“When did I get old? When did everything change? Did time speed up? Or did I slow down?
When did I get old? It’s all behind me now. I used to fly so high, and not fear a thing. I was ten foot tall; everybody knew my name. but the world keeps turning, statues begin to fall, and now I’m just a man who used to have it all.”
Last night, sitting at my oldest granddaughter’s softball game – she’s a sophomore starting pitcher (8-3) at William Carey University - when they defeated the University of Mobile, I noticed that every player had her own “walk out” song playing over the loudspeaker when she approached the plate to bat. Their choices were eclectic, ranging from hip-hop to country. I knew this was now the tradition in both softball and baseball, but it got me thinking about what my own walkout song might be. Maybe not for softball, but for life in general. As I thought about it, it occurred to me that most people my age think more about their “walk away” or departure song - what will be played at their funeral. In any event, the above words to the song “When Did I Get Old?” (2023), by Derrick Dove and the Peacemakers, well sum up my frame of mind these days. When did I get old?
Psalm 90:10 reminds us that “As for the days of our years, in them are seventy years and if men should be in strength, eighty years; and the greater part of them would be labor and trouble; for weakness overcomes us and we shall be chastened” (Amplified Bible). No matter how you cut the cards, my shelf life has expired, and my expiration date has come and gone. The other night I was re-reading the “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” an 1859 translation of an ancient Persian poet by Edward Fitzgerald, and I came across these lines as I tried to fall asleep: “We are but miniature pieces on a giant chessboard, tiny dots on the sprawling meadow that is life. Life shifts the pieces around back and forth, loses interest, knocks them out, then sets them back in their graves.” That about sums it up. Personally, I always preferred the part in the poem about “a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and Thou beside me singing in the wilderness,” but that was when I was much younger. Anyway, I always felt like I was playing checkers when everyone else was playing chess.
I couldn’t really say when I started to get old. When I was young, I was so backward I couldn’t play dead in a Western movie; but probably around the time my mama died while I was at sea and my alcoholic daddy later committed suicide, I began to realize that there wasn’t any free bubble up and rainbow stew. Pick any metric you like but, oddly enough, I think my aging started with the mail, or lack of it. I once went over two years at sea without getting a single letter. I began to wonder if anyone in the world knew I was alive. To this day, I wear a rubber band on my wrist because the mail petty officer, not having any letters for me, either out of pity or ridicule, would always throw me the rubber band that held our division’s packet of letters together.
Beyond that, I suppose my journey into old age began with my worldwide travels. It’s not so much the years as it is the miles. The Canadian country singer, Hank Snow, had a hit song, “I’ve Been Everywhere” (1962) later covered by Johnny Cash, where he listed all the places he’d visited in the United States: Reno, Fargo, Chicago, Minnesota, etc. In the spirit of the endless poker games that I witnessed on ships all over the world, I will “call” Hank on those places and “raise” him a Singapore, a Saigon, a Sasebo, and a Vladivostok. When I was nineteen, I had already been ashore in twenty-five countries, been through the Panama and Suez Canals, slept on the Spanish Steps, was a Golden Shellback, and had climbed Mt. Fuji in Japan. Then I went home on leave, after almost three years absence, and my faithful high school English teacher, the only one who had ever given me the time of day, put me in my place. She said, “Well, that’s all well and good, Benny, that you’ve seen all those famous places, but did you really know what you were seeing?” I had to admit that I didn’t. All I had was vague impressions and bits and pieces of random information.
That day, I “aged” intellectually. I decided to pay more attention. The next time I went ashore in Athens, for example, I was ready. My small ship had just transited the Corinth Canal, separating the Peloponnesian Peninsula northeast of the city. It is very narrow, cut through solid rock, and you could run back and forth across the focsle and slap the rock on either side. My little ship had no library, but it did have a ragged, World War II-era set of encyclopedias, and I had studied up. I might have been the only one onboard who knew that the Roman emperor, Nero, began construction of the canal in the first century A.D. by digging with a golden hoe – when you think about it, not that different from today starting new construction by turning dirt with silver shovels. So, in Athens, I took my notebook ashore with me. I had climbed up the Acropolis to the Parthenon several times already, but this time I sketched the difference between the larger Doric marble columns and the smaller Ionic-style ones which I knew the designers had used to give the building a sense of depth and perspective.
It was a while before I learned about “trompe l’oeil.” I speculated about the immense gold and ivory statue of the goddess, Athena Pallas, after which Athens is named, and for which the temple was built to house. I walked around the building and tried to visualize it before a chance mortar shell from a Venetian warship blew it up in 1687 when the occupying Turks were using it as a gunpowder magazine. Finally, I summarized in my journal how it must have looked before England’s Lord Elgin stripped off so many of its beautiful marble friezes and shipped them home to the British Museum in 1815.
Although I wasn’t yet that “literary” in those early days, I do remember having read Percy Shelly’s poem, “Ozymandias” (1818), with its lines: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay, Of the colossal Wreck, boundless and bare. The lone and level sands stretch far away.” One can’t help but think of that poem when looking at the ruins of the Parthenon. I also knew that just a few years after composing the poem, Shelly (1772-1822) drowned when his sailboat capsized and sank off the coast of Italy. Life is short.
