Mueller hearings offer a lesson on aging

The congressional hearings with Special Counsel Robert Mueller have received endless commentary -- on Russian interference in the 2016 election, President Donald Trump’s behavior during the campaign and since, Republican House members’ defense of Trump, the Democrats’ search for impeachable offenses and Mueller’s occasionally unsteady performance.

In some cases, commentators have been mighty personal with Mueller. Jake Tapper of CNN noted several times, “He is, after all, 74 years old.”

Imagine that. Seventy-four years old and still on the big stage but perhaps, ah, slipping.

I am 74 years old.

When I was a boy, I met men and women who were 74 years old and wondered if they had been around when the Bible was written. No, they had been in the Klondike-Alaska gold rush, now lived in small cabins and were impoverished, a state they accepted as inevitable. In the mining camp of Ophir, my Dad, Fabian, found a coroner’s jury’s summary of the contents of a dead miner’s cabin. He was worth about $30 and the written record of his estate included a pair of “socks, holes.”

What does it mean to be a 74-year-old American today?

It means you were raised in post-World War II prosperity, the most widespread affluence in the history of the world. It means you know that affluence didn’t extend to everyone, not to African Americans and Native Americans in particular. It means you can remember the day President John F. Kennedy was shot. It means you have heard of the Marlboro Man. It means you can visualize the face of a classmate or teammate who died in Vietnam. It means you know popular phrases that have disappeared -- “far out,” for one, “out of sight” for another.

It means the pretty young girls you give the eye are 55 and up, and none of these pretty girls notice you. It means many of your friends have died of natural causes and survivors report in on their illnesses, their hip replacements, their spouse’s memory loss, their grandchildren’s weddings, their ex-husband’s third marriage, the condo that replaced the house on the hill. It means you appreciate Medicare.

If you are 74, you should be able to identify the following players in the culture that 74-year-olds came of age in: Wolfman Jack, Eugene McCarthy, Huey Newton, Donovan, Lewis Hershey, Grace Slick, Mary Travers, Edie Sedgwick, Angela Davis, Bella Abzug. (Extra credit: Tell me something, anything, about Rama Lama Ding Dong. Hint: Not a person.)

It means people you loved with all your heart have vanished. It means you meet with friends your age in a fashionable restaurant and they say, “I believed I could make the world a better place. Now ... this.” By “this,” they mean Donald Trump.

It means riding the city bus and having a homeless guy get up and give you his seat.

It means the clerk in the post office, asks his ancient customer, "Who is this guy on this stamp?" It's Jimi Hendrix. The clerk says "Never heard of him."

It means waking up in the middle of the night with a fit of gratitude, struggling to thank the friends, family, teachers and former colleagues who shaped your life. Some of them occasionally appear in your dreams.

A friend of mine, a Catholic priest, died in the Detroit airport when he fell on a moving sidewalk and suffered a brain injury. His memorial mass was at Notre Dame, where he taught. The eulogist said, “He is now part of eternity.”

I swallowed hard.

In the not-too-distant future, 74-year-old Robert Mueller and I, so different in what we did with our lives, will be part of eternity too.

Michael Carey is an Anchorage Daily News columnist.

The views expressed here are the writer’s and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.