“As I stand on the precipice of death, my perspective is enormous.”
Sometimes the weirdest quotes get stuck in my head.
It’s like musical earworms, songs that you can’t get out of your head till they decide to leave on their own. One that was infesting my head for some time was “Lemon Tree,” by Trini Lopez.
As for the quote, it took a minute to identify. I thought it might be something significant, but it’s just a line from a goofy song that ended the movie “Walk Hard,” a comedy I enjoyed from about 20 years ago. Singer Dewey Cox is reflecting on his life as the end approaches.
It is indeed a beautiful ride.
I don’t think I’m standing on the precipice of death, although at 76 I’m a lot closer to the end than the beginning. I have a friend who had a birthday recently and I suggested the same thing to him, only to have him tell me he was only at the halfway point of his life.
It was his 66th birthday, and living to be 132 would make him the oldest person ever to live who wasn’t in the early books of the Bible.
Considering that Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 at age 122, is the oldest recorded person who wasn’t begat, living to 132 probably isn’t in my friend’s future.
But I do find that my perspective — if bot enormous — has increased as I think back on 76 years. I have always had mixed feelings about how much I have moved around and how many different places I have lived. I have lived in 10 different states and two countries, and I have had the rare experience of living at least 10 years in four different states.
One effect of all that is that I often feel as if I don’t have a home town. Is it Dayton, Ohio, where I lived most of my life up to age 13? Or Fairfax, Va., where I lived till I was 32 except for 20 months in Austria in my mid 20s? Or Los Angeles, my home in my 40s and 50s?
In the end, it has to be Virginia. It was my parents’ home from 1963 till they died and where I always returned to see them. Two of my four siblings still live there, as do my son and his wife.
Many of the good things and most of the bad things that happened in my life happened there and there is nowhere in the world that I have such a love/hate relationship with.
Nearly all of my closest friendships that have lasted started during my time in Virginia, as did my relationships with the first three women I loved. Two of the three I still have casual contact with. The third one was my first wife, who I saw and spoke with for the last time 44 years ago.
Why am I writing this now?
Maybe it’s the enormous perspective thing again. Virginia — actually the D.C. metropolitan area — had such a huge influence on my life, more than I realized until decades after I left.
The video above is made from the midnight signoff on WMAL radio that played in early 1963 when we first moved to Virginia. The accompanying film is from 1949, an era in D.C. history that now seems almost prehistoric. When we moved to Fairfax, we lived 15 miles from Washington and we lived in what was considered a remote suburb.
Now my son and his wife work at State Department headquarters in D.C. and live in Haymarket, Va., 38 miles away. Other people live even farther out.
In 1963, the metropolitan are had an estimated population of 2.004 million people. Sixty-three years later, it’s 6.46 million. Fairfax Count has grown even more, from 270,000 in 1963 to 1,175,000 now.
You might think that wouldn’t bother someone who lived from 1990-2010 in Los Angeles, but at least in my case you would be wrong. At least when I lived in the Southland, I was less than an hour from the Pacific Ocean and about 20 minutes from Blue Heaven during baseball season.
My first apartment in 1975 was in Herndon, which was almost rural at the time. It was a nice new one-bedroom and we paid $230 a month, which included utilities. My first wife and I had our wedding reception in the community center of our apartment complex, 51 years ago yesterday.
Now that same apartment goes for $1,860 and the area is almost urban.
Yes, Fairfax County — specifically Fairfax City — is my hometown. That doesn’t mean I would ever live there again. It’s almos as unaffordable as New York City. My son and his wife are doing well, but they both have great jobs, and as I said, they live pretty far out in the countryside.
One of my closest friends is a woman who was my most significant relationship in between my two marriages. She’s nine years younger than I am and she had a good career in communications, but Trump and Elon Musk essentially killed that job market.
She can’t retire, and she has been out of work for a year. She told me the other day that sjhe had found a job and she thought I would laugh when I heard what it was. She told me and I didn’t laugh at all. I told her I admired her for thinking outside the box.
She’s going to be a deputy sheriff.
All I can say is good for her.
That’s life in my hometown these days.