(Dobbs) Act Your Age

Are we supposed to act differently just because we're older?

You might have missed it, but President Joe Biden was declared by his doctor last month a “healthy, vigorous, 80-year-old.” Given his persistently punishing schedule, he must be, because he couldn’t pull it off if he weren’t. Just think about that trip he took a few weeks ago to Ukraine. Biden traveled through seven time zones— first across the ocean by plane, then ten hours by train through the war-torn country to Kyiv, then ten more hours on the rails to get back to safety again—and after that grueling odyssey, he held weighty talks with NATO allies in Poland.

It would have been arduous for any man half his age.

So is our 80-year-old president as healthy and vigorous as a 40-year-old? No, of course not, we all slow down. If an uber-athlete like quarterback Tom Brady could lose power by his mid-40s, the rest of us don’t have a chance. But compared to most people, Brady’s still healthy and vigorous and so is Joe Biden. And by the way, you know how supposedly we shrink as we get older? Biden’s doctor says that since the president’s last annual physical, he grew by about half an inch. If that isn’t healthy and vigorous, I don’t know what is.

Which leads me to the whole matter of age. 

Some years ago, my mother came to Colorado for the graduation of one of my sons from college. Early each morning of her visit, I went out on my mountain bike before the rest of the house was stirring. Since it was Spring— what we call “mud season” here when the snow is melting and the slush is deep— I’d get back to the house each time splattered with mud. What she’d say when she saw me (and being a mother, she said it several times) was, “Gregory,” (that’s what she called me when I was in trouble), “you’re too old to ride a bike.”

I was 54.

What she was telling me was, “Act your age.” Which got me to wondering, how was I supposed to act at that age? Is there some magic number after which we should deliberately slow down, just because of how old we are? 

For that matter, what actually makes anyone “too old to ride a bike?” Or to take a tough hike? Or to play tennis? Or to ski down a black-diamond slope? 

The calendar? That’s how many in my mom’s generation saw it. There came a time when they’d look at the calendar and think, “Whoa, I’m just too old to do that anymore.”

To be sure, not all of them thought that way— my wife and her siblings gave their father a 20-speed bike when he was 80— but there’s a reason why Norman Rockwell, born in the late 1800s, portrayed grandmas as he did. Sensible shoes, hair in a bun, sewing, knitting, baking. Not biking.

Now I’m 76. I’ve been lucky, I’ve dodged a few bullets, so I still ski, I still hike, I’ve substituted pickleball for tennis (as have plenty of people half my age), and I still ride my bike up high mountain passes here in the Rockies. The time when “I’m just too old to do that anymore” hasn’t come. Why not? Because there is no magic number beyond which I shouldn’t. Unless your luck runs out and your body just gives up on you, there’s no reason not to keep doing what you used to do.

Mind you, just like Tom Brady, the older we get, we don’t necessarily do it as well. We have to make concessions to our bodies because we’ve been using them nonstop. Everything from organs to joints wear down. If we’re lucky, that doesn’t stop us, it only slows us down.

I talked to a friend my age the other day, a man who has been an active skier and golfer and tennis player all his life, who just had his shoulder replaced. His wife, equally athletic, is looking at two knee replacements. But he got the new shoulder and she’s getting the new knees because while they’ve both had to slow down, they won’t let the calendar make them quit.

An old-time comedian once joked, “First thing I do when I get up in the morning is read the obituaries. If I don’t see my name, I make breakfast.” So I get up every day of my life and make breakfast. As do a lot of my peers, who live equally active lives. And so does Tom Brady, so does Joe Biden (or at least they get up and eat breakfast even if someone else is making it). What we’d all tell you is, we are healthy, we are vigorous, and we are acting our age. Who’s to say we’re not?!

Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.