Vol.175: Reason to rejoice

What excites me this week?

There’s a spring in my step and a twinkle in my eye this week. Maybe you can guess why.

—Spring finally arrived! (True, but then it disappeared again.)

—The Dow hit 50,000! (Until it didn’t.)

—We won the war! (True, but to someone who’s lived through Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, and Korea, military victories are no big deal. Especially when they all turned out so well.)

—Ukraine is driving back the Russians! (Great, but we haven’t reached the finish line.)

—At a momentous two-day summit in Beijing, Trump and Xi refrained from slapping tariffs on each other and instead agreed not to bother each other, especially concerning Taiwan! (This is good?)

—My sports teams whipped your sports teams! (Actually, they didn’t.)

—The 2020 election was finally settled! (Except that it wasn’t.)

—After three weeks of scrambled images and gobbledygook on CNN (but no other channel), our home TV reception miraculously snapped back to normal without our calling any technician! (True, but watching the BBC alternative was a revelation.)

—No one in my family has been arrested or shot by ICE agents! (True, but many other families can’t say the same.)

—The Justice Department indicted Raul Castro for conspiring to kill four Americans 30 years ago! (He’s 94. That’ll teach him a lesson!)

—Tech mogul Elon Musk lost a lawsuit to AI mogul Sam Altman! (Yes, and therefore…..?)

—Trump dropped his family’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS! Instead, he settled for the government’s promise not to audit his family’s back tax returns! (Look, I know Trump has trouble making ends meet. If this settlement enables him to live within his means, I can’t object. But celebrate? That’s another story.)

To live to 100

No, the spring in my step this week has to do with a personal matter. Maybe you’ve forgotten: I’m 83, an age at which one’s grandiose dreams of global peace and ethnic harmony have largely narrowed to less ambitious goals, like remembering my computer passwords or where I left my cane. At reunions these days, I hear classmates say, “I don’t mind dying, but I’d just like to know how everything turned out.” To the extent that world events concern me, what keeps me going is my determination to outlive Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump (although I know full well that another bully, equally malign, will probably pop up in their place).

Our friend Marty Schwartz of Muncie, Indiana, who lived past 100, used to tell us, cheerfully, “Old age just means higher maintenance.” On the other hand, a distant relative was asked, on his 100^th birthday, what he had learned. “It’s just one damned thing after another,” he grumbled.

So… what excites me this week?

Falling on the street

Regular readers of this column no doubt recall that on January 19, while biking to my office, I slipped on the ice, fell off my bike, and broke two bones in my left ankle. (For all the pitiful details, click here). After ankle surgery, I was largely confined to my home for months while clomping around in a variety of boots on my left foot and walking with the aid of my above-mentioned cane.

I was just about all healed when, on May 15, I fell again while walking a block from my home (blame an uneven sidewalk curb or blame me for daydreaming). This time I suffered a huge black-and-blue mark on my right leg and a swollen right knee. I thought maybe the knee was broken and I’d have to go in for more surgery and God knows what else.

Last week I submitted the knee to an X-ray. The next day I got the result:

Negative.

I dodged another bullet.

I ask you: What could be more thrilling? (OK, OK— maybe Raul Castro’s indictment. But aside from that…)

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com