Contemplating a long life’s “lasts”

‘Nice car!” I said, climbing into the back seat of a high school classmate’s new car. “I got it three months ago and I’m still trying to figure out how it all works,” she replied. She continued matter-of-factly, “It occurred to me when I purchased it that it might well be my last.” Then a couple of beats of silence as three elderly people considered what was said.

This is where dark clouds roll in, lightning rips across the sky, and there is thunder in the distance because her words managed to lay our own mortality on the table, bare, unvarnished. More than 30 years ago my friend Robert Waller penned an essay in which he wrote, “At some point, it gets down to “lasts.” It’s getting there now.” Those of us of a certain age know exactly what he meant.

A few days back a friend and I traveled the gorgeous ridgelines from my place toward the big sewage-filled river that divides Iowa and Illinois and on the way we had to ease up, as three American bald eagles were feeding on a dead raccoon on the road. Birds that large are slow to rise and it’s thrilling to witness magnificent wings lifting these creatures into the cool September air.

The next evening after dark I opened a window next to where I sit in the evening and my heart stopped when I heard a low growl and hiss from behind the house. I’m used to hearing the howling and keening of coyotes, but a big cat? Bobcat maybe? Something larger than my 12-pound Luna for sure.

Back to “lasts.” The contents of my closets will likely see me to the end. My 12-year-old Canon cameras should outlive me and my American Deluxe Fender Jazz Bass will one day be played by someone else. It was a gift from my wife when I turned 50. She said, “It’s time you got back into music.” She was, as always, correct.

Speaking of music, last week one of my favorite musicians passed away, the Brazilian musician/composer Sergio Mendes. Back in the 1960s my mother had a small General Electric radio on a shelf in her kitchen and when she and I did dishes she’d always have that little radio on, and we both fell in love with ‘Sergio Mendes and Brazil ‘66.’ Nobody was producing music like Mendes and his ‘So Many Stars,’ ‘Like a Lover,’ and ‘The Look of Love’ had a profound effect on this 16-year-old young man who had just fallen in love with a pretty, brilliant, flute player in the grade ahead of him. I longed for the kind of love the songs described. Perhaps Mom did too. I’ll never know. Music is such a brilliant time machine.

Anyway, I still have the radio. It sits on a counter in my kitchen, and it still works. When I went off to college my mother gave me a Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, which I still have, a cardboard suitcase, which is long gone, and the little radio, which was a welcome companion all through school. As the late singer/songwriter Nanci Griffith wrote in her song “Listen to the Radio,” “When you can’t find a friend, you’ve still got the radio.”

I’m still pondering what my very thoughtful classmate uttered about “lasts,” and it haunts me. I have moved for the last time, at least knowingly. Someone else may be forced to put a crazy old man in a home, but it’s not the current plan. I still purchase books, though I seldom enjoy the ones good folks recommend. Likely some weird psychology at work on that one. Oh, well. And soon enough I will follow my wife and will gentle down to my final rest, but in the meantime, I’m thinking of buying a new car.

Kurt Ullrich lives in rural Jackson County. The Dubuque Telegraph Herald published a 60-page magazine of Kurt’s columns. The magazine can be purchased here.