Suddenly, You’re Seventy

I have written before about my experience of ageing. It goes something like this. Picture yourself in a meeting at work. You’re the youngest person in the room. You excuse yourself to go to the restroom, but when you get back you look around and discover that you’re the oldest. That’s how it happens. Suddenly, you’re seventy.

My friend Tommy turns seventy today. He is the first of our group to reach this milestone. When I say “group,” I mean a bunch of guys who hung around together on Staten Island in the late sixties and early seventies. We haven’t been a group for some time, of course, with nearly all of us not just moving away but moving on. There has even been a death. Life turns out that way.

I met Tommy in the third grade, when I transferred from a Catholic school to PS 30. Public School 30 is a red‑brick building with cement courtyards encircled by a high metal fence. Back then, it had the look of a minimum‑security prison. It was raining that day, and my mother carried a pair of red rainboots to class for me. Tommy immediately made fun of them. He had me there. There’s not a whole lot you can say in defense of red rainboots. The kid who wears them is asking for it.

Tommy and I worked as crossing guards. We got into the rather criminal habit of fleecing younger kids out of their candy and desserts from their lunch. Eventually word got out, and we got in trouble. Later, in junior high, our group egged the houses of people who had been mean to us or yelled when we trampled through their yards on the way to school. It was about a mile walk to Edwin Markham (JHS 51), and once during the winter we goaded Tommy—the biggest of us—into walking onto the ice of the brook we had to cross to see if it would hold the rest of us. When he fell through up to his knees, we laughed.

Sure, we were hoodlums, picking fights and causing trouble, but there was some honor. Once, when I ran away from a fight, Tommy stood up for me. Around that same time, he taught me how to tie a necktie, which came in handy throughout my adult life (see The Ties That Bind). In high school we tried out for the football team together but quit the day before the final cut, sneaking off the field through a hole in the fence. Had we held on, I’m certain we would have made the team. When we showed up the next day, having changed our minds, the coach shook his head and told us to hit the showers. That was another lifelong lesson—this one about endurance and not giving up.

In many ways, I admire Tommy. As a youth, he was tough but compassionate, well‑read but not nerdy, and loyal beyond what most of us could appreciate. How else to account for his lifelong devotion to the New York Yankees, even through the Steinbrenner years? He even bought bleacher tickets for three home games of the 1978 World Series with the Los Angeles Dodgers for himself, his future wife, my girlfriend, and me.

Tommy is proud, too—of his family, his Norwegian heritage, and his independence. He is his own man, for a time working on tugboats in New York Harbor and up and down the Eastern seaboard. He married one woman and has remained happily married to this day. I was pleased to have his son lecture to a business class of mine years later at Fordham University.

Beyond reminiscing, what impresses me most about Tommy is his steadfastness. He does not drift from his center. He is responsible, reasonable, and accountable, but not rigidly so. These traits are balanced by tenderness and a sense of humor. I don’t know if he gets it from his Norwegian genes, his upbringing, or just his personality, but he is the kind of guy you can count on. I have counted on him through the years, as have many others. I don’t know that he can say the same about me. But he can look back comforted by the knowledge that—as he once said of my own father—he is “one of the good ones.”

And suddenly that lanky Norwegian kid turns seventy today. He just returned from the restroom.

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Image credits: Duncan Kidd, Kristijan Arsov, Mick Haupt, Sindre Aalberg, Maria Ivanova, Giorgio Lazzari. For more, go to Robert Brancatelli. Visit other blog readers under “Who You Are.” Comment by clicking on “Leave a Reply” below or the Contact tab above. Happy seventieth birthday to Tommy Blom on this 700th post of The Brancatelli Blog!