Age - It creeps up on you.

Another anniversary of my birth has crept up on me sort of arriving unexpectedly, not that the date was unknown, but that it got here some quickly, even suddenly, after the end of summer, and once again the Phactor is older than he has ever been before. This generally doesn't bother me, but the disparity between my mind, which still feels quite young and vigorous, the result of continual exercise, and my body, which definitely feels older, grows. Of course when you buy yourself a nice big ornamental tree as a present (a cascading white pine), and then have to heft it down out of a pickup truck bed, and it's considerably heavier and more difficult to heft than it seemed when the two young fellows at the nursery put it in there, you especially notice that while your mind may say "nothing to it" the back more often says "I'll ache for you all night". Still we appreciate that the alternative to older age is considerably more dismal, and the smell of an apple pie baking, the acid test of our Nova Spys, a birthday pie made out our own apples for the first time ever, does wonders for your attitude.

Tree clones: immortality and sex

The oldest organisms on Earth are clonal organisms. Plants seem to have the capacity for immortality because they have perpetually juvenile tissues (meristems) capable of continued growth, and further, certain plant cells can dedifferentiate, return to a juvenile state, for wound repair and growth. This capacity is widely used in the vegetative reproduction of economically important plants. But can a clone live forever? Probably not, but they can be very old. The Pando clone of quaking aspen in Utah is estimated to be at least 80,000 years old, and some estimates place its age as 10 times older, which would make this clone as old as our whole species! Not only is Pando impressively old, it’s big covering over 40 hectares and at over 6000 tons is the largest organism alive. Now of course one problem with being an immobile species is that the longer you live the more likely you’ll encounter some environmental disaster, a fire, a flood, a volcanic eruption, a storm, a chain saw. But clones have a sex problem. Since they are all one genetic individual although looking like a whole forest, they cannot produce seed except by exchanging pollen with another individual, and when one individual occupies the whole area that becomes less likely. Even worse recent research suggests that as the clone gets older, it loses sexual vitality because of an accumulation of mutations. These show up in pollen because pollen only has one copy of each gene so if a harmful mutation occurs it may affect the viability of the pollen, a harm that does not affect the tree because in its tissues chromosomes and genes occur in pairs. By the relatively young age of 20,000 fertility can be diminished by more than 3/4s. So the clone may live a long time, but as it ages, its ability to sire offspring and start a new individual drops, but who knows Pando may already have lots of offspring.

Elvis is dead and I’m not feeling so hot myself

There was a distinct flavor of fall in the air this morning, and that’s how life in general is beginning to taste as I begin counting down my 7th decade. The Phactor wasn’t so sure how he felt about this, although it helps improve the attitude to have a new, authentic Hawaiian shirt, but while lots of things remind me about getting old, the spirit of a 20-something is still in me at times, but it just can’t ignore the aging package or the accumulated common sense and do stupid things anymore, and that is probably just as well because you can still enjoy living without doing stupid things even though the very young do not believe this. You come to understand that when you grow up, and up, and up. This somewhat morose feeling that old age is creeping up on me gave way to the pleasantry of the morning as the sun began to slice through the mist and tree leaves on my stroll to the coffee shop and then to my office, and the knowledge that this most certainly will be a beautiful September day as so many of them are. So it is good to be alive in September when good apples begin to ripen, and it just isn’t worth making a pie before they are; now if I could only remember where my apples were?