Putting my 64 years end to end – and seeing what I missed

"Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64?"

So, you may recall, sang the Beatles, playfully flaunting their generation's flamboyant youth — what fun to imagine getting older, losing one's hair — roughly a million years ago.

Or was it … yesterday?

Truth is, the song "When I'm 64" and the epochal "Sgt. Pepper's" album on which it appeared, will turn 50 years old next year.

And by some sorcery, the calendar implies that I turn 64 … today.

As a marker of time's passing, well, who could ask for more?

Forgive this brief intermission from an American journalist's full-time employment these days, chronicling our era's headlong rush toward civilizational collapse.

I pause to note a more private calamity simply because I think I may not be quite alone in feeling a bit odd, bemused and even surprised, to find myself approaching life's final frontier.

No doubt every "maturing" adult has always felt this way. But possibly elderhood has discomfited none more than members of America's ponderous population of baby boomers, one of those rebellious, self-assured generations that once was so positively proud of its youth, almost as if being young had been some kind of accomplishment.

"Time, time, time," sang (and warned) another of our poet/prophets, "see what's become of me ... "

What's become of America — or anyhow American political life — is perhaps another reason as the holiday season takes hold to seek the perspective a longer view of events can provide. The bruising and startling rise of Donald Trump was fueled by the justifiable anger and alienation of Americans who were not being heard. But its first effect has been to spread anger and alienation more widely, especially among 60s-spirit progressives who had thought they'd seen in recent political trends — not least in culture-conflict victories on same-sex marriage, marijuana and more — signs that history was finally catching up with their visionary (all-you-need-is-love) ideals.

Concerns about Trump's fitness and intentions are legitimate. And the sheer, flabbergasting shock of 2016 will not pass quickly.

But still. None of this remotely compares to the shock and terror commemorated 11 days ago — the surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor 75 years ago this month that killed thousands one Sunday morning and plunged the nation into a war that killed 400,000 Americans more (and 100 times that many worldwide).

Or consider that exactly 100 years ago today, the Battle of Verdun officially ended. It had raged in northeastern France for 10 full months, one of the longest continuous combats in human history. Total casualties exceeded 700,000, with about 300,000 dead. It was one of the bloodiest struggles in the slaughterhouse that was World War I — but it wasn't even the worst carnage of 1916. That would have been at the Somme, a five-month horror producing more than 1 million dead and wounded.

No doubt these kinds of recollections should remind us of how far wrong political life and international relations can go, and make us even more vigilant amid today's stormy politics in upholding those institutional bulwarks of American government — its separation of and limitations on powers — that can keep the new administration, like any other, in check.

But it also would be no crime if looking back allowed us to calm ourselves, just a little, remembering that our nation and our species have been through passages more unnerving, perplexing and painful than those we face today. And not at all long ago.

I've long enjoyed a fancy of humanizing the long sweep of history by breaking it into lifetime increments — my lifetime, to be exact. I picture a line of "grandparents" the same age as me, stretching back through time, each person born on (now) the 64th birthday of the person before.

In this line of 64-year-olds, end to end, the forebear immediately behind me would have turned 64 the day I was born. So she was born herself in December 1888. The Somme, Verdun, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, the Great Depression and much more all happened during her life, but before my time. We boomers, and subsequent generations, might want to consider our comparative good fortune.

Just two people behind me in this peculiar timeline stands a fellow born long before Minnesota was a state, when apart from a few soldiers, trappers and explorers there were no Europeans here at all. His lifetime saw one American in every 50 killed in the Civil War. He was almost 70 before aspirin was invented.

Just six people back is an ancestor on hand for the first European settlements in North America; the 12th in line saw the Magna Carta signed. The 31st 64-year-old was there for the first Christmas.

They say life is short, and they're right. And so is human history, measured in lifetimes, the same way it is experienced.

No wonder civilization remains a work in progress — never so much collapsing as still always being constructed, out of flawed and fragile raw materials, one perishable generation at a time.

D.J. Tice is at Doug.Tice@startribune.com.