Rod is the oldest person I know in the Sandhills. He’s 94. We met several months ago at a Pinehurst Old-Timers luncheon, where he was cutting up with the ladies at the adjoining table. My kind of guy, I decided on the spot.
I went to see him the day after my 53rd birthday. I went as an eager old-timer-in-training — a “Future Old Fogey of America,” as I recently overheard a certain witty teenager in my household describe her father to a friend, who couldn’t believe she was 17 and still had a silly midnight curfew.
I was hoping for some useful perspective from Rod on the subject of my own increasingly senior moments.
As Rod is within lob-wedge distance of a hundred and not getting any younger by the minute, there was no point in dilly-dallying or beating around the bush. I put it to him straight the instant we sat down in his cozy living room.
“So who is right, Mr. Innes?” I asked. “My wife or Lee Trevino?”
My wife, I explained, contends that growing older is simply a state of mind — that growing older and getting old are two entirely different concepts.
To compound matters, every year about Valentine’s Day, when I least expect it, she likes to throw poet Robert Browning in my face, a man who once foolishly told his wife Lizzie (as he was shouldering his bag and sneaking out the backdoor to catch a quick nine with the guys), “Come grow older with me, love, the best is yet to be.”
Poor Robert, legend has it, never saw another Saturday morning round of golf with the lads as a result of this careless remark. Not long afterward, he expired under the wait of his wife’s weekend to-do list.
On the other hand, there is that true philosopher-poet of the links, Lee Buck Trevino, who once testily observed after blowing a five-stroke lead in a major at the age of 50, ‘The older I get, boys, the better I used to be. Put the period there.”
Rod smiled.
“There’s some truth to both, I suppose,” he said. “Growing older is in your head. You can remember everything that happened 80 years ago, but not an hour ago. On the other hand, it’s amazing what you don’t worry about anymore — even losing golf tournaments, I imagine.”
Very classy answer, that. So, probing more, I asked Rod what sort of things he does remember. I wrote them down in case I forgot them later.
To begin with, Rod vividly recalls coming to the Sandhills from Dornoch, Scotland, with his parents, Alexander and Jemima, in 1922. He was 11. His father was a childhood pal of Donald Ross and was invited here to serve as a golf pro and welcome visitors to the Pinehurst Resort.
He recalls how every road in the region was still made of clay and sand then, how the first paved road in the region was Highway 5 running from Pinehurst to Aberdeen. This was just about the time steel shafts replaced hickory ones in golf clubs, and Rod has a funny memory there, too. As a teenager, he found a part-time job repairing clubs in Donald Ross’ golf shop.
“People have always asked me what Donald Ross was like,” he said. “For one thing, he was much friendlier than his photographs suggest. He was deeply religious, but also jovial and quite clever. Love grass is not naturally occurring around here, but I’ve always contended Mr. Ross put love grass all over his golf courses because if a player was unfortunate enough to hit a ball into it, he was likely to break a wooden-shafted club trying to hit out. As you might expect, we repaired a lot of clubs in those days, a steady business.”
Rod’s daughters Diane and Jane and I laughed at this. They’d just arrived and joined us for a stroll down memory lane.
Fond Memories
The Innes girls and I are almost exactly the same age, by the way, the three of us having debuted roughly midway through the so-called Baby Boom generation that is turning 60 this year and probably feeling its age and probably wondering if the best is yet to come.
If I can remember like it was yesterday riding my Black Racer bicycle eight miles from our house in the suburbs to the Carolina Theater in downtown Greensboro and leaving it unattended and unlocked on Eugene Street just so I could see a young Jane Fonda frolic as space vixen Barbarella, they can remember when nobody in Pinehurst ever thought to lock a door or worried about traffic jams in the traffic rotary because there was no rotary.
“We called Midland Road ‘Double Road,’” Diane said. “You could go down that road and never see a car.”
“There were no street signs either,” Jane recalled. “You gave directions by specific houses or a certain tree or shrub.”
They remembered when kids in all these surrounding towns had their natural boundaries.
“We didn’t mingle much,” said Diane. “The Pinehurst teenagers hung out at the Park and Eat” — that’s where Sonic is now — and the kids from Southern Pines all went to the Clam Box. Everybody from Aberdeen went to Dairy Queen, which is now where the police station is.”
Building Pinecrest High School changed all that, Jane emphasized.
“Before that,” she said, “we all went to smaller high schools and stuck pretty much to our own towns. It seemed like so far from one town to the other then.”
Nobody the Innes girls knew then — aside from Rod, by that time associate publisher of Golf World Magazine — played golf for fun and exercise.
“Golf was for the rich visiting people,” said Diane. “After they left in summer, the courses shut down.”
Jane chipped in: “The hotels did, too. This place felt like the end of the earth at times. Hot and lonely.”
A memory nipped at Diane.
