Keep Moving (2 page)

Eventually you will reach a point

where you will stop lying about your age

and start bragging about it.

—WILL ROGERS

Every morning, I wake up and read the obituaries—

and if I’m not in them, I have breakfast.

—CARL REINER

Playing with House Money
Playing with House Money

There are many different ways to celebrate turning eighty-nine. On December 12, 2014, the night before my birthday, I was in the audience at the Malibu Civic Theater watching my wife, Arlene, belly dance. She’d been taking classes at Melanie Kareem’s Middle Eastern Dance School for a few years and was performing a solo in their end-of-the-year recital. She looked gorgeous in a silver top and black skirt that shimmered with every shake of her hips. I was mesmerized.

After about three minutes I couldn’t sit still anymore. Arlene had cast a spell over me, and there in my seat, my body began to mimic Arlene’s movements and move to the rhythmic Egyptian music until suddenly I was on my feet and heading toward the stage.

I did not want to detract from her big moment in the spotlight, but I couldn’t help myself. I had spent six
decades on the stage, on top of which I had practiced moves with her at home, and I saw no reason to stop what came naturally, even if I was entering my last year as an octogenarian. Why sit on the sidelines of life at any age, especially at mine?

I didn’t. Standing beside Arlene, I shimmied and shook, my hips going right and then left, my arms and wrists undulating like long snakes. All of our rehearsing at home paid off, as we looked in sync, though I added my own solo on the side of the stage, a final series of bumps and shakes in my blue jeans, before relinquishing the stage again to my beautiful wife.

“You were great,” someone said to me afterward. “It’s amazing. You don’t act your age at all.”

Amazing? Why is it amazing that I don’t act my age? Why should I act my age? Or more to the point, how is someone my age supposed to act? Old age is part fact, part state of mind, part luck, and wholly something best left for other people to ponder, not you or me. Why waste the time? I don’t.

The following night—my actual birthday, December 13—we were out again. We went to a holiday party at the home of our friends Frank and Fay Mancuso. They throw first-class parties, and this one was no exception. Christmas carolers in Dickens-style outfits stood by the door and greeted guests with a buoyant version of the seasonal hymn “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” but they segued seamlessly to “Happy Birthday” as soon as Arlene and I came up the front walk. My wife had tipped off the
hosts, despite my preference against such attention. But their harmonizing was perfect, absolutely gorgeous, and there is no bigger fan of four-part harmony than me. I stood there, beaming.

“Do you take requests?” I asked.

“Sure,” one of them said as the others nodded.

“Do you know ‘Caroling, Caroling’? I love the Nat King Cole version, and for some reason I never hear it on the radio during the holidays.”

They knew the classic holiday song, of course, and as their voices wove together in beautiful harmony, I stepped away from Arlene’s side and joined them. “Dingdong, ding-dong,” we sang, “Christmas bells are ringing . . .” If I had worn a Victorian-era suit, I might have sung with them all night.

Inside, the house had been turned into a winter wonderland, starting with a tree in the entry that was at least twenty feet tall, if not taller, and decorated with such an abundance of ornaments and lights that I jokingly said to Arlene, “You could break your neck trying to see the star at the top.”

In the dining room we encountered an actual light snowfall, a unique backdrop to a delicious Italian feast that also included a sixteen-piece orchestra playing holiday classics and standards—in other words, my favorites. Then Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus passed out fancy caramel-covered apples and brought out an enormous cake full of candles. It was one way to say hello to my ninetieth year.

Ironically, I hadn’t planned to do anything for my birthday. I had given the okay to my wife to organize a big party the next year, my ninetieth, but my intention was to sit this one out. I don’t need a party every year. I am fine with celebrating the big ones, the birthdays ending in a five or a zero. Otherwise I don’t like the fuss or attention. I am most comfortable with a simple dinner and visits or calls from my four children, seven grandchildren, and growing list of great-grandchildren.

