Friday
The internet is a wondrous place when it can surface a poem that hits as close to home as this Lu Yu lyric. It captures the joys of being about to turn 70 at a time when I am on the eve of turning 70 (tomorrow).
Lu Yu was an 8th century Chinese poet who (this according to Wikipedia) authored The Classic of Tea, “the first definitive work on cultivating, making and drinking tea.” I love how the old man in the poem is carrying a battered book. No wonder he is whooping with delight.
Old man pushing seventy,
In truth he acts like a little boy,
Whooping with delight when he spies some mountain fruits,
Laughing with joy, tagging after village mummers;
With the others having fun stacking tiles to make a pagoda,
Standing alone staring at his image in the jardinière pool.
Tucked under his arm, a battered book to read,
Just like the time he first set out to school.
Carl Jung, while he celebrates the archetype of the “wise old man,” also has positive things to say about the figure of the “old fool.” Dignified old age can get trapped by respectability whereas crazy old age opens up new perspectives on life. W. B. Yeats agrees in his “Crazy Jane” series, having a poor old woman confront a holier-than-thou bishop. “Love has pitched his mansion in/ The place of excrement,” she defiantly tells him. Lu Yu’s old man would have hit it off with Crazy Jane.
While not crazy, my old friend Maureen Holbert Hogaboom, an actress who died at 98, insisted on being called a crone rather than a wise old woman, although she was both. Thinking of herself as a crone gave her the freedom of not always being entirely respectable. She used to tell me that each decade was better than the one before (although she stopped saying this when she hit her nineties).
As I enter my seventies, my prayer is that, like Lu Yu’s old man, I will continue to whoop with delight, laugh with joy, have fun, and act like a little boy.
