Laura Erickson's For the Birds

Back in 1980 when I was teaching junior high math, my students were learning about prime numbers right when my 29th birthday came around, so of course I told them that I was now officially in my prime. I’ve used that lame joke a lot over the years, most recently in 2022 when I turned 71. Now, next month when I turn 73, well, I’ll be back in my prime once again.

The concept of prime numbers will elude my grandson Walter for a few years more, but he’s very interested in people’s ages, and knows that every day, everybody gets one day older. Before his August birthday, he told his parents that he did not want to turn four—“Three and a half is the best age because you can’t get old and die while you’re three and a half.” He told me that when he grows up, he wants to be a veterinarian, a doctor, a construction worker, and a grocery store clerk. He said on the days that he’s a doctor, he wants to figure out how to make old people’s ears work better so I can hear every kind of bird again. He said that won’t happen till he’s a grownup, when I will be very, very, VERY old, but that’s okay because I MUST still be alive.

I’ve never been proactive about getting old, at least not like Russ’s parents. When Russ and I were still dating, while his parents were in their fifties and his dad was still working, they were already members of AARP. My father-in-law retired when he was 62; when I was 62, I was just getting started with the most active decade of my life with nary a moment’s thought about slowing down, much less retirement. I’d never made it to a foreign country except Canada until I was in my fifties, and I did the vast majority of my long-distance travel in my sixties—to Cuba, Costa Rica, Panama, Peru, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Uganda. And I was in my sixties when I did my Big Year, camping alone in remote areas here and there as I crisscrossed the Lower-48 seeing 604 species in the wild, 595 of them “ABA Countable.” I turned 68 in 2019, one of the most busy, exciting, and rewarding years of my entire career, with speaking gigs in Rhode Island, Indiana, Maine, Arizona, and Massachusetts.

Russ and I went birding in the Florida Everglades and Keys, visited Chicago for our 50th high school reunion, and went to California to see the Peace, Love, and Woodstock exhibit at the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, which displayed my own 1996 letter to Charles Schulz and his response to me. On that trip, Russ got his first up-close-and-personal views of a California Condor and we took one of Debi Shearwater’s wonderful pelagic trips.

If that wasn’t enough travel for a single year, 2019 was the year I went with my dear friend Susan Eaton on a birding trip to Panama, which was even more splendid than I’d anticipated, and I tend to anticipate a lot of impossibly wonderful things.

Yep—2019, the year I turned 68, was a darned good year. I closed it out with cataract surgery, but that made my long-distance vision clearer and brighter than it ever was when I was young. I’d already had my first heart attack and first bout with breast cancer, but so far, so good.

Five years later, it’s sobering to remember that my father, brother, sister, grandmother, and godfather never made it to 68, and as sweet little Walter reminds me, I’m old.

Does birding keep us young? Not literally, of course—my birth certificate still says I was born on November 11, 1951. Since that wonderful 2019, I’ve had a second heart attack and bout with breast cancer, a scary episode of vertigo, and two bouts of Covid. But just as in all the previous decades, the two things in my life that kept me happy and engaged through the pandemic and aftermath have been my family and birding. I may be getting older, but as Walter reminds me, so is every four year old.