JOSEPH N. BELL -- The Bell Curve

I turned 80 on July 4. There, I said it.

I said it because several days ago, my wife said to me, almost idly:

“Why haven’t you celebrated your age? Eighty is a milestone, and you’ve

avoided mentioning it in your column.”

“Not so,” I said. “I’ve written about my birthday in several of these

columns. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She shrugged and said: “You haven’t mentioned your age in any of them.

I’m just curious why. You should be proud of it.”

So she had me. I was aware that I hadn’t mentioned my age, but I

wasn’t aware that I was aware of it. She made me look at that -- and come

up with an honest answer, more for myself than for her. And the most

immediate answer was this: I was avoiding dealing with the number,

itself, because I was afraid that if I stared 80 in the eye, I’d begin to

act my age. Or at least the behavior that society would impose on those

of us who reach that age.

As an old -- in every good sense of that word -- friend said to me the

other day: “When you turn 60, you’re a senior. At 70, you’re an elder.

But at 80, you’re just flat-out old.”

I was aware of that sentence passed down by society, but since I have

no intention of conforming -- until absolutely required -- to any of the

limitations that “old” implies, I was staking out my ground by avoiding

the number. Now, with some domestic help, I realize that it is much

better to stare it down. So, OK, I’m 80.

Age plays a tyrannically concrete role in the life of a journalist. We

are taught from our first class in journalism school to include the age

of the people we are writing about -- even if the age is totally

irrelevant or the subject doesn’t want to give it. I’ve always found this

absurd and once wrote a Times column that began: “John Jones, 48, his

wife Rachel, 26, and their dog, Buster, 12,” followed by a series of

similar plays on age that the editors didn’t find amusing. But we are

taught to label people by their age, a habit that dies hard.

I’ve never paid much attention to my own age. The other supposedly

landmark ages, like 40, 60 and 70, were passed without the need to be

unaware of them. But since 80 carries freight that the others didn’t for

me, it clearly needs to be dealt with differently. It needs to be stared

down.

Somewhere in our 70s, we begin to read obituaries, not to find out

what sort of person died but how old they were when they left this vale.

This is an insidious sort of habit that produces predictably mixed

results. Along with the 95s that offer us encouragement and seem to

appear more often these days are the 65s and 70s that pull the average

down and are therefore best to factor out of our calculations.

One of the first of my new resolutions is to quit -- cold turkey --

playing this game. If I read an obituary from now on, it will be to

celebrate someone’s life, whatever its span.

I’ve decided some other things too. There is a vast difference between

denial of problems and celebration of life. Denial is a blind refusal to

look very straight at matters that need to be resolved in the best

possible way. Celebration of life is using the tools of body and

intellect that are currently working for us to the highest level of which

we are capable -- and not wasting a lot of time grousing about those that

aren’t working as well as we would like.

I’m blessed with good health. I can’t field a ground ball or hear

worth a damn without a machine in my ear, and I had to quit playing

tennis because I don’t know how to dog it on the court and playing

all-out exacted a price I was unwilling to pay. Otherwise, I’m doing just

fine, even in a good many areas where “old” is supposed to kick in.

The title character in the Book of Job told us “the thing that I fear

comes upon me” -- and indeed it does. That’s why celebrating life makes

so much more sense than being afraid of getting old. It seems a little

silly either to hurry out and meet infirmity or to run from it. Better,

I’ve decided since I allowed myself to examine 80, to treat it as a

number among many other numbers and get on with whatever it is I’m doing.

So what I was doing last week was shooting hoops with my friend and

former student Gordon McAlpine -- a one-time jock who now teaches at

Chapman University and writes fine novels. I don’t try to go one on one

with him, which would be stupid for two reasons: First, he’s a lot better

than I was at my best; and, second, he’d murder me because he knows that

if he tanks it, I won’t play with him anymore. So we play a non-contact

game called “21” for money -- and I let him pick up loose balls for me.

He beat me last time two out of three and is a buck into me.

So I have to get that buck back. I also have a column to finish and a

novel to write and a pennant to win for the Angels and a trip to make to

New England in the autumn and a ton of other things of varying degrees of

urgency to do -- including the enjoyment of reading a book and nursing a

martini in the cool of my backyard at dusk this evening.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.