Monthly Archives: February 2021

From two years ago – “Will I live to 141?”

He jumped from 14,000 feet to celebrate turning 100.” For me, “Been there, done that*”

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I recently got the idea I might live to the ripe old age of 141. First from watching a Ric Burns documentary, the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, and from there some research on my ancestor William Bradford. He came over on the Mayflower, and served as governor of Plymouth Colony. And he – my ancestor – ended up living “twice as long…”

Two years ago – January 20, 2019 – I posted A Review of Ric Burns’ “Pilgrims” DVD. (See also American Experience: The Pilgrims | Film Review.) Burns’ 2015 two-hour documentary wove its way “between two warped views of the Pilgrims,” one as some of the first mythologized American Founding Fathers, and an alternate, more “cynical view of them as creepy religious extremists:”

 The spine of the story is the use of excerpts from the 30-year historical account of the early colony written by William Bradford, governor of the Plymouth Plantation; his presence is effectively evoked by the late actor Roger Rees.

On that note: According to family legend, William Bradford is my long-ago “great–great-great-times-many” grandfather. (Then too, Bradford is my middle name.) The good news – for me – is that if I inherited “Grandaddy-Plus” Bill Bradford’s genes, I could end up living to 141.

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There’s more on that later, and on why I reviewed and re-titled my 2019 post. (Reviewing Burns’ documentary.) But there was one big benefit: It started off with lots of information on “what’s coming up in the Church Calendar.” On that note I must confess – I “do not deny, but confess” – that I’ve been a slacker when it comes to the main purpose of this blog. Instead of “spreading the Goood News,” I’ve been paying too much attention to politics.

So, to catch up with that calendar: We’re now near the end of the Season of Epiphany, which started back on January 6. (See Happy Epiphany – 2018.) Then too the Feast Days coming up include the Confession of St Peter, Apostle, on January 18 and the Conversion of St Paul, Apostle, on January 25. (Not to mention the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, way back on February 2.) All of which leads to the Last Sunday after the Epiphany, next Sunday, February 14.

That’s also Valentine’s Day 2021. (The link is to Nine great ideas for virtual dates; which is pretty appropriate for this 48th full week of the COVID. That’s roughly 12 full months.*) It’s also the anniversary of the marriage to my first wife, who died in 2006. But we digress…

That “Last Sunday after the Epiphany” takes us to the beginning of Lent. And Lent – a season of “penancemortifying the fleshrepentance of sins, almsgiving, and self-denial” – begins with Ash Wednesday, symbolized at right. This year Ash Wednesday falls on February 17.

Meaning Easter Sunday will come on April 4, 2021.

To see any past meditations on Feast Days or topics noted above, type in a title in the “search” box, above right. ( E.g.: Type “Ash Wednesday.” That will take you to last year’s post, On Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent – 2020. Which came a month before the COVID hit.)

But now it’s time to get back to why I may live to 141 years old…

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It just hit me – in the last few weeks or so – that I’ll be turning 70 next July, 2021. When I turned 69 last July, it didn’t seem like a big deal. But this new situation seems way different. Compared to turning 69, this summer’s “turning the Big Seven-Oh” is a whole new ball game.

Which brings up why I went back to review this particular long-ago post:

Mainly I remembered something in that 2019 post about that “other Bradford” living twice as long as most people back then. So I went back, reviewed, and found the information I was looking for. That led me to re-title the 2019 post. It’s now, “Am I going to live to be 141?” Which explains the title for this new post, “From two years ago – ‘Will I live to 141?*’”

All of which led me to re-think this idea of turning 70.

Instead of being bad news – necessarily – there’s a lot of good news as well. (In the idea of turning 70.) That is, once I got used to the idea – in the last week or so, and after re-reading that 2019 post – I found the new situation quite liberating. So to repeat, the really good news is that – if I inherited my long-ago “great-times-many” grandfather – I could very well “Live long and prosper.*”

To explain further: In Governor Bradford’s time the average life expectancy was 36, but he lived to be 67. (Based on life expectancy a century after Bradford. He died in 1657.*) 

From there I did some interpolation. Dividing Bradford’s then-ripe-old-age of 67 by the “average life” 36 years, I came up with a “1.86 factor.” And if that 1.86 factor applies to me today – with a male U.S. life expectancy of 76 years – I should live to be 141. (76 years times 1.86.) Which would give me another 71 years of life. (Which is kind of nice, but also a bit scary.)

But don’t take my word for it. I did some more research and found More People Expected To Live Beyond 100 – Redorbit. It said the number of people aged 100 years or older “is expected to increase to record levels by 2050.” Two reasons: better diet and more aggressive medical procedures. Which means the “centenarian population in the US is projected to rise from 75,000 to over 600,000 by 2050.” (I found varying estimates, but this is about average.)

Another site, Number of centenarians in the U.S. 2060 | Statista, said in 2016 there were 82,000 centenarians in the United States, a figure expected to increase to 589,000 in the year 2060.

I read another study that said the number would be over 840,000, but whatever the figure, it represents a significant increase. Even using the lower 589,000 figure, that would be a seven-fold increase. (Seven times the number of Americans over 100 by 2050.)

That’s a far cry from the “Biblical three score and ten.” (See BIBLE VERSES ABOUT THREE SCORE AND TEN.) The usual citation is Psalm 90:10, “Seventy years are given to us! Some even live to eighty.” But see also Deuteronomy 34:7, “Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.” That last of which is pretty much what I’m hoping for.

