by Joe Broadmeadow
Today, I turn seventy years old. I want to say that again because it hasn’t sunk in and I’m not sure it ever will. Seventy. Years. Old. I’ve typed those words and I’m still waiting for my brain to file them somewhere that makes sense, but it keeps rejecting the paperwork, stamping it “insufficient evidence,” and sliding it back across the desk.
Here is what I know about being seventy: I don’t feel seventy. I feel like a man in his late thirties who has been the victim of an elaborate and sustained hoax. The person I encounter in the bathroom mirror each morning is clearly an imposter—some weathered stand-in sent to gaslight me while my actual self is presumably still out there somewhere, maybe stuck in 1987, completely unaware of what’s happening. The mirror shows wrinkles. I don’t have wrinkles. I have never approved of wrinkles. And yet there they are, present and accounted for, apparently on permanent assignment. My knees have developed opinions. They share those opinions every time I stand up from a chair, loudly, in the language of a man walking on gravel in dress shoes.
I spent twenty years as a police officer in East Providence, which means I have seen the full catalog of things human beings do to themselves and each other. I stood at crime scenes at three in the morning eating a gas station sandwich and thought, well, that’s a new one. I have been lied to by people who lied with the serene confidence of amateur magicians who don’t realize you can see the card up their sleeves.
Absurdity, in other words, is not a new concept to me. I have a professional relationship with it. But nothing in two decades of police work prepared me for the sheer brass of time itself—the way it stands there with its hands in its pockets, whistling, completely unashamed, and informs you that you are, in fact, seventy years old now.
Speed is the thing that nobody warns you about. Or maybe they do warn you and you just don’t hear it because you’re young and your knees are quiet and the warning sounds like something that applies to other people. But here is the truth: somewhere around fifty, time finds a higher gear. By sixty, it has abandoned the speed limit entirely and is now technically fleeing the scene. At seventy, entire seasons go by with the casual swiftness of a Tuesday afternoon. I blink and it is December. I blink again and it is April. I blink a third time, and this year is suddenly last year, which is impossible, because last year literally just happened. I was there. I remember it. Sort of.
The decade from sixty to seventy did not feel like a decade. It felt like a long weekend—a pleasant one, mostly, but one where you kept meaning to read that book and somehow never got around to it, and now it’s Sunday night and you have to find your keys. I have a theory that time actually is accelerating, that this is a measurable physical phenomenon, and that physicists would confirm it if they weren’t all too busy blinking and wondering where June went.
Which brings me, with considerably more feeling than I expected, to memory.
Memory is a strange comfort. It is also, I have learned, a creative writer. I have memories from thirty years ago that are vivid and specific and detailed in ways that recent events simply are not—I can see the particular shade of afternoon light coming through the window of an apartment I lived in for two years in my twenties, the pattern on the rug, the sound the radiator made when it was feeling theatrical. But ask me what I did last Thursday and I will give you the face of a man who has just been asked to solve a differential equation at a dinner party. This is, I am told, normal. It is also, I choose to believe, evidence that the brain has the good taste to curate.
The memories that stick are the ones that matter. The first day my daughter looked at me and actually recognized who I was—not just a warm blur, but me specifically, her father—and the expression on her face, which was not entirely unlike the expression people make when they’re trying to be polite about a surprise. The last conversation I had with my father, which I have replayed enough times that I’ve probably altered it significantly through sheer repetition, the way a photocopy of a photocopy starts to lose the original detail. The particular sound of a city at four in the morning when you’re the only one on the street and the whole world is briefly, completely yours.
These memories do not feel old. This is the other thing nobody tells you: when you remember something from forty years ago, you are not accessing a historical document. You are standing in the room again. The feeling is contemporary. The person doing the remembering is not seventy, not really—he is whatever age he was when it happened, still there, still surprised by it, still grateful or still wounded or, most often, both.
What seventy has given me, somewhat against my will, is an understanding that the inventory is finite. Not in a morbid way, or not only in a morbid way, but in the same way that knowing a meal is almost finished makes you pay more attention to the last few bites. You chew slower. You set the fork down between bites. You look up from the plate.
I find myself looking up from the plate more often now. I notice more. Not in the way young people notice things, that first-time hungry noticing, but in a different way—a way that has some weight to it, some context, some sense of accumulation. This is, I suspect, what all those people meant when they said getting older had its compensations. I used to think that was something people told themselves to cope. Now I think it might actually be true.
Seventy is ridiculous. It is factually, ontologically, completely ridiculous—a number that belongs to other people, to the distant future, to a category I was never supposed to enter. And yet here I am, wrinkles and noisy knees and all, with a head full of light from windows I used to live near, standing in a long line of mornings.
I have to say, from where I’m standing, it’s not a bad line to be in.
On Turning Seventy
Now seventy years have gathered on my head,
And every morning brings some novel creak;
I rise by slow degrees, as from the dead,
And feel my strength grow fainter through the week.
My memory, once nimble, plays the thief,
And steals the names of men I know full well;
I hail them with a hearty, false belief,
Then grope for what, alas, I cannot tell.
And yet—what freedom crowns these silvered days!
I speak my mind and care not who may frown;
I nap at noon, I chase no worldly praise,
And wear my folly proudly as a crown.
So let the mirror crack and joints complain—
I'd not go back to twenty-five again.
25567.5 days ago, on July 25, 1956, at 11:31 a.m. at Pawtucket Memorial Hospital I started this journey. I was there because I wanted to be close to my mother, some of you will get this, if you don’t, you have been denied a culturally rich upbringing.
At some point the number of days will reach their maximum allocation. What that is, no one knows. I have often said, for the sake of balance, I will die on my birthday. That way, all I have to do is survive every July 25th and at least believe I have another year ahead of me. We, well, you all may see if my prediction holds.
If I grace these forums with more of my rantings on July 26, 2026, I am good for another 364 days. If not, well, it has been a hell of a ride! Thanks for riding along.
Leave a Reply