If I'm 64...
One of the peculiarities of being a member of AAA in Southern California is that the organization dates your membership back to the date when the first person in your family joined, provided you also signed up as a minor under that membership. So my new membership card came in the mail and I am now regarded as a 64 year member of AAA. (My parents moved to California in 1960 and the memberships are good for two years go so I won’t be 64 in AAA years until 2024.)
Sixty-four has been a weird landmark in my family. For some in my family, it has just been another birthday. For others, it was an unattainable go. These past few weeks, cursed by the human desire to find patterns that are pretty much coincidence, the number 64 has been coming up a lot. And not in a happy way.
This story starts in May of 1993. My oldest brother Jim calls my father on the phone from his home in Ithaca, New York (his wife was doing postdoctoral work at Cornell). Jim, blessed with a good singing voice, sings the Beatles’ song “When I’m Sixty-Four” for Dad, which he really loves.
Dad was not someone who liked the Beatles or pretty much any rock music, but the somewhat sappy and lightweight “When I’m Sixty-Four” was acceptable to him. Mom was waiting for her song that would come in October of 1993.
That was not in the cards for my mother. In May of 1993, her cancer was getting worse. She was able to hold it off for a bit and got to fulfill one of her goals in life of visiting Washington, D.C. and also going to see Amish Country. She made it there in June. And then things went bad quickly. By August, Mom was gone. She was 63.
I began to develop a healthy dislike for the song “When I’m Sixty-Four.” I can’t say that the song is objectively bad. But it’s definitely sad to me.
As time went on, I was able to move past the horrible year off 1993. My brothers and I all moved on with families and careers. My mom didn’t to see any of her five grandchildren. My father saw some of them, but he didn’t see much of them as he passed away in 2002.
Once my father passed away, Jim turned into something of the patriarch of the family. He would have loved doing this more in his younger days, when he was the big brother bossing around his three little brothers (he really didn’t do that very much). But as he grew older and became the father of four children, he just became a brother, not a big brother. He was a friend.
In 2006, I was off to visit Jim as we were going to go see UCLA play at Notre Dame. Although Jim was an extremely proud alumnus of Pomona College, he adopted UCLA as his big school to root for, probably helped by the face that his other three brothers all got degrees there.
When I got there, I found out that I was going to be doing all the driving. Jim’s eyesight was starting to fail and his central vision was disappearing. He had peripheral vision, but a big blurry blog in the center. Modern medicine staved it off for a while, but it was pretty much a lost cause.
Nevertheless, we enjoyed a day in South Bend amidst the maniacally cheerful Notre Dame fans, who make it a point of stopping and welcoming you, sincerely, to their campus, and hoping that we had a good time. UCLA lost on a late touchdown and I can say that I could have had a better time, but it wasn’t bad.
Jim’s health turned into almost a medical textbook. He even had to go to the Mayo Clinic at one point. But most conditions were managed. And he was adapting to his low vision. But, in 2014, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Despite a bone marrow transplant, the leukemia was too much to overcome. In the fall of 2015, my oldest brother passed away. Sometimes it’s hard to fathom that it happened. But it did.
Today, February 3, 2023, would have been Jim’s 64th birthday. I’m not singing a Beatles song. I’m just writing this. About my brother, a great husband, father to four wonderful children, a friend, a journalist, a person connected to the problems of his community and of the world, and the smartest person I ever met. Someone I desperately would want to talk to about all the craziness in the world.
But all I have is a AAA card telling me that I’m a 64 year member. I will hold on to that.