Many years ago, my elder daughter Sarah was invited to swim in the Maccabi Games in Israel. The Maccabi Games, for the uninitiated (and likely the uncircumcised) could colloquially be called "The Jewish Olympics."
Jews from more than seventy countries meet and compete in scores of sports--from track and field, to swimming, to basketball, volleyball, baseball. The quality of competition is not, I'll concede, Olympian, but still it's an honor to be invited to play and a thrill to see.
And for a people whose physicality and strength is often derided, the Maccabi are a testament--a thumb in the eye of ancient and virulent prejudice, a naysaying of the notion that the People of the Book can't be the people of the ballpark, or the swimming pool, or the pinochle table.
My wife and I flew to Tel Aviv near where my daughter's team was being housed. Before we were to see her swim, we went to visit she and her team mates at their run-down hotel.
When we got there, there were hundreds of kids cavorting about. These are kids enjoying the full-flower of their physicality. They're strong, they're fit, they're attractive and they all know it. As they should.
I saw my daughter sitting in a chair with a boy sitting on her lap. Not something I would have shown my parents when I was young. But ok. O tempore, O mores as Cicero bemoaned.
Finally, the young lap-bound man got up and introduced himself. He was slim and about 5'5", not much bigger than my daughter. I sternly looked him up him down--like New Yorker's do before we decide to push back on someone. You want to make sure he has no weapons and can't obviously beat the shit out of you.
"What do you do?" I Tourquemada'd.
"I wrestle at Northwestern. I'm wrestling here at 126." He polited.
I paused. I glared. I flared.
"I'll kick you ass," I said.
Now it was his turn to look me up and down, to size me up.
"You probably could," he assessed. "You have old man strength."
I had never heard that phrase, "Old Man Strength" before.
I liked it, and I saved it.
Months later when two young men from a carpet cleaning place were in my home to pick up a carpet so it could be revivified, they struggled rolling it up. Impatient, I brushed them away and did it myself. It was a 9'x12' and I might have carried it to their panel truck like it was a passed-out damsel and I was a firefighter.
My wife asked, simply, "how."
"Old man strength," I said, like the Oracle of Delphi. I don't need to explain.
That was more than two-decades ago and I've been thinking about Old Man Strength since then. And about the unfairness of the term. It has nothing to do with being a man. And maybe nothing to do with being old.
Old Man Strength (since I work in advertising, hereafter referred to as OMS) is really just strength. It is has nothing to do with John Henry, born with a hammer in his hands, or even, as above, Tennessee Ernie Ford who was "born one morning when the sun didn't shine.[who] ..."picked up my shovel and walked to the mine. I loaded 16 tons of number nine coal and the straw boss said, 'well bless my soul.'"
OMS is strength.
Born from failure.
Born from no safety net.
Born of loss.
And more loss.
Born from bruises and scrapes and broken bones.
Born from tears and sweat and pain that pulsates and attacks.
Born of fear.
Born of every hardship but paralysis.
OMS is strength.
The strength of coming back.
The strength of trying again.
The strength of being knocked down and getting back up.
The strength of deciding to win when it's easier to lose.
The strength of standing when they say sit.
I am an old man now. I'm 67. Which feels older for me because my best friend died at 62 and my father died at just 73.
Like Hemingway's Old Man, Santiago, I know what it means to go eighty-four days without a fish. I know well the flag of permanent defeat.
If you don't know what eighty-four days means, you don't have OMS.
I know there are tech trillionaires who pay no tax who say things like "young people are just smarter." It's true. They are. I no longer can read instructions and I haven't the patience to learn how to use our new LG washer-dryer, my television's remote or the My Charts app for my impending double-cataract surgery. When I have to sign up as a vendor for yet another new client I fairly feel like hurling my computer into the nearby sea.
I don't understand Megan Thee Stallion, Tik Tok, or Matcha.
But I've gone eighty-four days without a fish eighty-four times times eighty-four times times eighty-four times.
That's taught me.
OMS.