I grew older, too, in Greece, when I got my first lesson in “realpolitik.” I was on Shore Patrol in downtown Athens, rounding up drunken sailors from my ship, when I managed to get caught up in an anti-American riot by the students at the Athens Polytechnic Institute who were protesting the dictatorship brought on by the “Revolt of the Colonels.” It struck me as ironic that I was running for my life down a street that was rebuilt after the war by the American-funded Marshal Plan. However, I did think that the military junta’s “rising phoenix” symbol, which denoted a “New Greece,” and was plastered on posters all over town, was neat. I guess I’m a two-time loser, because many years later I got caught in a similar student-led, anti-American riot, this time at the University of Panama. They were protesting the Panama Canal crossing their country. I often wondered how they singled me out as an American, as I had on civilian clothes – probably my military haircut.
As time passed, and I kept moving from ship to ship, from voyage to voyage, from ocean to ocean, and from continent to continent, I continued to grow older but not necessarily smarter. One day, I was walking down the street in Perth, Australia, and I saw a kid throwing a homemade boomerang which came back perfectly. I stopped him; we talked a while, and I ended up buying it from him, paying him an extra five dollars for a lesson. It wasn’t hard to learn. A few days later, I bought myself a digeridoo, an onomatopoetic name for an ancient Aboriginal wind instrument. It only makes one sound, but that is enough, apparently, to send them off on their “Dreamtime” quests.
On another visit to Australia, on our Navy’s first nuclear-powered cruiser (I slept one deck directly over the after (rear) nuclear reactor for three years. That’s why my wife says that “I glow in the dark”) the environmental protection group, “Green Peace,” tried to keep us out of the harbor. We just gently “nudged” their small boat out of the way and tied up at the pier as normal. Later, there was an international incident when the French Intelligence Agency tragically sank that same boat with major loss of life as it protested the detonation of atomic test bombs on some of the French Pacific islands.
On that same trip, I got interested in the origin of the song, “Waltzing Matilda,” which is the unofficial national anthem of Australia. I know this because, when I was stationed in Newport, Rhode Island, I was the sponsor of an Australian naval officer who was studying at the Naval War College for one year. We got to know his family and things “Australian” very well. For example, they seem to smear that awful condiment, “vegemite,” on most everything they eat. Although you often hear the song mentioned in relation to the Allied debacle at the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915 when Australian and other Allied troops fought the Ottoman Turks along the Dardanelles Strait separating Europe and Asia, it is really a “bush ballad.” (As an aside, Winston Churchill once said that authorizing the Dardanelles invasion was one of the biggest mistakes he'd ever made.”) In the “patois” of early outback Australia, to “waltz” meant to wander about the countryside looking for work, and to “waltz Matilda” was to travel with a “swag” or bag; hence wanderers were called “swagmen,” and the song is about such a man – not those returning wounded from Gallipoli.
Another interesting thing about Gallipoli is that the site of ancient Troy is not far away, except that it’s on the Asian side of the Dardanelles, as you approach Istanbul or Constantinople. The Old Man on one of my early ships, who, for some reason, thought I had sense, used to make me get up on the ship’s loudspeaker system as we passed by and talk about Troy’s ancient history. The crew’s ears really perked up when I talked about Homer’s Helen, the kidnapped woman whose beauty caused one thousand ships to be launched “on the wine-dark sea.”
I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you about another wretched soul who grew old at sea – a peripatetic outcast who spent the final fifty-five years of his life wandering the waters of the world. Of course, I’m talking about Lieutenant Philip Nolan, USN, an accused accomplice of the Revolutionary War traitor, Aaron Burr. His story is told in the short story, “The Man Without a Country” (1863), by Edward Everette Hale. Overheard by the judge at his treason trial to curse the United States and renounce his citizenship, he was sentenced to spend the rest of his days onboard U.S. Navy ships, never entering the United States again or even hearing it discussed. While his story is fiction, it is a cautionary tale about inopportune speech.
As the years passed, he was treated with courtesy at his former rank, but nothing was ever mentioned about the United States – no conversations, no newspapers, no letters, nothing. Nolan was unrepentant at first, but he gradually changed his mind and became desperate for news from home. One day, while being transferred to another ship at sea, he implored a young sailor to never make the same mistake that he had made. Ultimately dying aboard the USS Levant in foreign waters, he showed a sympathetic officer his little “shrine” of patriotism. The “Stars and Stripes” were draped around a picture of George Washington, and over his bed, Nolan had painted the picture of a bald eagle. At the foot of his bed, Nolan had painted an outdated map of the United States, not showing the many states that had been added during his absence. Nolan smiled and said: “Here, you see, I have a country.” Like Nolan, I grew old at sea all over the world, but I, too, always had a country.
Light a candle for me.
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Benny Hornsby of Oak Grove is a retired U.S. Navy captain. Visit his website, bennyhornsby.com, or email him: villefranche60@yahoo.com.