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So if I play my cards right, I could live to the age of Moses, 120 years. Or I could live only to the 105 years that can be gleaned by Googling “woman 105 covid.” And there’s quite a few of them. So if I lived only to that ripe old 105 years of age, I would still have 35 years (hopefully) of good living left. And my life now would only be two-thirds over. I’ll still be a “lot closer to the end than the beginning,” but that end won’t be quite as close. And who knows, I might end my years with an old-age benefit like King David:

King David was old and advanced in years;  and although they covered him with clothes, he could not get warm.  So his servants said to him, ‘Let a young virgin be sought for my lord the king, and let her wait on the king, and be his attendant;  let her lie in your bosom, so that my lord the king may be warm.’  So they searched for a beautiful girl throughout all the territory of Israel, and found Abishag the Shunammite, and brought her to the king. The girl was very beautiful. She became the king’s attendant and served him, but the king did not know her

(I.e., In the biblical sense.) On the other hand, King David didn’t have all the “better living through chemistry” advantages that we have today. And those advantages will no doubt increase by, say, 2050?

Something to look forward to…

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Do I have something like this to look forward to, when I’m “old and advanced in years?”

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The upper image is courtesy of Skydiving People Over 100 – Image Results. See also He jumped from 14,000 feet to celebrate turning 100 years old, from the Everett and Snohomish County news from The Herald | HeraldNet.com:

SNOHOMISH — Robert “Stu” Williamson isn’t much for publicity and the limelight… When he jumped from 14,000 feet up in an airplane Sunday to celebrate turning 100 years old, the limelight found him anyway. Everywhere he went at Skydive Snohomish, there followed a dozen or so family, friends and staff with cameras… The Seattle centenarian made his second skydiving jump to mark his 100th birthday in airy fashion… “I recommend it to everybody who’s 99 years old,” Williamson said after landing… “And if you’re younger, get in practice.”

Re: “Been there, done that.” I did my second tandem jump back on October 1, 2020. The first tandem jump – at Skydive Spaceland Atlanta – happened the previous summer, in July 2019. But those were actually the sixth and seventh times I’ve jumped out of a perfectly good airplane. My first jump happened on May 30, 1971, at Zephyrhills (FL) municipal airport. The fifth jump happened on April 29, 1990, at Keystone Heights Airport, nine miles south of Starke, Florida. (My wife at the time – who died in 2006 – watched the jump, then said “You’re never doing that again!” Which led to a 19-year hiatus.) Anyway, with that second tandem jump I’m now qualified to jump “solo” at Skydive Spaceland. But I’m not sure that’ll happen any time soon. After all, I am turning 70 in a few months…

Re: 12 months of COVID. See On St. Philip and St. James – May, 2020, where I explained that, to me, “the pandemic hit full swing – the ‘stuff really hit the fan’ – back on Thursday, March 12,” when the ACC basketball tournament got cancelled, along with other major sports. “So my definition of the ‘First Full Week of the Covid-19 Pandemic’” started Sunday, March 15 and ended Saturday the 21st.” Also note a discrepancy: 48 weeks makes “roughly 12 full months,” but a calendar year has 52 weeks.

Re: Giving the old 2019 post a new title. It was a long post, with a lot of information about how many Pilgrims died in the first year after landing at Plymouth Rock. The information on Bradford’s longevity came at the end, and was pretty brief. So I chose to focus on that last-part “Good News.”

Re: “Live long and prosper.” According to the link, ‘Live long and prosper’ – meaning and origin, the term is an “abbreviated version of a traditional Jewish religious blessing:”

It came to a wider public in the Star Trek TV series, where it was used there by the character Mr. Spock (actor Leonard Nimoy, himself Jewish) as the greeting of the Vulcan people.

The site added, “The phrase echoes the Hebrew ‘Shalom aleichem’ and the Arabic ‘Salaam alaykum,’ which roughly translate as ‘peace be upon you.'”

Re: Life expectancy in Bradford’s time. The closest I could get was Life expectancy in America in the years 1750-1800.  

Re: Psalm 90:10. The full reading: “Seventy years are given to us! Some even live to eighty. But even the best years are filled with pain and trouble; soon they disappear, and we fly away.” Which leads to a question. Should “Fundamentalists” do away with themselves once they reach 70, or at most 80 years of age? I’d prefer the answer that some things are just way different now than in Bible times. And that we should accept that potential seven-fold increase in life span as a Gift from God.

The “old Moses” image is courtesy of Moses Looking Promised Land – Image Results. See also Moses viewing the Promised Land from Mount Nebo by Robert Dowling (1879).

Re: Googling “woman 105 covid.” Some sample articles: 105-year-old Vermont woman who survived influenza pandemic receives COVID 19 vaccine, 105-year-old Minnesota woman gets her COVID-19 vaccination, and 105-year-old Bay Area woman gets COVID-19 vaccine. For an alternate see 103-Year-Old Man Becomes 500th COVID-19 Patient To Be Discharged from Northwest Hospital.

Re: That last full paragraph in the main text. The link leads in part to: “Idioms: know (someone) in the biblical sense[.] To have sexual relations with (someone).”

The lower image is courtesy of King David Abishag – Image Results. The painting may actually show Bathsheba, see Moritz Stifter Bathsheba – Image Results, and/or Bathsheba Painting – Image Results.  The “Abishag” connection was gleaned from “Interesting Green: Reflection – King David and Abishag,” from veryfatoldmanblogspot.com. But see also Is Veryfatoldman.blogspot legit and safe?  (Review).