Celebrating My 70th Birthday, Getting Inked For The First Time in My Life

Today’s the day I make 70 years on this planet, and I’d never been inked.

Until now. It was time to get it done.

I chose a simple idea, a tribute to my original influencer, the great American bard, author of Leaves of Grass, Song of The Open Road, Walt Whitman.

I took four words from that latter poem, that paen to the glory of wanderlust that sums up what I do and focuses my aim as senior solo traveler better than anything else could.

“Forever alive, forever forward.”

What do those four words mean? They remind me to continue living life to its fullest, to continue learning, loving, caring, to stay moving, helping others, focusing on the goodness of life, and never looking back with regret at what might have been.

I wanted to do something special to mark this day. Climb a mountain maybe, or something. But I couldn’t come up with anything appropriate and truly unique.

Until I thought of getting my first tattoo.

All my life I never bothered, and I actually viewed the act of getting a tattoo with some disdain. Seemed like a waste of time and money, an egotistical call for attention at best. So I never gave it much more thought than that.

Maybe it was a symptom of never giving much thought to anything like that — something that appeared to me frivolous, around the bend, out of the ordinary, a little too different.

All my life I was a pretty much a straight arrow, if you don’t count the drugs and alcohol. Decorating my body with permanent ink? And paying for it? Nah.

But a lot changed for me in the past five years. Once I started traveling I realized that much of what I used to think was really sort of boneheaded. I loosened up, became more open and accepting of things that are different than what I thought things were, or should have been.

A few years ago my son Mackey got an elaborate tat inked on his arm while we were traveling together in Cusco, Peru. Since then I thought about what I might apply to myself if I ever got a tat of my own. But nothing ever really seemed right.

Then, as today’s milestone approached, I began to think that the best time had come, my 70th birthday, and the 6th birthday that I will spend on the road. If ever I was going to do it, this was the time.

The first birthday I spent on the road, my 65th in 2016, was significant because I took my first real solo trip to a place in the boondocks of Guatemala that finally germinated the seed of travel in my mind.

It was at the 8,500-foot summit of San Francisco Alto, a plateau where every Friday there is a huge farm animal market. I’d seen a video of it on TV while sitting in a plush recliner where I used to live in Hawaii. The market was colorful, exotic, gritty and raw, a slice of real life in a foreign locale with no tourists in sight.

I thought to myself, “Wow! If I ever traveled, that’s the kind of place I’d like to go see.”

At that moment, BOOM! My epiphany. “Why wasn’t I traveling?”

I had everything most people desire in retirement — income, a comfortable house in an island paradise, nearby friends — everything but a sense of satisfaction with my life. I had that nagging voice in my head like Peggy Lee. “Is that all there is?” I wanted more in my waning years than TV and a comfortable seat.

I wanted to move, and all of a sudden I saw my opportunity. I spent the next eight months planning, and then I was gone.

Then once on that mountain, I realized that I really could be a senior solo traveler, and I realized then, too, that there wasn’t anything else in life that I wanted to do.

I’ve been doing it now for more that five years and I see no end to the journey.

The pressing question became, what would be an appropriate tattoo for this?

I’d read many books about travel written by very accomplished and talented authors. None, though, was as influential as Whitman, the great 19th-century American bard, a giant in the history of American literature whose poetry influenced a distinctively American style of writing, using free, spirited verse, bringing people together in unabashed praise of freedom and life on the road.

Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road” called his readers to give up their habits and occupations, to free themselves from the conventions that weigh heavily on their lives, and to seek their spiritual renewal on the open road. It spoke directly to what I was doing.

That and the fact that Whitman lived, died and was buried in 1892, in Camden, N.J., USA, only a few blocks from where I was born in 1951, allowed me to feel a certain special connection to Whitman’s life.

That’s how those four words inked on my arm, “Forever alive, Forever forward,” became my one and only gift to myself. They were all the inspiration I needed to carry on this journey that began soon after I retired in Hawaii and discovered that the normality of retirement life was not how I wanted to write the last chapters of my book.

My journey instead has given me so much more than if I’d stayed home in that recliner. I’ve done many things, seen more, experienced more and learned more about myself, who I am, what I’m capable of, and what I’m not, in these last five-plus years than anything else I might have done in the end game of my life.

And now Whitman’s words lie inked under the skin of my forearm where other people see them and ask about them, allowing me to explain their meaning in the context of what I do, and to introduce Whitman’s poems to an ever greater audience more than a century after his death.

And ultimately, they remind me constantly of the lasting sense of satisfaction in life that I wanted and found.

Forever alive, forever forward.

My best birthday ever.

***

A shoutout to Yaro the tattoo artist at Tbilisi Ink, Tbilisi, Georgia (the country) for doing the work. Established in 2013, the shop is one of the few remaining in the city that focuses only on great tattoo work, no haircuts.

And one more shoutout to my good friend and fellow traveler, Suzanne Hooker, who took the great photo above of me and my tat.