Susie Turnbull - Keep Manhattan

Posted in: Susie Turnbull - Keep Manhattan
Susie Turnbull: Eighty the new fifty
By Susie Turnbull
Dec 4, 2008 - 10:12:28 PM

I’m beginning to think that 80 is the new 50. Last week I had the privilege of being invited out to the Shima farm north of Marengo to watch Ed split wood. It was his 80th birthday. He made slinging a maul look easy, quite honestly, not that I would even begin to know how to do it in the first place, but I heard a rumor from one of his sons that even his hearty college-aged grandson couldn’t keep up with him.

When I got out to the farm, the first thing Ed asked me was “How old are you?” This horrified his son, who was visiting from down south for the celebration, but I knew he was only asking because his youngest son is just a couple of years older than me and he was trying to place me in the grand scheme of things. I’m not averse to giving out my age anyway. I balk a little, I’d certainly rather be ten years younger, but to be a kid again? No way. (I’m including early twenties in that as well—no thanks.)

I’ve learned over the years that with age comes experience and knowledge. Now granted when I was twenty, I felt like I knew everything about everything, but now looking back I know I was wrong. I knew nothing, and I’m sure Ed Shima would tell me that I don’t know anything now either, comparatively speaking.

We sat around the dining room table after the wood cutting, eating chips and apples and dip, trying to warm up from the cold, and listened to Ed tell stories. He spent four years in the 1970’s as a county supervisor, apparently the first democrat in approximately 30 years, and was, according to him, quite the troublemaker. He told us about flipping coins to appear as though that was how he made decisions, and apparently creating quite the media stir because of it. He told us about his farm, and his family, and showed photos of his latest grandchildren.

When we are kids, these stories seem a waste of our time. They certainly did for me when I was young. I’m not sure when this new-found interest in nostalgia began. It must have been a gradual appreciation. It could derive from my gym membership at Colonial Manor in Amana, where during the day I’m often the youngest person working out---You’ve never been challenged at the gym until an elderly man who had to have assistance to actually get onto the exercise bike starts out biking you, and then points it out to you on the monitor. “Get going, I’m beating you!” he said to me. (I stepped it up a notch. I had to.) I sit and I bike and I listen, but I imagine it’s more just a phenomenon of aging itself. As people get older, they realize they weren’t nearly as smart ten to twenty years ago as they thought they were, nor were they as important. We spend our childhood looking forward, and our adulthood looking back and there’s not anything really wrong with that unless we’re looking back wishing we’d done everything differently. It’s a way of teaching the younger generation about life, and also a way of putting them in their place. Plus everyone likes to think their lives counted for something, and if you don’t share them with people, it becomes easy to argue that they didn’t.

Susie Turnbull Photo

It seems to me that people are living longer than ever, and people in their 80’s are living lives no differently than they did back when they were “middle-aged”---except perhaps with more aches and pains and an intolerance for cold. Recently the world’s oldest lady died in Indiana. She was 115 and born the same year as my dad’s parents. (He was either an accident or an afterthought, born when they were 43) It said in the article that even up until the last year of her life, she could be found pushing other people around the nursing home in their wheelchairs.

So how do these people do it? I’ve seen and read news stories over the years and no one ever has the same answers. Some say they didn’t drink or smoke, some, like George Burns, say they did drink and smoke. I’ve noticed that those who are living the longest are more active in their advanced age, with their brains or their bodies, such as Ed Shima. These are the people who are active in their communities, or with their families, or in the case of the woman in Indiana, in their nursing homes. Perhaps they just have a better outlook in general, I guess it’s hard to tell. It seems to be more a genetic luck of the draw than anything else. Some people get Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, some don’t. Some people get achy joints and broken bones, some don’t. Most likely though, if people truly are living longer than ever it probably has more to do with advances in health care than anything else---but still, that doesn’t explain the quick minds of the story tellers.

My guess is if you want to live a long life, you need to enjoy it and tell people about it. Happy Birthday, Ed.

© Copyright 2008 by The East Iowa Herald