Peter Miller: On Turning 80

To be 80. This year it happens to me.

No one wants to be 80 years old. Drink deeply of your years before 80, take them everywhere with you. But if you should be 80, if it is so, if you are that lucky, then do it well. You can and will be in your 70s for many years — but cross into your 80s, and you are in a land apart.

They will say, ah but you do not look 80, but you are, you and the swath of youngsters born 1946, somehow a new crop, of the Post War optimisms. You are as different as can be from the previous crew, the boys and girls born during the war, and there is little reckoning it. They were a tradition, you are a generation.

You had the best schools in the history of America, boxes of new books arrived each week to be handed out. Even your school buildings were new. It was quite a passion to want your kids to be the best educated in the world. It made the simplest sense — why would you not want your schools to be the very best ?

When Khrushchev took off his shoe and banged it on the table at the UN, my mother screamed, You are a disgusting man, she screamed at the television, and you shall never be allowed in this house.

When I went to visit Yale on a November afternoon in 1963, Kennedy was shot. When I graduated four years later, King and Robert Kennedy were shot. For many terrible and sad reasons, 1968 marked the last year that America wanted their kids to have the best schools in the world. And it happened. Since then, America has not had near the best school systems, nor has it even tried to be the best.

If you are 80 years old now, then I tell you in truth: you are old. For the first time, you must not fall, for falling is when they collect the tax. You must walk, even as this is not a country that particularly loves walking, or walkers or its elders. You must walk now, for your own health and the health of the world. And you must read. It is a quiet moment for books. Most importantly, read to others — “Listen, you must hear this passage, it is remarkable.”

We did some things, this generation. We saved apples and we saved salt and we showed that water was fragile and food was more complicated than a green can of grated cheese. But we failed to give peace a chance, to rescue our schools, to include, at all cost, to include. We owe these undone things.

By the 1970s, it was the showtime of Dumb and Dumber. Today may even be seen as the graduating class of that smirk. With any luck, the trash in today’s yard is a quiet signal of a New Era.  If so, the era will be one of education, repair, and maintenance. 

It is a heart break in King Lear when the fool, Lear’s only ally, says to the now blind ex-king, “See better, Lear.” That is our task, the new 80-year-olds. To see better, or, at least, to see well. In an odd, rarely-spoken-of way, you can now see, quite perfectly and certainly, the front and back of things.