Sometimes it’s rather amusing to watch 50-or-over males. Often wearing open-throat shirts and gold chains and beards, they are spied frequently in the sporting good sections of mall stores.
Under the pretense of looking for gifts for their wives, they size up jogging suits and running shoes, tennis racquets, shotguns, hunting bows, knives, fishing tackle and basketball backboards for themselves.
They also can be spotted in automobile accessory sections, looking at any attachable car part with chrome on it, or on used car lots, asking about vintage vehicles. They think the high-water mark of western civilization was reached in the ‘56 Chevrolet. Check out the ages of the men driving those old cars with special antique license plates in those five-mile convoys we see year-round from town to town across the South.
Yet another place to find them is in 24-hour waffle houses at 3 a.m., decked out in boots and camouflage suits on their way to deer and duck blinds or in fishing togs, depending upon the season of the year. A sizable number can be spotted on the golf fairways, usually in carts rather than walking. A smaller and more select group is into Civil War reenactment soldiering, fastidious in their attention to details of uniforms and armaments.
Judging both from where they shop and how they spend their time, the only logical conclusion to reach is that life for men after 50 is a form of advanced adolescence.
They are easy for me to spot because I was one of them. I was about that age when I got, for Christmas, a size-33 Louisville Slugger baseball bat and a Wilson cowhide baseball. The bat had my name burned into it, up on the big end where you would expect to see the autograph of Mickey Mantle or Stan Musial, lined up with the trademark at the center.
All that was missing was the tape, which, in our real adolescence, we always wrapped tightly around the handle to improve the grip and in vain hopes of preventing the bat from breaking if it ever met the ball on its trademark with home-run power. After swinging my middle-aged acquisition a few hundred times, I spent five hours and $30 finding a wooden wall rack on which to display my personalized baseball bat. Unlike the fading photographs around it, which show me as I was, the bat shows me as I would liked to have been.
Down in Florida -- in which Ponce de Leon knew was a hidden fountain pumping out the Secret of Eternal Youth -- hundreds of middle-aged men gather each spring for spring baseball training. They lay out lots of green stuff for the privilege of wearing wool uniforms, rubbing linseed oil in old fielders’ gloves, being coached by retired major league all stars as old as themselves, and getting to play the game again.
Statistics on heart attacks and broken bones incurred are not released to the public, but some idea of the rigor of this voluntary regimen can be found by tracking liniment sales in the drug stores nearest the camp. I admire and salute them, bruised and bloodied and battered though they may be. They know what Yogi meant when he said, so tersely and unforgettably: “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”
Riding their Charley horses into the sunset with felt caps doffed, they are symbols of the unending quest for significance and meaning in life, living proof of the unacknowledged fact that dreams are not the exclusive right or property of those whom Roy Orbison and I call “only the young.”
We older codgers have the dreams and the willpower of the young. We also have some things the youngsters don’t, memories and experience.
Past 50, we lack only two things to regain our lost youth:
One is nimbleness.
The other is acne.
Larry McGehee, professor-emeritus at Wofford College, may be reached by e-mail at mcgeheelt@wofford.edu.