She returned twice more during the summer for week-long stays and—er—lessons. By Labor Day, we were damned serious, but I had to get back to the city and try to find a job in the heart of the Depression and Eva had to complete her education at Hunter. What’s more, we both knew (we weren’t moonstruck kids) that we’d had a summer fling, one to be treasured, but—for a lot of reasons—not followed up. It was great while it lasted, we both agreed over a tall drink at the hotel bar.
Arteriosclerosis can begin as early as age 20.
As you age, your responses to stimuli of all kinds become slower and more inaccurate, especially in more complex tasks. From age 20 to 60, your reaction time to noise slows 20 percent. At 60, you make more errors in verbal learning tasks. At 70, you will experience a decline in your ability to detect small changes, such as the movement of a clock hand.
Given a list of 24 words, an average 20-year-old remembers 14 of the words, a 40-year-old remembers 11, a 60-year-old remembers 9, and a 70-year-old remembers 7.
Most people reach skeletal maturity by their early 20s. At 30, you reach peak bone mass. Your bones are as dense and strong as they’ll ever be. Human bones, with their astonishing blend of strength and flexibility, can withstand pressure of about 24,000 pounds per square inch—four times that of reinforced concrete—but if you were to remove the mineral deposits, what you would have left would be flexible enough to tie into knots. In your late 30s, you start losing more bone than you make. At first you lose bone slowly, 1 percent a year. The older you get, the more you lose.
Beginning in your early 20s, your ability to detect salty or bitter things decreases, as does your ability to identify odors. The amount of ptyalin, an enzyme used to digest starches, in your saliva decreases after age 20. After age 30, your digestive tract displays a decrease in the amount of digestive juices. At 20, in other words, your fluids are fleeing, and by 30, you’re drying up.
Lauren Bacall said, “When a woman reaches twenty-six in America, she’s on the slide. It’s downhill all the way from then on. It doesn’t give you a tremendous feeling of confidence and well-being.”
Jimi Hendrix died at age 27, as did Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones of the Stones, Kurt Cobain, and bluesman Robert Johnson.
Until you’re 30, your grip strength increases; after 40, it declines precipitously. After age 65, your lower arm and back muscle strength declines. Owing to reduced coordination rather than loss of strength, your power output —e.g., your ability to turn a crank over a period of time—falls after age 50. My father, on the other hand, could defeat me in arm-wrestling halfway into his 60s.
At age 30, men show a decline in enthusiasm for typically masculine activities such as sports, drinking, and car repairs. Be grateful, I say, for small favors. Still, easily one of the happiest moments of my life occurred when, nearly 30 and in grad school, I went with several of my classmates to the gym to play basketball. Out on the wing on a fast break, I caught the ball, reverse-spun on William Mayfield, who started at forward for the University of Iowa basketball team, and beat him to the hoop. (Was he dogging it? Who knows? I don’t want to know.) My fellow grad-student nerds went nuts; they all kept saying, “You don’t even look like a basketball player!” Glasses, love handles, etc. Hoop dream (vii), undoubtedly.
Nicholas Murray said, “Many people’s tombstones should read, ‘Died at 30. Buried at 60.’” The ancient Persians believed that the first 30 years should be spent living life and the last 40 years should be spent understanding it. Reversing the time periods, Schopenhauer said, “The first forty years of life give us the text; the remaining thirty provide the commentary on it.” According to Rousseau: “Man is always the same: at ten he is led by sweetmeats; at twenty by a mistress; at thirty by pleasure; at forty by ambition; at fifty by avarice; after that, what is left for him to run after but wisdom?” At every age, 10 or 90, my father has been a pleasure-seeking missile.
Since your vertebral column continues to grow until you’re 30, you might gain anywhere from three to five millimeters in height between ages 20 and 30. Starting at 30, though, you lose one-sixteenth of an inch in height per year; your posture changes because your vertebrae shrink while your hips and knees bend closer to the ground and your foot arch flattens. My father has shrunk from 5'11' to 5'7'. As you age, you lose body water and your organs shrink: your body consumes 12 fewer calories per day for each year of age over 30.
