisco. I wouldn’t mind being named ambassador to Brazil, whereupon my first act will be to move the embassy to Ipanema, the better to improve bilateral relations with the natives there.
4. Be cared for by a nurse 30 years my junior (with Beng’s approval, I guess) – and please don’t make her look like one of those Wagnerian Brunhildes with the horned helmet. An ability to discuss mid-century British poetry while feeding me chicken noodle soup and giving a Thai foot massage would be a definite plus. If I’m alive at all in 2018, I expect to be reasonably sick – the just desserts of a life devoted to carbo-loading and all the ways of devouring pork – but not too sick as to fail to appreciate the ministrations of faithful and talented assistants.
5. Hand over all my old pens, watches, computers, books, CDs, and my Beetle to my grandkid, who will perfectly understand his or her grandpa’s quirks, and know better than to yank a cap off a 1934 Sheaffer, and know how to put the Beetle in reverse gear. If I’ve been out till quarter to three, he/she (Vera? Chuck? Dave?) will open the door for me.
Some of these could happen, some may not, but we take our first and boldest steps into the future on feet of fantasy, and while the greater likelihood is that 64 will find me indulging in nothing more fabulous than doing the garden and digging the weeds; I’ll probably be too happily astonished just to have lived that long. Who could ask for more?
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