“Down Comes The Sun”*

The world we live in, that of the twenty-first century, has some features markedly different from those that have gone before. Growing-up, I remember a society obsessed with spectator sports. I remember people worrying about the fact that we were leaving almost all physical activity outside job performance to the professionals in football, soccer, basketball, tennis, what-have you.

Today we see people on our streets carrying out a whole range of physical activities in public and in thousands of gyms. During the pandemic, millions turned to riding stationary bikes in their living rooms. We have become so much more conscious of the necessity of exercising our bodies to stay healthy. And that concern has passed on to efforts to ensure we are exercising our minds, not only on the job, but in other ways in our lives as well.

Another thing that has changed markedly is the greater effort we are making to have physical records of our activities. The overwhelming presence of personal phones, equipped with a camera nowadays, enables us to make a permanent record at insignificant expense of all manner of personal activities.

The consequence for those of us of more advanced ages, still trying to keep our bodies in trim like our neighbors, is that we have become more acutely aware, as time goes on, of our failing capacities, and we often have the physical evidence of the consequences we face over time..

When I review the album of my photos, examining scenes from earlier times, they bear witness to a changing physical condition. They allow us to see the toll that time has taken of our physical being over the years, evidence presented there before our eyes. We have to continually adjust the image of ourselves we carry around in our minds. Sometimes what we see causes a shock. The changes, the products of change over years of time, we must learn to live with. What is the most disheartening is the gathering speed of these changes as we age.

The title to this piece appears in a love song written to describe that longing anticipation for the end of the day when the lovers might come together again. In the context I am describing, the story is not nearly so joyful.  The decline that aging people feel at their later stages when they experience how the senses that make living so enjoyable appear to be rapidly failing, no longer performing their functions in the ways they have done so reliably for many years. Down comes the sun indeed!

These days, now in our late eighties, we begin to feel like we are in the land of invading armies. The changes we are seeing are ravaging our capacities on a daily basis. We make new discoveries each day, actions, capabilities, that we have always taken for granted, now seeming like an awful chore, if they are even possible at all. Yet the liberation from the invading armies which we might expect, or even look forward to, we may feel not yet ready to welcome.

Getting old is not for sissies!

*A line from the song, “All Through The Day”, written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, in 1946, for the movie Centennial Summer.