Getting to the top of the hill: a birthday column

When I was in my 20s I never thought about getting old. When you are young you will never be old.

It’s not that I thought my edgy, action-packed, high-risk life would lead to early death. Although I had some close calls in my youth, I knew I couldn’t be killed. When you are young you will never die.

These days, my life may be a few things, but risky is not one of them. The most perilous thing I can do is trip on the cracked sidewalks of Havre when I run, or choke on one of Dottie’s maple bacon donuts.

I have learned a few things during my many years on this earth. I have probably unlearned just as much. This unlearning, dubbed as forgetting by young whippersnappers, is something I can expect more of, I am told.

First, I learned the older we get, the more our standards for what makes one old drops. Mom believes she shouldn’t be called an old lady until she’s in her 70s. I tell her the only reason she says that is because she’s in her 60s. A few years from now, I will begin to defend why at 40 my life is just beginning.

While we old people grow ever more in denial, we also grow more immune to the opinions of others. With caring less about what others think also comes the closing of our minds.

By now I’ve seen centuries of culture shifts and with it generations who have each contributed to history their own brand of ridiculous. Since that’s the case, we old people figure it makes just as much sense to close our minds as it does to keep them open. What’s the point of staying open-minded if all we’re going to do is swap one brand of ludicrousness for another?

In the ’80s, guys were wearing spandex, snorting copious amounts of cocaine, washing it down with 150-proof and having a good time as their hearts plummeted them ever closer to death. In the ‘90s, people were wearing flannel shirts that hadn’t been washed in months, injecting heroine in their toes and beating their hearts to the punch of death. In the ’00s nothing happened. In the ’10s, guys started wearing skinny jeans and that trend has yet to die.

So you see, there’s no point in open-mindedness. You can keep your skinny jeans.

Another thing I learned over the years is the best thing to do when you don’t know is to fake it. Now that I’m just a few years from collecting Social Security, I can look back and appreciate the little nuances of my native culture. Growing up, my dad’s friends were all fresh-off-the boat Eastern Bloc immigrants like him, like me. While equally appalling and offensive in different ways, one thing most shared was their ability to look someone straight in the eye and give them a market price for a service they had never performed or, sometimes, ever heard of. Like my dad liked to say, “How hard could it be?”

Once they contracted a job promising to deliver a service they’d never done — say replacing every electrical wire in a 100-year-old home — they’d tap into their immigrant network to find the one guy who’s an electrician and ask him how to replace hundreds of feet of wire without shattering every wall in the house or electrocuting himself to death. Romanians are notorious for our lack of shame. The askee would sometimes not only insist that the expert enlighten the knucklehead about the craft he lied he knew to do, but sometimes he insisted the expert come along and help with the task. In return, the expert would get a fresh-cooked meal made by the knucklehead’s unsuspecting wife.

Before I ever wrote a book, or a blog, or magazine article, I told people I was a writer. Realistically, I was a certified mechanic. I started calling myself a writer before anyone ever said I could write, before anyone ever paid me to write. I even made cards that said I was a writer and then read a book or two on how to write. I started a blog, a platform I used to regurgitate themes and ideas out of whatever book I was reading at the time. Someone eventually read my blog and asked me to write a book for him. So I did, ’cause that’s what writers do, dognabit!

Nothing ever came of that first book, except that it sparked the interest of one of the two people who read the rough draft, prompting him to pay me to write his book. That second book was picked up by a publishing house in Boise. In the first year, we surpassed projected average sales. So I faked it until I made it.

But the most important thing I ever really learned is to never feel bad when I don’t know what I’m doing. Nobody really knows what they’re doing.

Not too long ago, the medical industry — the experts — “healed” people with psychological ailments by removing portions of their brain. A physician friend recently told me that many years from now the medical establishment will look back at us and say everything we did was wrong, just as we look at the geniuses who decided removing an entire section of the brain is the best way to deal with the mentally ill.

Just since I’ve been in school, scientists — the experts — have gone back and forth about three or four times about what in Billy’s sweet name Pluto is. Is it a planet? Is it a cluster of gases? Is it a capsule of maple bacon donuts that exploded before escaping our galaxy?

If you watch Ken Burns’ documentary on the Vietnam War, you’ll notice foreign policy gurus say outright that they were wrong in their approach to the war at the time. You’ll hear audio of U.S. presidents plead with advisers for sound advice, and you’ll hear a long list of advisors — experts — offer different advice to the same question.

You’re not alone. Nobody knows what they’re doing.

Getting old is the comfort of knowing that we’re not the only ones who’ve messed up, we’re not the only ones faking it — and being OK with that. Growing old is dancing in the rain of our humanity. Getting old is deciding what you’ll be by the time the music stops.