Charles McCabe was a columnist with so many opinions to get off his chest that he sometimes stacked up a dozen columns ahead of his San Francisco Chronicle deadline. Joseph Alioto said McCabe was the only Catholic he knew who went to confession in public and got paid for it.
Until his death at the age of 68, he devoted several columns to the subject of aging. They’re in a pair of books, The Fearless Spectator and The Charles McCabe Reader, containing the best of his work.
One thing that kept McCabe going was curiosity. “I wanted to know how the whole crazy plot would turn out. . .” he said. “I wouldn’t have missed the past decades of my life for anything. The chief use of my life has been that I have grown, or think I have grown. My chief pleasure in the later part of my life has been the observation of that growth. . .I can hardly wait to see the man who awaits me at the end of the tunnel of the next decade, if I last it out. I would like to be kinder, to love myself less, to wish to help people more. I would like my faults to be blunted by the kind arm of time. I would like to continue to wake up in the morning with the feeling that I have useful work to do.”
Give up your grudges, he urged. “They are a weight and an encumbrance. . .The wretched past has no right to encroach on the present. In fact, the sensible man has a positive duty to prevent this. Fortunately. . .just growing older does the trick. Here’s hoping you will be able to say, as the Abbe Sieyes replied when asked what he did during the French Revolution: ‘I survived.’”
McCabe took umbrage at the term “senior citizen,” declaring, “It is a patronizing and dehumanizing expression” popularized by bureaucrats and politicians who want our votes. “We do not have a single convenient noun to designate an old person, though we are very good on the other age groups: embryo, fetus, newborn, infant, child, the adolescent and the adult.” Americans should use the word “elder,” he declared. It “is simple and sweet. It does the job. It sounds good to my ear.”
As for “ageism” in America, McCabe insisted, “There are a lot of good things about age, and the youth to be recognized. Merely having lived over 55 years brings for most of us a hardy wisdom that can be imparted to the young. We know quite a bit about the gopher holes along the road of life, and there is no reason why there should not be a systematic spreading of that knowledge to those who are still sorting things out.
“The way we cope with old age is, too, another part of our legacy to those who will some day become their ‘future selves.’ What older people need more than anything else these days are the tools to live productively and well and even inventively. These tools can only be produced by the citizenry at large, who are mostly older folks.”
Summing up his early years in New York City, McCabe said, “Though it was never phrased in quite this way, the burden of my moral education was this: Anything you enjoy is bad for you. . . It has been uphill work, but I’ve done a pretty good job of things, and I intend to spend the rest of my life learning how to enjoy more.
“Over the long run, the game is worth the candle," he declared "This is largely because of one little word: Growth. It is this slow and steady quickening of strength which enables one to accept the offerings of life—-both pleasant and painful. A fully grown man, which I certainly do not claim to be, is the noblest work of God. For growth always seems to move in the direction of love. It is, in fact, almost a definition of that often-defined word.”
A quote from a press handout caused him to ruminate: “The idea is held by far too many people that life is essentially a struggle against death, rather than a process constantly to be savored and enjoyed. . . We should concern ourselves always with taking things on, rather than sloughing things off. New interests should be sought like paying ore. Everywhere and whenever it can be arranged, the pulse should quicken.”
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