Demographic Difficulties

Many elderly citizens in my small western Maine town of Lovell were summer people from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island who always planned to live here full time after retirement. I expect that’s true in other towns in a state where “Vacationland” is stamped on our license plates. I’m semi-retired myself and part of my income, aside from my teacher’s pension and Social Security, is from managing vacation properties here. It dovetailed nicely with teaching and I kept doing it after retiring in 2011. The small contractors I use for plumbing, excavation, carpentry, etc. tell me often how hard it is to find help — especially competent help.

Maine is the oldest state in the country, demographically speaking. According to a recent Boston Globe article: “Maine is one of only two states, along with West Virginia, where deaths now outnumber births,” and “many young people move away in search of opportunity,” further exacerbating the problem. Counties in northern Maine see declining populations while York and Cumberland counties in southern Maine are increasing by three and six percent respectively. Median age is 44 statewide. There are more people over 65 than under 18. The over 65 demographic is predicted to rise 37% by 2016 while all other age groups decline, according to the Globe.

Maine people are having fewer children and New England, according to a New York Times article, is “the least fertile region in the U.S." Without immigration, which is at record levels, regional population would very likely be declining. People I meet in the Portland area who are in their twenties and thirties are more likely to have dogs with them than children and I’ve written about that several times over the past fifteen years. Nationwide, according to lifescience.com, “there were about 60 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 [in 2017], which is 3 percent lower than the rate in 2016, and the lowest recorded rate since the government started tracking birth rates in 1909.”

Why don’t 21st-century Americans want to have children? When I looked into the problem for previous articles, opinions varied. Some young people said openly that it was selfishness — that children are expensive and require a lot of work for a long time. Some women said they wanted to avoid stretch marks and saggy breasts. Some had parents who divorced and didn’t want any of their children to go through that painful experience. Some said the earth’s environment couldn’t handle too many more people and they wanted to reduce their carbon footprint.

Catholic pundits suggest it’s a lack of hope. Young celebrities like the 29-year-old Congresswoman Alexandria Occasio Cortez (D-NY) declared recently that the world will end in twelve years if we don’t take drastic steps like passing a “Green New Deal.” That certainly lends credence to the no-hope theory for her demographic. The Catholic Church taught (I don’t know if it still does) that despair is a sin, and that suicide — the ultimate despair — is too. AOC recommends that her cohort forego having children and eating meat as well because of the methane cows expel from their rear-ends. She wants us all to be childless vegetarians.

The Catholic Church’s influence with young people has seriously declined in America and in the entire western world. The liberal Pope Francis has made several public statements against abortion, but I don’t believe he’s said anything about artificial contraception. That too was declared sinful by his predecessor, Pope Paul VI in his 1968 encyclical: Humanae Vitae. Never have I heard a sermon on that teaching in any Catholic Church I’ve attended, it being politely ignored since its issue fifty years ago. Pope Francis has spoken out about climate change, about which he’s a fellow traveler with the Democrat Party, but nothing about the “carbon footprint” of more children — not yet at least.

The unemployment rate is so low now that we’re essentially at full employment all across America. There are more jobs than people who want them. Although you may not believe it if you look out the window here in western Maine, summer is right around the corner. Building contractors, landscapers, restaurants, resorts, and many other businesses will be desperate for workers and we’re simply not producing them. Savvy business people are recruiting in eastern Europe and elsewhere for seasonal employees. Fewer high school or college kids want to work the way they did decades ago.

What are we to do? Some European countries offer financial incentives for women to produce more children. Maybe we can do that here too but it won’t be enough. Our culture has changed from one that encouraged couples to have children to one that discourages them. For that trend to reverse will take a very long time.

Changing Perspectives

My primary care physician is my age. If I keep breathing, my next one will be much younger. How do I feel about that? Ambivalent. Younger docs are more likely to be up on newer methods, but older ones are likely to be wiser - I hope. Once a year I bring my body in and he looks it over, offering advice about how to prolong my time on earth. I’ve taken his advice so far and already I’ve lived longer than my father or paternal grandfather, so that’s good.

Old oak tree in Cape Elizabeth, Maine

My primary residence is younger than me - under thirty. Structurally it’s in good shape, but I’ve already replaced the appliances we bought when we built it, and my wife is always doing cosmetic makeovers. It’s tight - no drafts - and I like that, especially as my body ages. Maintaining is a whole lot easier than building, and I’ve hired someone to paint it the last two times. My wife talks downsizing, but the thought of starting over and building something smaller makes me tired.

It’s the second new house I’ve lived in. My father moved us into a new one when I was four. New houses are nice. Once they’re finished, you can leave them alone for years and just live. But old houses require constant maintenance, just like old bodies. Up to age twenty-five or so, I didn’t exercise, ate whatever I wanted as much as I wanted, and stayed in shape. After that, I had to restrict my eating and I had to exercise, which I don’t like. Now I have to exercise even more and I’ve grown to hate it. The only thing I like is when it’s over and I don’t have to punish myself anymore for the rest of the day. I never feel "runner’s high" or any other endorphin thing I hear people rave about. I just feel fewer aches and pains than if I were sedentary. That’s the only reason I continue.

Our other house is older than me, built in 1910 or so. It was a kit house ordered from Sears and assembled on site. A couple of young architects live across the street in a similar house and they told me. After I looked it up and saw images online, I’m seeing hundreds of them around the Portland area. Nowadays, people can order houses from various companies, but they’re partially assembled in a factory. Walls and rooves are delivered to the site and assembled using a crane. Pretty slick.

