There are a lot of songs about aging couples who gently dance their way into the sunset of their lives. (If you haven't come across any, you may be listening to the sort of music that celebrates only young love. This can be depressing as you age, so you might want to branch out.) In the songs, they always sound like such gentle people, swaying leisurely to a private melody.
The couple I met this weekend wasn't anything like that. Winnie and Dave may dance, for all I know, but when I met them they weren't being particularly gentle or leisurely. What they were being, was fierce and full-bore alive. No gentle wasting into the sunset here.
She is 68, and he's in his 70s. I know her age exactly, because that's what determined her forty-two second handicap in our lightweight women's single race. Mine is only about two and a half seconds, so in our race she got a 39 second handicap over me - not to mention a silver medal.
He was racing too. One of their races was a double together. Being married for 43 years and still racing together is no small achievement, or maybe it's more accurate to say that racing together and still staying married for 43 years takes some doing.
When you look at them you see wrinkles, but you also see muscles. They were out there for fun, all right, but not the sort of fun where you just play around to see what happens. They were in those races to compete. He won his raceand they came in third in the double (of four boats) so they had two medals apiece -what She-Hulk likes to call "clinkage".
They're not unusually old, for the world of rowing. Kearney Johnston competed into his 90s. I hope they have a few decades ahead of them. I hope they keep charging on, out on the water in the sunrise, rather than fading out into the sunset in a gentle waltz.
I hope I can grow up to be like them.
Posted by dichroic at July 20, 2004 04:54 PM