By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
During six decades together, my older sisters Maureen (Moe) and Karen gave me many wonderful gifts. The best one is my love for the Beatles.
I was a child in the 1960s, but my sisters were cool teenagers. I annoyed them at times, but they let me listen to their radio and taught me how to roller skate and dance.
Beatlemania was all the rage, even in our Northern Utah home. So Moe and Karen also introduced me to the music of John, Paul, George, and Ringo.
This included some songs from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, such as “When I’m Sixty Four.” Paul McCartney wrote it in his teens, but did not record or release it until a decade later in 1967 when his father turned 64.
McCartney once described the tune—featuring clarinets, bass, and chimes—as “rooty tooty.” In the jaunty lyrics, a young man speculates with his lover about growing old together.
When I first heard the song, growing old was inconceivable. Now, as I turn 64 this May, the anthem about aging and mortality resonates.
I don’t fret too much about my own demise, but listening to “When I’m Sixty-Four” when you are just about there does make one a bit contemplative. Although John Lennon invited us to “imagine no religion,” faith and the Bible do offer some help during such musings.
Proverbs 16:31 says, “Gray hair is a crown of splendor…attained by a righteous life,” and Job 12:12 explains, “Wisdom belongs to the aged, and understanding to the old.” But then Matthew’s Gospel soberly reminds me that I know not the time nor the hour of my death.
The lyrics of “When I’m Sixty-Four” are also a useful guide for looking back and taking stock.
When I get older, losing my hair, Many years from now…
I’ve still got most of my hair, now all gray. I cut it each season, 4 times a year, whether it needs it or not.
My thick and wavy mane takes on a life of its own as it grows. When each quarterly shearing approaches, my wife Vicki starts calling me “Bozo the Clown.”
I respond with the wisdom of that great Broadway musical: “Gimme a head with hair, long beautiful hair…” As I give in and go to the barber, I mumble that she’s lucky to live with an old man who can still grow it.
Will you still be sending me a valentine, birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
Please, not too much wine. There’s something vile within the aging process that forces human alcohol digestion to downplay the buzz and highlight the hangover.
Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty four?
A recent visit to Disneyland with our adult children and our grandsons was a startling revelation.
I used to be the Master of Mouse House, the Fast Pass hero who shrewdly set day/ride schedules and fearlessly led our O’Brien clan past lines of those Disney-doomed folks who did not plan to fail but who failed to plan.
Now all this is done on an app. During our most recent trip, my job was simple—keep up with the younger folks, don’t get lost (too often), and try not to drool (too much) on myself.
Given the trend lines, if I see the “Happiest Place on Earth” again, it may be while I sit in one of those plastic Disney rental strollers. I’m kinda looking forward to it.
I could be handy mending a fuse, when your lights have gone.
Nope. To be fair, this also was not true when I was 24, 34, 44, or 54.
Ev’ry summer we can rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight…
The sixties years are a good time to travel, but my wife and I both work and tend our grandkids. Still, we try.
I’m a monk nerd (as explained in my 2021 book Monastery Mornings) and have convinced Vicki to visit each remaining Trappist monastery in the United States with me. She’s a good sport and the abbeys are in lovely places.
Unfortunately, I got sick (two colds and one COVID) during three of our four trips in 2024. As I approach 64, a part of me likes home and hearth better than the Isle of Wight.
Grandchildren on your knee; Vera, Chuck and Dave.
This is the real payoff for getting old. We have Wally and Finn who are, to slightly paraphrase Lennon, “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful boys.”
They also are well worth the many indignities of aging, such as: (1) new leg scratches or arm bruises which I know not how I got; (2) mysterious gravitational forces that make it hard to get up after sitting on the floor; (3) stress sweat when I have to change my computer password; (4) the blank look I get from work colleagues whenever I mention Archie Bunker; and (5) that pesky six-decade-old bladder that wakes me up to go to the bathroom each night.
Yours sincerely wasting away.
See all the above.
Send me a postcard, drop me a line, sharing point of view…
Ultimately, the Beatles lyrics leave us to our own devices to discern the joys and challenges of the Golden Years. For that, however, I also love their 1969 album Abbey Road.
During a 2018 trip to London, my wife and I found the famous crosswalk and recreated (sort of, see photo) the album’s iconic cover. The intersection is so popular with tourists that city authorities moved the “Abbey Road” street sign high up on the side of a nearby building so people like me won’t steal it.
In their second-to-last album’s second-to-last song (“The End”), the Beatles vocalize what just may be the meaning and purpose of life: “And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make…”
By1969, Lennon really had nothing good to say about his band mates. And yet, he praised these McCartney lyrics as “a very cosmic, philosophical line.”
The Irish McCartney was baptized Catholic, but raised in a nondenominational home. He says he’s agnostic, explaining, “I have a kind of personal faith in something good, but it really doesn’t go much further than that.”
And yet, the penultimate words McCartney penned for Abbey Road sound remarkably like my favorite part of Matthew’s Gospel—love your neighbor as yourself. Focus on giving love instead of wondering where or when you will receive it.
Whether your source is religion or the Beatles, or from your two older sisters Moe and Karen, it’s pretty good advice at any age.
Even when I’m 64.
(The Salt Lake Tribune published a version of this story on April 26, 2025.)
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
