THOUGHTS ON BECOMING THE OLDEST MALE IN MY FAMILY

Today’s birthday marks my achievement of becoming the oldest male in my family since my Civil War ancestor, great-grandfather Henry Clay Thomas (the one who celebrated his 16th birthday on Little Round Top the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg) came to an unfortunate end at age 90 when the Minie ball he collected under his left kneecap at the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse was jiggled in its position as he started climbing down the ladder into his root cellar to inspect the two jugs of 20-year old “corn squeezin’s” his son-in-law (my grandfather) and his grandson (my father) had found as they helped him clear things out in the fall of 1937; the knee locked up, his foot missed the next rung, he pitched down the ladder head-first and broke his neck on impact, expiring eight minutes later according to my father’s account.

Since I didn’t get mauled by a bear at age 48 like my Revolutionary War ancestor, sixth great grandfather Isaac Cleaver (the one who crossed the Delaware with General Washington and saved the Revolution), or stick a thumb-sized piece of uranium in my work pants and leave it there for a week as my father did, to die of genital cancer at 78, there’s a good chance - according to the history of the other eight ancestral eldest males - that I will live to at least 90, with all lights burning bright (and most of them managed that in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, proving that modern medicine isn’t the answer to everything and DNA matters). Given the way things are nowadays, I am not always certain that’s something to celebrate. But at least there are no heart attacks or mention of Alzheimer’s or other wonderful things one could be looking forward to, so there’s that. All of them, when their time to depart arrived, left quickly and I do look forward to that. I have no interest in being an old invalid.

I am definitely not like most people my age. The only other writers my age I know who are writing anything are now found here in Substack, with the exception of Sir Max Hastings, the only other author I know my age (he’s a month older) still publishing excellent books that people buy; his most recent, “The Abyss,” is the best and most-readable history of the Cuban Missile Crisis I have come across. And I do actually know him, having found an email address that got through to him 10 years ago; he liked “I Will Run Wild,” for “daring to tell the well-known tale from a different perspective, turning it into another story entirely.” I told him he was my teacher for how to do that.

The interesting thing is, I am actually doing all the things I really liked doing at age ten, and making enough income to live as I like by so doing. I am known around the world for the scale models; I could move to any European country and have friends waiting for my arrival. My newest book has been picked up by airport bookstores, so there’s a good possibility when I see next April’s royalty check that I might be able to do a couple new things. Not too bad for the kid who got told he couldn’t just keep his nose in a book when he wasn’t “playing with those toys.” If you had told ten year old me back then that all the things that made me “weird” to the other kids at school, were the things that would let me make my way in the world on my terms, I would have thought you were crazy.

While there are some things I can’t do now that I could do 20-30 years ago, I would not care to go back if I could, regardless of how much fun those things were. I like being old enough to have experienced enough life that I can be certain I do in fact know what I know. When I look back at how ignorant I was then, I’m amazed I survived to get here.

The youngest felines here are now 10, so in about six to eight years I will have kept my promise to take care of them all of their lives. Departing any time after the last one crosses the Rainbow Bridge will be fine, but I also won’t mind if the departure is delayed.

Oh yeah, the birthday is number 79. Born in 1944, the high tide of the American Republic, the year America liberated the world.

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