I think birthday parties are best for kids. They are learning to count. Let them practice. At my age I don’t need the practice. Or the boredom. If I started to count, I would lose interest before I reached fifteen. I would never make it into the fifties, let alone the eighties. So what’s the point?

However, I do like cake. My mother baked a birthday cake for me every year, an angel food cake with chocolate frosting. To this day it is still my favorite flavor. She sent me one when I was in the Air Force. It did not travel well through the mail and arrived in a pile of crumbs. I did not care. My buddies and I stuck a candle in it and ate every morsel.

From what I have observed, birthdays get scary as you march through your twenties. At thirty, you don’t know whether to celebrate: what’s to get excited about—the end of youth? The beginning of adulthood? I overheard someone say that fifty is the new thirty. Does that make thirty the new ten? On the
Today Show
recently one of the anchors declared that sixty is the new forty—and that
was part of a week-long showcase of experts telling people how to live to be a hundred. What’s the point here—is it to stay young or live to be old? Or both?

More people than ever before are crossing the line into senior citizenship, and I see them being intensely curious about how to make it work, how to do it better than their parents or grandparents. These are Baby Boomers, the generation who once screamed, “Hope I die before I get old.” That line should be rewritten, “Hope I die before I
feel
old.” That is the crux of the matter.

Except for a three- to four-month period, which I will go into later, I have never felt old. When I turned fifty, typically the point when people think they’re beginning to head downhill, I was in fine fettle mentally and physically, and my fettle got even finer when I starred in a traveling production of
Music Man.
I toured the country for a year—a new city every week. When it finished, I was fifty-one and in the best shape of my life. I returned to the ranch my first wife, Margie, and I owned in the Arizona desert and realized I couldn’t stay there and do nothing—which was what Margie loved about that place. It was the beginning of the end of our marriage.

At sixty-five, I was halfway into a thirty-plus-year relationship with a new mate, Michelle Triola, a woman with an immense appetite for treating life as a party—and when there wasn’t a party, she organized one. We enjoyed life together. We traveled and sailed, and I had no plans of doing much other than spending my senior years in a leisurely pursuit of adventure. Then producer Fred
Silverman wanted to do a spinoff of William Conrad’s series
Jake and the Fatman,
and he wanted me in the lead role. “You’ll play a surgeon who solves crimes,” he said.

I agreed to one episode. As I said, I was in pursuit of fun and leisure. I thought that would be my full-time job. After the episode aired, though, Freddie said the network wanted to order an hour-long series based on my character. It was called
Diagnosis Murder.
I said, “Freddie, I’m sixty-five years old. I can’t do an hour series.”

He said do one. Then he said do another. And so on. That went on for ten years. I was seventy-five when I finally said “enough.”

But slowing down was not on the agenda. That same year I started an a cappella singing group, the Vantastix, and we booked shows across the country, at any place that would have us. We still perform together. Singing is my retirement. Others play golf—and that’s fine. I may even take it up one day when I get old.

That may not happen. My mother, a beautiful woman in her younger days and regal looking as she aged, lived until she was ninety-six. As a kid, I would have long conversations with her as she did the dishes, while my father barely talked to me at all. He said even less to my brother, Jerry. Before getting married, Dad had been a bon vivant around town—without money. He played the clarinet and saxophone in a band, had played semipro baseball, and once won a left-handed golf tournament. A jack-of-all-talents. Then I came along, and he stopped that life. He became a traveling salesman, which he hated. It made
him angry about his fate. He was tall, thin, and wiry like me and genetically poised to live a long life, and he likely would have if he hadn’t been a chain-smoker. He died at seventy-six of emphysema.

His father—my Grandfather Van Dyke—was my real mentor. He filled in while my father was on the road, and in many other ways. He worked in the shop at the railroad and had massive, muscular forearms as proof of all the pounding and lifting he did on that large equipment. Until Charles Atlas came along with his enormous chest and biceps, the mark of a strong man was big forearms (think Popeye). My grandfather was cut from that mold. He died at age fifty-six from a ruptured aneurysm. He went instantly.

