On the Morning of My 60th Birthday

“Oh, you’re 55? You’re still so young!”
I’ve been hearing variations on this for years, mainly from friends of my parents.

Now that I hit 60, I realize only people in their seventies or eighties are going to say that now. I don’t want to be insulting, but I think their perspective is skewed.

As I woke this morning, thinking about what it means to be sixty, a song came to mind. That’s not surprising. In my youth, I could have entire conversations where I did little but communicate through song lyrics. I still have the ability and the database of lyrics, I’m just old enough now to understand that it’s quite the annoying habit.

Anyway, the lyric that came to mind: “I don’t count my losses now, only my gains.”

When I was actually young. This guy didn’t have those aches and pains.

That’s the line—from a Paul Kelly song I hadn’t heard in a few years. In fact, I couldn’t remember the song, only the line.

I lay still for quite a while, counting my gains: Mi Esposa next to me, the house around me, friends, good work, financial plans, family, health.

There are, of course, little aches and pains.

Wait. I think that’s the name of the song: Little Aches and Pains. Now I remember.

Disabled we’re born, disabled we die
Is that a cliché? I’ll make it one.
And hope it doesn’t get too creaky

I have found that what you don’t know will hurt you
And what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker
Leaves you with little aches and pains
I got ‘em always now, sunshine or rain
Oh, these little aches and pains
I don’t count my losses now, just my gains.

You see, I can still let a song speak for me. It just a different song than when I was 15.

Little Aches and Pains is the end of a cycle, the story of a failed romance. The great Australian songwriter released a little over a decade ago when he was in his late fifties, nearly my age now.

One can only lie in a warm bed and count one’s gains for so long. If you are in the right place, they come easily to you. But if you stay still, the other things come. The regrets.

I’ve never been one to dwell too much on bad descisions. More often than not, the difference between a good and a bad descision is luck—the thing that determines the outcome often happens outside of one’s control. The bad descisions just roll off me. As Iay there, though, warm and cozy in my bed, the real regrets surface. The cruelties, the callousness. Real sources of shame. Those can spiral up from the past—everything from conversations last week to long-forgotten scenes on elementary school buses. There’s no remedy for those.

The Paul Kelly song is from Spring and Fall a disarmingly simple album, both in arrangement and lyric. It’s opening track is rooted in John Donne, and the final, unlisted bonus track is a song lifted from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. When I first heard it a decade ago, it didn’t really stick with me. I was hoping for some of the fantastic pop hooks and witty lyrics I’d fallen in love with when I’d first heard Kelly in the 80s. But I’ve come to love simplicity in most aspects of my life, and late in my fifties Spring and Fall has come back around to me.

There’s a lesson in the way he stripped away the useless and ornamental, getting down to the heart of things, laid bare.

Last month, he released a new record, Seventy, marking his seventieth birthday. Adele has some time to catch up to that. Seventy is quite good. I’ll write about it in a decade or so, when I can understand it.

Eventually the day calls. It’s my sixtieth birthday. I have plans for the day, and a fantastic trip scheduled for tomorrow. My bladder pressed, and I got out from under the covers. The plantar fascitis in my right foot tweaked when I stepped on the cold floor. Little aches and pains. I’ve got ‘em now, sunshine or rain.