Muddling Through the Decades

Dear George,

It’s still a shock to have had my eightieth birthday.  I find myself reflecting on my life as a whole.  Here is my poetic version.

Love,

Dave

     The Decades of My Life 

One of the main perks of aging

One’s experienced so much of their life

Each of these decades has its own unique flavor

Some mixture of pleasures and strife

As a grade school kid I loved comic books

Captain Marvel, I’d say, was the best

And the matinee films had Roy Rogers

Plus Dale and Gabby and the rest 

My teen years turned into a struggle 

I was quiet and shy with my peers 

We thought of our group as the “good kids”

While the “bad kids” had sex and drank beers 

My twenties found new sorts of pressures

First marriage, then doing grad school

Writing a dissertation — so gruesome 

My worst fear, they’d know I’m a fool 

I launched my career in my thirties

A social psychologist no less

I was always on edge in the classroom

And publish or perish, huge stress 

A tennis dad in my forties

Our son became ranked near the top 

We traveled to tournaments in the Tri-State

My blood pressure rose as a pop 

In my fifties our house was an empty nest 

Our kid had departed for college

I got sort of queasy in my field

Espousing such old-fashioned knowledge 

My career wound down in my sixties

Even though I became department head

My true love belonged to our sheepdogs 

More sweet than my job when all’s said 

In my seventies I worked on retirement

My first step — to join at the gym 

I did line dancing on Tuesday nights

A quest to find vigor and vim

So this year I’ve started my eighties 

I never even thought of this age 

I feel pretty much like I’m fifty

But perhaps this will be the best stage