June 3, 2025: The Cherry Now -

Maybe everybody does this, not just people who once marinated in the Greatest Hits of English Literature. But I sure do it: I blurt out a line of verse that seems to fit my situation. (“Seems” is key, here.) I can’t necessarily place it, but it becomes my mantra, for a little while.  

Working up to my 70^th birthday last week, I kept chanting to myself:

Now of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again.

I couldn’t recall the poem, but I thought I understood the math: the narrator, like me, was turning seventy – three score years and ten! And, as a person familiar with the Psalms, he knew that turning seventy meant he was in overtime.

Psalm 90:10                  King James Version

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

However long the narrator may last beyond this point, he knows he isn’t likely to hit ninety.

If you aren’t already ahead of me, I need to tell you that I had this all wrong. (Also, I admit, my math didn’t quite go with the words. Oh, well.)

The poem is “A Shropshire Lad,” by A.E. Housman. It has sixty-three quatrains, and the lines stuck in my head were from Poem II, Loveliest of trees the cherry now. 

The narrator here is TWENTY years old, not seventy. His name is Terence. Terence is a sensitive, nay, a moody young man.  In Poem II, he is wandering about the woodland in a cherry-blossom swoon, sad that he likely has a mere FIFTY SPRINGS LEFT in which to appreciate the glory of the cherry tree.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,

… well, that being the case, Terence is going to go about the woodlands, and look at cherry trees.

It’s not exactly DEEP. Appreciate ye cherry-buds while ye may!

Snotty critics have characterized Terence as callow, “inadequate … to our experience,” lacking in “modern irony,” and even displaying the “defiant atheism of the Victorian adolescent.”

Anyway, here I was thinking the poem was an old guy brooding on how his life was nearing its end, but NO! It’s an overwrought young guy brooding on how he only has fifty years left (“Sigh, comma, heavy,” as my pal Ted used to say.) So that gave me the grins.

I don’t usually brood over birthdays, or make jokes about being 39, or despair about encroaching death. I know people who didn’t make it to seventy, or won’t. I’m not embarrassed about being an old lady. There’s a lot of freedom to it.

And yet, I was wrestling with the concept of seventy. After a few days, I finally realized that I had Expectations about the sort of seventy-year-old I ought to be. I think (this is dumb) I expected that, by this point, I would be WISER than I am.

(Why is it dumb? Well, just anecdotally, for instance: Like you, I had grandparents, parents, teachers, and older friends. I knew them before and after they turned seventy. The wise ones were wise before, and the others were not wise after. (But ME! Me, I was going to become WISE.))

Several of my friends suffered from Milestone Birthday Expectation Disappointment in our younger years. One said she always assumed that when she turned 30, her nylons would stop running. (Wrong! But nylons went away, so … kinda?) Another said she assumed that by 35, she’d be organized.  (Again, wrong!) One went into a decline because she “hadn’t accomplished anything” by 28. (I told her she wasn’t Mozart. We’re still friends.)

So for a few minutes I felt compunction about how I hadn’t been properly sympathetic to my friends. And I thought, Hmm, I have never had Milestone Birthday problems! What a late date to begin having them!

But then I remembered turning twenty. (Just like Terence, the kid in the poem!) I thought twenty was an age when I would put away childish things. I also thought the clock was ticking, and I had darn well better do every lingering childish thing I could, while I was still nineteen!

I had a crush on Geoffrey, who was pining for his old girlfriend, who REALLY wanted him to move on. (All three of us knew this, no secrets.)

What a stupid state of affairs! 

What a waste of everyone’s glorious, frisky youth!

And Geoffrey could solve all three problems -- by turning his attention to me!

Since talking someone into returning a crush is invariably effective, I made my pitch.

“Geoffrey,” I said. “I’m about to turn TWENTY! Come ON! You are my Last Teenage Crush!”

“Oh,” said Geoffrey, showing an uncharacteristic level of interest, “when’s your birthday?”

“It’s in THREE WEEKS,” I wailed.

Geoffrey considered this judiciously. “You’ve got time for one more,” he said.