His wife—my grandmother—continued to live in the family’s house with his mother, my great-grandmother, who passed away in her eighties, leaving my grandmother on her own for the first time in her life. She was the proverbial small-town, provincial Midwesterner. She had never traveled outside of our hometown, Danville, Illinois, and never ventured, as far as I knew, beyond the daily routines that filled her days. She knew her neighbors, but as they began to pass away, she had less to do and fewer people to talk to. I worried that the isolation of living alone would drive her to a premature grave. I put her in a nearby rest home.

Though it was nice, I was unsure whether she would take to the communal surroundings. But not only did she take to it, she took over. She ran the kitchen. She
got involved in everyone’s business. She was full of stories. One day she called me up and said, “Dickie, I didn’t know that people were the way they are.”

She was in her late eighties when
Mary Poppins
was released in theaters, and she got to see it. They had a premiere in our hometown. During the screening she said, “I always knew Dickie was built like a racehorse.”

One day I visited her at the rest home. She was sitting on her bed when I came into her room. Ordinarily she liked to hear me tell stories about Carl Reiner, her favorite from
Your Show of Shows
and my boss on
The Dick Van Dyke Show,
but this particular time she took charge of the conversation.

“I have some snapshots you’ve never seen,” she said. Excited, she reached behind her to get the pictures. Somehow she did a complete backward somersault in the bed. If you thought the little stumble I did over the ottoman at the start of
The Dick Van Dyke Show
was something, you should have seen this. Even more impressive, she somersaulted forward again, with barely a pause in her conversation, as if it were nothing out of the ordinary.

But that was my grandmother. She was light-hearted—never worried about much of anything.

I inherited her sense of humor and ease and maybe also her ability to take a tumble and bounce back up with a smile. Though unlike her, as a younger man I was a worrier. As a nightclub performer and then TV host, I worried about how I was going to support my wife and
young children. I mention that frequently and am sure you will find me talking about it again because I did not have much ambition or secure employment. And yet things worked out: I still marvel at my good luck.

Today I don’t worry about anything. At eighty-nine, what’s the point? But I don’t think worrying served much of a purpose when I was younger. It was a waste of time, I suppose. It was an attitude suppressor. The less you worry, the better your attitude is, and a positive, worry-free, guilt-free attitude is key to enjoying life at any age—especially old age. A thousand years ago people didn’t live long enough to worry about anything other than finding their next meal and avoiding becoming some ravenous beast’s next meal. If people did manage to live a long time, their family or tribe took care of them. Very often they worshipped them, the wise elders of the clan.

I can see heads nodding: if only that were the case today.

It is a relatively recent phenomenon that human beings worry about old age, social security, medical bills, and long-term care. But you can only plan so much. In general, things either work out or they don’t, and if they don’t, you figure out something else, a plan B. There’s nothing wrong with plan B. Most of life, as I have learned, is a plan B. Or a plan C. Or plans L, M, N, O, P.

Here is the truth: your teens and twenties are your plan A. At fifty, you’re assessing whether plan B or plan C or any of the other plans you hatched actually worked. Your sixties and seventies are an improvisation. There
is no blueprint, and quite honestly you spend a lot of time feeling grateful you’re still here. Call it fate, luck, or whatever. If you make it past then, as I have, you discover a truth and joy that you wish you had known earlier: there is no plan.

As you get older, you figure this out. You relax. You exhale. You quit worrying. You shake your head with an accepting disbelief as family members and friends disappear like photos in a yearbook, leaving empty spaces where there used to be familiar faces, and occasionally you wonder when it will be your turn and what that will be like. You go for a walk—not to get from point A to point B but just because you want to feel the warm sun on your skin and enjoy fresh air. You open your eyes in the morning with surprise and delight that you’re still here. You realize you’re playing with house money. You are ahead of the game. You eat whatever you want. You do what you like. You smile at strangers. You wave, “Have a nice day.”