The year that we were married, an Arab oil embargo sent energy prices soaring around the world. There was a shortage of refined gasoline at pumps here in the United States and lines began to form at stations as people waited for an opportunity to purchase without regard to price. We had a small car in those days, an Opel Kadette. The gas tank on that car held 40 liters - about 10 1/2 U.S. gallons. I remember commenting to whoever would listen that our car wouldn’t hold $5 worth of gas. A year later the price of gas had shot up from 39 cents a gallon to a whopping 53. At over 50 cents a gallon, the car would technically hold more than $5 of gas, but if we ran it that low, we would have been out of gas, so fill-ups were still less than $5. I used to try to have $20 in my wallet when we started a trip from Montana to Chicago or back home again just in case we encountered a situation where we needed gas and couldn’t find a station that would accept our credit card. We only had one credit card in those days and it was accepted only at Mobile stations and we couldn’t always count on finding a Mobile station when we needed gas.

All of that sound a bit dramatic if you don’t remember that there has been general inflation and the price of everything along with people’s incomes has gone up significantly. Corrected for inflation, the 1974 price of gas would be about $3.19 per gallon, compared with $3.69, which is the price of a gallon of regular at the gas station where we usually buy our fuel these days.

A few years after we graduated from seminary and had traded for a slightly larger car. Our Ford Pinto had a 13 gallon gas tank and the price of gas went above $1 per gallon for the first time in our lives. Corrected for inflation, the 1980 price of $1.19 after the Iran-Iraq war began, would be about $4.25 in today’s prices.

The bottom line is that over the span of our careers, the price of energy has been about the same percentage of our income, with spikes early in our career and again about ten years before we retired. The debate over the price of fuel and fears over the world’s dwindling supplies of fossil fuels, however, have dominated a lot of our conversations over those years.

Back in our seminary days, in 1977, President Jimmy Carter made an address to the nation about the energy crisis. The impact of rising energy costs had driven inflation to keep rising and President Carter called the energy crisis “the moral equivalent of war.” He called on all Americans to conserve energy. The Carter energy policy focused on conservation, efficiency, and domestic technologies to reduce dependence on foreign oil.

One of our beloved teachers at the time told our class a story of a personal experience he had that opened my eyes to how I thought about aging. Our professor reported that he had been out of town visiting his mother. She had the thermostat in her apartment turned down during his visit and he was cold, so he asked her to turn up the temperature. She refused, saying that she had listened to the President’s speech and the President had recommended lower thermostat settings. Our professor argued to his mother that the President had specifically exempted senior citizens from the request to turn down thermostats to which his mother replied, “If you think I’m less patriotic because of my age, young man, you’ve still got a lot to learn.”

The thing that opened my eyes in the story was our professor reporting that his mother had called him “young man.” We knew our professor was 74 years old. He taught a class for seminary students titled, “Spirit in the Aging Years.” We assumed that he was qualified to teach the class because of his own personal age. After all, I was 50 years younger than he. He seemed almost impossibly old to me. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be the age of his mother - 94 years.

These days I’m starting to narrow in on the age of our professor. I just turned 71. I’m starting to think about the impact of age on my life and my relationships with others. These days it is not at all uncommon for me to be one of the oldest persons in a group. I serve on committees where I am the oldest member. In fact, I serve on some groups where my age is probably the reason they invited me to participate. I’m the token old person invited to demonstrate a diversity of ages. Whereas our professor has always seemed wise to me, I don’t feel particularly wise myself. I have learned that older isn’t always wiser.

Those thoughts came to me yesterday as I struggled to write a poem. It wasn’t coming together and I was facing a deadline. I belong to a poetry group where we are challenged to write poems and I was expected to have a poem to share at last night’s meeting. Somewhere in my struggles, I remembered that same professor once saying bluntly to me, “One day, young man, you will write poetry.” I imagine he was using the same tone of voice his mother used with him when they argued over the thermostat. Yesterday, however, I decided that I am only 71 and he was 74 so I should have 3 more years to learn to write a poem. It feels like it could easily take longer than that. Although my teacher was a wise man, his prediction about me and poetry may have been wrong. And if I am not yet wise enough to write a decent poem, I wonder what other areas of wisdom I lack.

At this rate, I guess I should be hoping to make it to the age of our professor’s mother. In another 20 years or so, I’m pretty sure that I won’t be driving a car that uses gasoline and the price of gas won’t be a concern of mine. I may not have become any wiser, but sometimes problems go away even without my wisdom.

As for poetry, only time will tell.