How did I ever get to be 75 years of age? It’s a long story from which only a few highlights can be shared here. But the secret behind my success can be summed up in one word – survival.

The first important event was my being born. A fill-in-the-data-book entitled “Baby’s Days and Baby’s Ways” records this birth in Peabody, Massachusetts on August 19, 1928, “the Little One” measuring 22¾ inches.  

Getting born, I am still persuaded, is fundamental if you want to achieve longevity. You simply must survive the event to give yourself a shot at reaching the three quarters of a century mark or beyond.

Later on, in kindergarten, I had to defend my manhood against one of my classmates (a boy, you should be reassured) and gave him a bloody nose. This encounter, so satisfying to me as the solitary pugilistic triumph of my life, also qualifies as a survival event. After all, the other kid might have had enough machismo to fell me with a mortal blow to my nose.

While growing up, I also survived tons of nutritionally incorrect food. At the risk of shocking you, let me report consuming a whole lot of Spam. That does not mean spam, the stuff that comes unbidden to your computer screen, but the alleged food that comes in a can. Like my brothers and sisters, I used to eat it all the time and, if I may confide a shocking fact, actually liked it.

Almost as bad, for supper we used often to open cans of Franco-American spaghetti. Scoop it out, heat it up, and we quickly had what my taste buds approved as a delicious meal.  If only I could have had a tall rich chocolate frappe to wash it down with!

Moving to college was something that was to prove especially hazardous to my survival. That’s because my first-year survey course in English literature exposed me to J.B. Munn. Professor Munn, if not the worst teacher I ever had, is still right down there fighting for the title.

Fortunately, he bored me only to tears. Many other students around me were bored to death, something that could easily have happened to me. Observing rows of my peers, all of them fatally overcome by boredom, served me as an object lesson of the fate that could have cut short my life.

Another professor, Harry Levin, during his lectures on the novel, was always coughing. Ritually, at the end of every second sentence, this brilliant academic would fetch a handkerchief from his pocket and hack into it. Who knows what contagion I might have contracted had I ever allowed myself to sit close to the master’s throat?

Another survival threat came when I discovered sex. At about age 20, I learned some details of what sexual partners do with one another. It came to me as such a shock that I almost died of astonishment.

Fortunately, during most of my life, sickness has played only a bit part. But other medical factors have posed challenges. Nosocomial exposure, danger coming from hospitals, I have come to recognize as bad for my health. This started in boyhood when I entered a Boston hospital for a bad case of the mumps and was there infected with scarlet fever.

The same is true for iatrogenic disease, the illness that comes from doctors. I have learned that you have to be wary of them taking out your gall bladder instead of your appendix, and various other blunders. A dentist to whom I was once referred took out of my head the wrong tooth. His apologies and those of my regular dentist, a personal friend, failed to move me deeply.

In my days as a student of theology, I also faced serious dangers. As the Latin term “odium theologicum” (theological hatred) suggests, the level of venom felt by theologians against one another is right down there with that of politicians, and even academics.  

During this era, I took a special interest in liturgy but soon discovered mortal danger lurking there too. I should have been warned in advance but did not know the answer to a question celebrated in church circles : “What is the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist?”  The answer: “You can sometimes negotiate with a terrorist.”

Then as a columnist of many years’ standing, I sometimes reflect on all the grief I have received from deeply disgruntled readers. I don’t want to exaggerate here but some, at least, would have liked to see me rot in prison for my allegedly disloyal views. Escaping assault and battery from those readers, with its potential for limiting longevity, is a blessing for which I am thankful.

From all of the above dangers, you can easily judge how lucky I have been to reach 75.  Any one of these threats could have done me in, but here I am at the three quarter mark of an ever faster-moving lifetime.

Richard Griffin