Turning 74

John's big birthday splash-out was a dish of vegetarian lasagna at Cafe Salade de Fruits at the French Cultural Centre in Vancouver on Thursday. A hip problem has curtailed driving and even walking, so we took a bus that landed us close to the restaurant.

I was 17 when the Beatles sang, hilariously, impossibly, about getting older, losing their hair, and asked, chirpily: “Will you still need me, will you still feed me/When I’m sixty-four.”

Well, today my life partner turned 74.

It was, for the first time in our lives, an old-people’s birthday. We’ve both had a terrible year health-wise, and John’s second round of hip inflammation within months has turned him from a bicycling jock into a limping senior. Driving for too long at a time is uncomfortable; walking too far is a problem.

So today, instead of driving out of town for a birthday lunch, as we have for the last few years, we took a bus that would land us within close walking distance of a Granville Street restaurant. On the bus, the alacrity with which young people leapt up to give John their seats was a measure of how he must appear to those for whom the Beatles’ lyrics are still an unthinkable proposition.

Luckily, as even the youthful Beatles acknowledged in their 1967 song, couples age together (“you’ll be older too”), so to me, John is not old. He’s still the intense photographer I met at age 21; still the athlete who booted it around the track before “jogging” became a fad; still the contrarian ready to challenge the obvious; the joker ready to tell a tall tale; the reader who will succumb to any book with Jane Austen in the title.

And, a decade beyond the Beatles’ wildest imaginings, the answer to their question is, yes.

Books are always the answer to the birthday-gift dilemma. We go together to Hager's books and choose what we want. The non-birthday person pays, then hides and wraps them so they are a "surprise" on the big day. Here, John unwraps his stash.

John's selection this year: Kate Atkinson's new mystery, Big Sky, a  Jackson Brodie novel. Jared Diamond's Upheaval, about how nations deal with crises. Niall Ferguson's The Square and the Tower, about networks and power. And Robert Morrison's The Regency Years, with the intriguing sub-title: During which Jane Austen writes, Napoleon fights, Byron makes love, and Britain becomes modern.