“You know one other thing I remember from that time?” she said. “How much it snowed here then. People now look at me like I’m crazy when I say that, but it did. It snowed a lot.”
Jane agreed. “We used to ride our sleds on Pinehurst No. 2,” she said.
“And on Laundry Hill,” added Diane, now a computer technology teacher at Sandhills Community College. She smiled and sighed, shaking her head. “Where did all that go?” she asked, a touch wistfully.
Realities of Aging
Diane might have been reading my mind. I’ve been thinking much the same thing lately upon the solemn occasion of turning 53 and beginning to feel if not act my age.
One thing I’ve decided, however, is to take my wife’s good advice and try not to be too solemn about this growing-older business, though certain realities of aging must be faced.
Topping the list, my nose hair is rapidly getting out of control.
Nose hair, I find, is one of those things that if you turn your back on it for a split second you’re bound to live to regret it. Suddenly it’s waving in the breeze and people are looking at you like you forgot to put on your trousers before going out to buy groceries.
Also, all the best new TV shows are on at 10 o’clock at night, but you don’t have TiVo and wouldn’t know how to make it work if you did.
Everyone’s music is way too loud. Even your own. Watching aging rocker Mick Jagger perform on the Super Bowl halftime show the other night was so depressing I decided it’s time to give away my Stones albums. From now on, it’s the greatest hits of 1785 for this AARP wannabe.
Everybody, I’ve just noticed, drives like maniacs. The other day, two punks zoomed past me on Morganton Road doing at least 15 miles per hour on their skateboards.
When I caught up to them at the light, just to show them who’s still patriarch of the pavement, I revved the engine of my sensible new Subaru station wagon. One of them glanced over and burst out laughing. He nudged his buddy. “Hey, dude, look. It’s a geezer gone wild.” I tried to do a violent wheelie but, alas, stalled miserably in traffic.
Problems With Body Parts
As one ages, dinner at 5 o’clock suddenly doesn’t seem all that unreasonable. In fact, it might be downright civilized. That way, you can brush your teeth and hop into bed straight after the evening newscast.
No matter which expensive teeth-whitening system you use, by the way, your teeth will remain as stubbornly yellow as your underwear.
Speaking of clothing, your socks seldom match, but you don’t care a fig. Mysteriously, plaid no longer seems nearly as objectionable as it used to. All your shirts must have huge double pockets for storing really important stuff.
Speaking of stuff, who took my car keys? I know I left them RIGHT HERE!
Disturbingly, though, you suddenly forget the names of people you’ve jolly well known for more than 30 years, or where you parked the car at the movies, not to mention the grocery list you carefully made out so you wouldn’t have to make a second trip to the store. These days, by the time I get there, I can never remember where I put that stupid list. Normally a third trip is necessary.
Everything you long to buy and eat is basically forbidden anyway. Sometimes I find myself staring at boxes of Krispy Kremes or gooey bear claws at Panera Bread exactly the way I once stared longingly at Playboy magazine securely stacked behind the counter at Eckerd’s Drugs, circa 1968 — a simple pleasure just out of reach due to one’s age, or lack thereof.
You probably shouldn’t be permitted to use the Internet without teenage supervision. The other day I tried to find an e-mail ad-dress for the White House just so I could send my aging Baby Boomer president a friendly bit of encouragement after his passing reference to this very topic in his State of the Union address and accidentally found myself on an entirely inappropriate Web site that will probably have the NSA monitoring all my Internet use from now on.
Body parts worryingly ache. Everything sags. I recently read somewhere that, not counting the nuisance of a bloke’s ever-expanding prostate, only two parts of a man’s body continue to grow after age 50, neither of which is of much interest to the opposite sex.
The drug companies, on the other hand, see you as a windfall opportunity just waiting for a valid credit card number. They have a cute little purple or green pill for a condition I never even knew I suffered from until my restless leg/overactive bladder/surging cholesterol began keeping me from enjoying a more active and fulfilling lifestyle.
When the moment is right, there’s even a little pill to boost my chances of romance, with or without assistance from Robert Browning, assuming my wife isn’t too put off by my lengthening ears or ever-growing shrub-like eyebrows.
Secrets of Longevity
Rod Innes, I’m happy to say, had a good laugh at my Sweet Senior moments. He’s somehow managed to grow older with grace and charm and little of this kind of worrisome nonsense.
When I asked him for the key to his amazing youthful longevity, he thought a moment and observed, “Well, I’d say going to church, having good friends and family around, and keeping a sense of humor. It can always be worse.”
He smiled wryly.
“Ben Franklin, you know, turned 300 years old the other day,” he said.
“I’ll bet his nose hair is really something,” I said, feeling the great man’s pain.
Author Jim Dodson has been a writer-in-residence at The Pilot since June. He can be reached at jasdodson@earthlink.net.
