The Passing of Time.

It frankly always amazes me when I think of my age.  It's trite, I know, but I don't know where the years have flown.  For many of them, I was having a very good time; but now the sun is moving toward the low gradient and, like it or not, it comes with the territory.

I really was not cocky in high school, though I achieved a measure of success there.  My grades were not as good as those of some of my friends, but they were good enough to get me admitted to a good college.  At college, I got along reasonably well, except for French, which I thought would be my undoing.  I know there is nothing wrong with the French, except that it takes a really exceptional foreigner to understand their language.  It all sounds (or did to me) like thick pudding, lacking definition completely.  God bless the professor, who understood that I tried, but knew me (and announced to the class one day) to be one of the dumbest students she ever taught.  Despite her and the subject matter, I was on the Dean's list every semester after I finally slipped ignominiously from French II with a C ( and that was a gift!!).

Law school was anguish.  Rarely did I understand what they were talking about, which meant that I was a lost soul.  Any professor at the University of Virginia who failed to answer a question with anything other than another question was taken up to Monticello and hanged that very afternoon.  The whole time, not one explanation of anything other than a question, much harder than any of us ever asked.  So, as the admission's risk of "63, I finally emerged in very average status in the spring of 1966, a graduate lawyer.

Viet Nam was boiling and deferments for graduate school put you at the front of the draft line.  Nothing to do but join the Navy.  Well,  training for fat boys was anything but fun.  Sweating profusely through Officer Candidate School, freezing on the parade ground every Saturday while the wind whipped in from Naragannsett Bay in Rhode Island, and in general finding the training much to my total dislike, somehow I managed to slither out of there at the end of December, on my way to a new naval communications station in Okinawa.  Okinawa??  Where the hell is Okinawa?  For those of you who don't know, it's one half the way around the whole world and just a little south of Japan.  It took me two weeks to get over jet lag, though I should tell you that I didn't fly over on a jet.  It was an airplane, in 1967, that had been used to haul coal in the Berlin Airlift in 1948.  Propellor driven, it took thirty six hours to cross the Pacific Ocean; and no one met me at the terminal.

I'm not going into all this stuff about my naval career.  Suffice it to say that I learned things that I never would have dreamed of in all the schooling I had endured.  And so, I returned to Maysville to begin my real career in the practice of law.

The lawyers of the local bar association met sporadically each year when there was something to discuss.  At the beginning, there were about 14 or 15 of us. Chuck Kirk, Jim Clarke, Bob Gallenstein, Bernard Hargett, Bill Sewell and I were the youngest of the bunch.  Most of us were under 30.  At the bar meetings, the topic of conversation varied from heavy to lite, and so some of us younger members occasionally thought we could contribute.  Thus, every now and again, we would make a comment.  The older people, Gene Royse, John Clarke and Andrew Fox would turn and look with complete disdain at the poor young sap who deigned to speak out.  That's really not fair:  They were not rude, but neither were they too interested in our thoughts on the subject of conversation either.

Time passed, and our status did not improve much.  Our views were generally ignored, although we didn't stop speaking up when the spirit moved us.  And then, all of a sudden, when we got to be about 40, the bar members seemed to pay more attention to what we said.  There were some younger members by that time, who were, as were we at their age, ignored when they tried to contribute.  Nevertheless, forty seemed to be the magic number.  The group seemed to instinctively feel that people 40 years of age or more were worth listening to; and from that time on, our voices were heard in the Maysville councils of the law.

As time went by, what we said in those meeting commanded more and more respect.  Where disagreements arose, it was the "middle age" people who carried the day, often at the expense of some of the more senior members, believe it or not.  Well, time did go by, and all of a sudden, those of us who survived arrived at the age of 60.  Some of us were even a couple of years older.  And as we looked about the table, we noticed our total numbers had swelled from 14 to 25 and 30.  And, more to the point, it was the 40 and 45 year olds who held sway in the discussions.  The wisdom of the old (if there was any) was outshone by the pragmatists in their early to middle forties and fifties.  How the hell did this happen?  We used to make reasonably good sense in what we said, and, I thought, we still did.  But the group wasn't buying our packages.  There was a new day.  It was frustrating, and I can honestly say that I didn't really comprehend what was happening at first.

When I was 62, I ran for judge and was on the bench for four years.  I wanted to stay, but was defeated for re-election and was bitterly disappointed.  When you're in the middle of something like that (or, really, any personal defeat in life), you don't understand much about what happened to you, because you're too personally involved.  I shall never forget asking my friend, Scotty Hilterbrand, what he thought about the outcome of the election.  He said, "Judge, I'll tell you, people between the age of 40 and 60 run the world."
When the election smoke cleared, and it took a while, I realized he was right.  As a matter of fact, it was one of the most astute observations I ever heard.  It's not, of course, true for everybody, but for the vast majority, it tells the story unequivocably.

And so, I have accepted the fact that younger people are now in charge.  They will make the decisions; they will call the shots.  And it is as it should be.  For we have had our turn.  We hope we did our best, and, there is some evidence that a lot of what we did was first rate; on the other hand, a lot of it was pretty damn sorry.

Post Scriptum.  People our age, 65-75, tend to think the world has gone to hell in a handbasket.  I recall, when I was middle-aged, Milton I. "Shorty" Tolle and A. J. Toncray would meet almost every morning for breakfast at Jim's Donut Shop.  I don't know how old they were at the time, but they were at that stage in life where the current generation was running the world into the ground and ruining all that they and their generation had worked for.  Listening to them would color your day the darkest of gray, if not black.  The military wasn't worth a damn any more;  Americans had forgotten how to work!  Government existed to feed, clothe and money people who wouldn't take care of themselves.  And it taxed people like Shorty and A.J. to do it.  The City couldn't do anything right; and nobody went to church anymore.  The country was wobbling next to an abyss, the bottom of which was no where in sight.

That's old men for you.  180 degrees out from the optimism and energy they both enjoyed in their twenties.
I don't know where in the Bible it talks about old men shall dream dreams and young men shall see visions; nor do I know what it takes to accomplish that, but wouldn't it be nice?