During six decades together, my older sisters, Maureen (Moe) and Karen, gave me many wonderful gifts. The best one is my love for the Beatles.
I was a child in the 1960s, but my sisters were cool teenagers. I annoyed them at times, but they let me listen to their radio and taught me how to roller-skate and dance.
Beatlemania was all the rage, even in our northern Utah home. So Moe and Karen also introduced me to the music of John, Paul, George and Ringo.
This included songs from “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” such as “When I’m Sixty-Four.” Paul McCartney wrote it in his teens but did not record or release it until a decade later in 1967, when his father turned 64.
(Screenshot) Photo of album cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” which included “When I’m Sixty-Four.”
McCartney once described the tune — featuring clarinets, bass and chimes — as “rooty-tooty.” In the jaunty lyrics, a young man speculates with his lover about growing old together.
When I first heard the song, growing old was inconceivable. Now, as I turn 64 this May, the anthem about aging and mortality resonates.
I don’t fret too much about my own demise, but listening to “When I’m Sixty-Four” when you are just about there does make one a bit contemplative. Although John Lennon invited us to “imagine no religion,” faith and the Bible do offer some help during such musings.
Proverbs 16:31 says “gray hair is a crown of splendor…attained by a righteous life,” and Job 12:12 explains that “wisdom belongs to the aged, and understanding to the old.” But then Matthew’s Gospel soberly reminds me that I know not the time nor the hour of my death.
The lyrics of “When I’m Sixty-Four” are also a useful guide for looking back and taking stock.
“When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now.”
I still have most of my hair, now all gray. I cut it each season, four times a year, whether it needs it or not.
My thick and wavy mane takes on a life of its own as it grows. When each quarterly shearing approaches, my wife, Vicki, starts calling me “Bozo the Clown.”
I respond with the wisdom of that Broadway musical “Hair”: “Gimme a head with hair, long beautiful hair.” As I give in and go to the barber, I mumble to Vicki that she’s lucky to live with an old man who can still grow it.
“Will you still be sending me a valentine, birthday greetings, bottle of wine?”
Please, not too much wine. There’s something vile within the aging process that forces human alcohol digestion to downplay the buzz and highlight the hangover.
“Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64?”
A recent visit to Disneyland with our adult children and our grandsons was a startling revelation.
I used to be the Master of Mouse House, the fast pass hero who shrewdly set day/ride schedules and fearlessly led our O’Brien clan past lines of those Disney-doomed folks who did not plan to fail but who failed to plan.
Now all this is done on an app. During our most recent trip, my job was simple — keep up with the younger folks, don’t get lost (too often), and try not to drool (too much) on myself.
Given the trend lines, if I see the “Happiest Place on Earth” again, it may be while I sit in one of those plastic Disney rental strollers. I’m kind of looking forward to it.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Paul McCartney performs Salt Lake City in 2014. He is now 82 years old.
“I could be handy, mending a fuse, when your lights have gone.”
Nope. To be fair, this also was not true when I was 24, 34, 44 or 54.
“Ev’ry summer we can rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight.”
The 60s are a good time to travel, but my wife and I both work and tend our grandkids. Still, we try.
I’m a monk nerd (as explained in my 2021 book, “Monastery Mornings”) and have convinced Vicki to visit each remaining Trappist monastery in the United States with me. She’s a good sport and the abbeys are in lovely places.
Unfortunately, I got sick (two colds and one COVID-19) during three of our four trips in 2024. As I approach 64, a part of me likes home and hearth better than the Isle of Wight.
“Grandchildren on your knee; Vera, Chuck and Dave.”
This is the real payoff for getting old. We have Wally and Finn who are, to slightly paraphrase Lennon, “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful boys.”
They also are well worth the many indignities of aging, such as: (1) new leg scratches or arm bruises, which I know not how I got; (2) mysterious gravitational forces that make it hard to get up after sitting on the floor; (3) stress sweat when I have to change my computer password; (4) the blank look I get from work colleagues whenever I mention Archie Bunker; and (5) that pesky 6-decade-old bladder that wakes me up to go to the bathroom each night.
“Yours sincerely, wasting away.”
See all the above.
“Send me a postcard, drop me a line, stating point of view.”
(Michael O'Brien) The real Beatles make their famous walk. Photo from Abbey Road gift shop.
Ultimately, the Beatles leave us to our own devices to discern the joys and challenges of the golden years. For that, however, I also love their 1969 album, “Abbey Road.”
During a 2018 trip to London, my wife and I found the famous crosswalk and re-created the album’s iconic cover. The intersection is so popular with tourists that city authorities moved the “Abbey Road” street sign high up on the side of a nearby building so people like me won’t steal it.
(Vicki O’Brien) Michael O’Brien re-creates, sort of, the famous Beatles album cover walk across the Abbey Road intersection.
(Michael O'Brien) The sign marking the famous Abbey Road crosswalk, high up on a building away from souvenir seekers.
In their second-to-last album’s second-to-last song, “The End”, the Beatles vocalize what just may be the meaning and purpose of life: “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”
By 1969, Lennon had little good to say about his bandmates. And yet, he praised these McCartney lyrics as “a very cosmic, philosophical line.”
The Irish McCartney was baptized Catholic but raised in a nondenominational home. He says he’s agnostic, explaining, “I have a kind of personal faith in something good, but it really doesn’t go much further than that.”
And yet, the penultimate words McCartney penned for “Abbey Road” sound remarkably like my favorite part of Matthew’s Gospel — love your neighbor as yourself. Focus on giving love instead of wondering where or when you will receive it.
Whether your source is religion or the Beatles or from your two older sisters, it’s pretty good advice at any age.
Even when I’m 64.
(Courtesy photo) Writer and attorney Michael Patrick O'Brien.
Michael Patrick O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City who frequently represents The Salt Lake Tribune in legal matters. His book “Monastery Mornings: My Unusual Boyhood Among the Saints and Monks,” about growing up with the monks at an old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, was published by Paraclete Press and chosen by the League of Utah Writers as the best nonfiction book in 2022. He blogs at https://theboymonk.com.