The older house still needs work but it’s mostly cosmetic now. Meanwhile it’s comfortable to live in and there’s no hurry. That hurry-up thing I’ve had to do most of my life, juggling two or three jobs with family responsibilities. Now I avoid hurry whenever possible. Anything involving hurry-up I try to stay away from. I’ve got to repair the front porch on the older house, and I will when I get around to it. Got to put in a half-bath downstairs there, and I will when I feel like it. Gotta finish the book too and it’s taking longer than I thought, but that’s all right.

Some of my contemporaries are having work done on their bodies. A hip here, a shoulder there, and some knees. Good for them if they want to stay functional and avoid unnecessary pain. I suspect some are “having work done” of the plastic surgery kind too, but they don’t talk about it, and I don’t want to know either. Most women dye their hair trying to look younger but I admire the ones who don’t. If they let it go natural and keep themselves in shape, they look better in my eyes. There’s a certain dignity about being who you are that shines through. It’s attractive. Men who dye their hair? I try to stay away from them.

The older kit house

An elderly woman whose old summer mansion I took care of taught me - not expressly, but in the way she looked at things. I was thirty-something. She was eighty-something. Soil had built up over the lower course of shingles on one side and they were rotten. When I showed her she asked what a repair would involve. They’d been that way a while and I said we couldn’t know until we pulled them off to see what was rotted behind them. She asked if the house would collapse, and I said probably not for a while.

The old mansion boarded up for winter

She decided to leave it be, which bothered me until I figured out that she wanted to enjoy however many more summers she had left in the place without the ripping and tearing it would take to fix it.

Perspectives change when you’ve been around longer than the usually-allotted three score and ten years.

Early Old

Most of you are reading this in a newspaper on Thursday, April 7th which is my 60th birthday. My sister, Jane, sent me a card saying: “We spent our entire youth laughing at old people.” Inside, it said: “We are SO screwed.”It’s actually my 61st birthday if you count the first in 1951 at the end of which I was one day old. A year later, when I was one year old, would have been my second birthday, and so on. Today is the first day of my 61st year. I’m not just 60 - I’m “in my sixties.” I’m beginning my seventh decade. A friend reached this milestone last year and when asked how old he was, he’d say “Fifty-ten."Our newest granddaughter, Lila

The way we measure time is relative and this was best exemplified by a small sign I saw on the outside of a bathroom door once which read: “How long a minute is, is relative to which side of this door you’re on.” When I was about ten, a year seemed a very long time because it was one-tenth of my life. Now it’s only one-sixtieth and goes by quickly. I formulated a scale for age when I was ten: Up to twelve, you’re a kid. Then you’re a teenager until age twenty. After that you’re a young adult from twenty to forty. Forty to sixty you’re middle-aged and from sixty on, you’re old.

I finished “late middle age” yesterday. Today I’m “early old.”

I’m not sure how sixty is supposed to feel, but so far it’s pretty good. I’m in good shape, but I haven’t as much stamina. I can still do everything, but I prefer shorter intervals. I can deal with that, but mentally there are other effects. Sometimes I can’t recall the name of something until ten or twenty minutes after the conversation has ended or shifted to another subject. It’s in my head somewhere, but it’s as if it were on a slip of paper and buried under stacks of other paperwork on the desktop of my mind.

My hair is thinning, but it’s still mostly brown. Students ask me if I dye it and it bothers me that they’d think I would. If it were gray, I definitely wouldn’t dye it. That’s okay for women, but vain for a man. Why? I don’t know. That’s what I feel about it. My wife is a year younger than me and her hair is mostly silver. I’m glad she leaves it that way because it’s attractive. There’s a certain strength I sense in women who take care of themselves and allow their hair to age naturally.

Another thing that makes me feel older is when guys in their thirties call me “Sir.” It’s not when they’re trying to sell me something either. It’s happening when I meet them socially. I’ve never been in the military and to be addressed as “sir” is unfamiliar. Students have been calling me “Mr. McLaughlin” for decades but that’s different. The “Sir” thing is going to take some getting used to.

Softball season starts soon. It’ll be my thirty-fourth year playing Thursday nights at Westways in Lovell. I’m one of the older guys now, but last year there were still some showing up who were older. This year, we’ll see. Some younger than me have stopped playing already and come just to watch and drink beer.For about ten or twelve years now, I haven’t had a strong urge to hunt deer - and it used to be overpowering. I’ve been thinking maybe it’s due to diminished testosterone levels because I’d rather go into the woods and shoot pictures. So, I buy chuck-eye steaks at Hannaford’s Supermarket, which I like better than venison anyway. It might not be testosterone though because I still get the urge to punch some someone in the head once in a while. I haven’t actually done it for about thirty years, but it has crossed my mind, and that’s a testosterone thing too. Maybe the urge will diminish someday or go away entirely, but I don’t think so. There’s no shortage of people around still who desperately need a punch in the head, and they still cross my path.

An old priest once told that “As I get older, I care more and more about less and less.” I took that to mean he didn’t sweat the small stuff anymore. He accepted things he could not change and he tried harder to change the things that mattered most - and upon which he could have some effect. I’m pondering his words more lately and it’s helping me make decisions about what to do with whatever time remains for me on this earth.