For most people, the ability to hear higher sound frequencies begins to decline in their 30s; men are 3? times more likely than women to show a decline in their ability to hear high notes. Whatever level of loss is found, it will get, on average, 2? times worse each decade. The sweat glands that keep the auditory canal moist die off one by one; ear wax becomes drier and crustier, and hard wax builds up to block out sounds. One-third of hearing loss in older people is due to this buildup. Your eardrum becomes thinner and more flaccid, causing the drum to be less easily vibrated by sound waves. You progressively lose your ability to hear sound at all frequencies.
The limbic system—“the seat of emotions”—exists in a part of the brain, the hippocampus, that humans share with lizards. (Your brain has three layers: the brain stem, controlling basic functions and basic emotions, is the reptilian layer; the mammalian layer houses more complex mental functions such as learning and adaptability; and the third layer constitutes most of the human brain—the cerebral cortex and cerebellum—which allows us to use language and perform complex acts of memory.) Beginning at age 30, parts of the hippocampus die off.
Emerson said, “After thirty, a man wakes up sad every morning, excepting perhaps five or six, until the day of his death.”
At 31, Tolstoy said, “At our age, when you have reached, not merely by the process of thought but with your whole being and your whole life, an awareness of the uselessness and impossibility of seeking enjoyment; when you feel that what seemed like torture has become the only substance of life—work and toil—then searchings, anguish, dissatisfaction with yourself, remorse, etc.—the attributes of youth—are inappropriate and useless.”
Before being guillotined, Camille Desmoulins, one of the leaders of the French Revolution, when asked how old he was (he was 34), said, “I am 33—the age of the good sans-culotte Jesus, an age fatal to revolutionists.”
By age 35, nearly everyone shows some of the signs of aging, such as graying hair, wrinkles, less strength, less speed, stiffening in the walls of the central arteries, degeneration of the heart’s blood vessels, diminished blood supply to the brain, elevated blood pressure. In my father’s case, the only sign of aging at 35 was a rapidly receding hairline. One out of three American adults has high blood pressure. The maximum rate your heart can attain is your age subtracted from 220 and therefore falls by one beat every year. Your heart is continually becoming a less efficient pumping machine.
You couldn’t prove this decline in efficiency by my dad, who, until his early 90s, would awake in darkness in order to lace up his sneakers and tug on his jogging suit. Birds would be just starting to call; black would still streak the colored-pencil soft blue of the sky: my father would be jogging. In an hour, he’d run 20 (then, when he got older, 15 and, later, 10) times around a track that was without bleachers or lighting or lanes, that had weeds in the center and a dry water fountain at the end of the far straightaway and a running path littered with glass and rocks. He didn’t care. He pounded his feet through the dirt and pumped his arms and kept his rubbery legs moving until, by the very stomping of his feet, night withdrew and morning came. As he once wrote me, apropos of nothing in particular, “I am, no surprise, that same skinny kid who ran with the speed of Pegasus through Brownsville’s streets in quest of a baseball.”
Rheumatoid arthritis most frequently begins between ages 35 and 55.
In 1907, the French writer Paul Leautaud, at 36, said, “I was asked the other day, ‘What are you doing nowadays?’ ‘I’m busy growing older,’ I answered.”
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Mozart died at 35; Byron, at 36; Raphael and Van Gogh, at 37.
James Boswell, Samuel Johnson’s biographer, said, “I must fairly acknowledge that in my opinion the disagreement between young men and old is owing rather to the fault of the latter than of the former. Young men, though keen and impetuous, are usually very well disposed to receive the counsels of the old, if they are treated with gentleness, but old men forget in a wonderful degree their own feelings in the early part of life.” When Boswell wrote this, he was 37 and Samuel Johnson was 69. Whenever I mention an accomplishment of mine to my father, he quickly changes the subject or mentions a more impressive accomplishment by someone else. I asked him once whether, in his view, competition was built into any relationship between father and son, and he briskly denied it, saying he’s never felt anything except pride and admiration.
