Geezah? Let’s Go

My brother was the first to call me Geezah. I was 38 and Dan, four years my junior, was getting his licks in early. We both hail from the north shore of Boston, where if you don’t have a nickname, you don’t have a friend. Though we’ve both moved West—he to Colorado and I to Utah—when we talk, the Boston accent paaahwks its caaaahar in the middle of every intersection. So, it was never Geezer. That would’ve been offensive.

Geezah, said with just the right mix of Masshole and mirth? A guy can live with that.

My kids started calling me Geezah when I turned 50.

How are the geezah knees? My son wants to know, as I’m icing both of them on the couch while watching a hockey game.

You won’t find Dad in my daughter’s phone favorites, but you will find Geezah. My wife is in on it too. After a parent/player hockey game, I’m posing for an on-ice photo with both of my fully grown kids, my smile big and dazzlingly white because my mouthguard (which is big and dazzlingly white) is still in. The Geezah grin! she heckles from the stands.

He’s so old, all his teeth are gone, my son adds.

Thanks, junior.

I give him an elbow in the solar plexus for good measure.

Recently, I became a grand uncle and took the tyke for a ride on the handlebars of my dirt bike. We putt-putt around some dirt roads in Saint George, Utah, and the kid is so stoked that he’s singing at the top of his lungs. I don’t recognize the song—definitely an original that seems to consist solely of the chorus, I’m flying through the air, and I don’t care—but I can sure relate to the spirit.

As we pull back up to his house, I put the bike in neutral and let him rev the throttle.

With a mischievous gleam in his eye, he twists the grip backward with everything he’s got. The engine wails, and he howls with joy. After a moment, I kill it, and he turns to me in the sudden silence. Then, at decibels rivaling the two-stroke, he screams, Thanks, Geezah!

Even the tykes are in on it.

What are you going to do? Correct them? Respect your elders, young man. You know, when I was your age… Yeah, not so much.

The truth is, I was amused with being called Geezah, but at the same time, I really didn’t want to be a geezer. What’s the difference? A geezer is close-minded, knows everything worth knowing and is more than happy to enlighten anyone in their midst. The geezer has long since stopped wondering about life and is no longer challenging himself. The geezer is no longer becoming, he’s been.

He yells at kids to get off his lawn when their street hockey ball lands on it.

I didn’t want to be confused with that guy.

Let it go, I told myself. Just show the world that you’re still young. Wriggle into some skinny jeans, ink a tattoo or two, and post some spicy TikToks. Dad jokes in a Speedo, anyone? Anyone?

I know, it’s a rough visual, one that would virtually guarantee lonely golden years.

Instead, I accepted the nickname, telling myself that it was harmless because, after all, it was still wrapped in a faded East Coast irony, like calling a heavyset buddy Slim, or a svelte friend Chubby. Both of which I do.

Although I was chronologically old enough to be a legitimate target for the ageist slur, in my head I was still thirty-four—maybe 35 at the outside—and surely the world could see that. Yeah, I could swallow Geezah as long as it was served wry, well-chilled, rimmed with a sardonic twist.

Then, just as I hit 60, everything changed.

The sport-tech company I founded got crushed by COVID, and I lost more money than I had, as well as some of my family’s and best friends’ dough. That hurt more than losing my house, which I also did. My kids, who were my best adventure buddies, left the nest for college and a boarding school that I couldn’t afford, and both my knees stopped working (turns out that a decade of professional mogul skiing actually does destroy knees… who woulda thunk it?).

Without knees, life got quiet. All the friends I'd spent my time skiing, playing hockey, and dirt biking with just shrank into squiggles on tiny text threads. Although my dog did die and the pickup also broke down, my wonderful and loving wife didn’t leave me, sparing me the humiliation of having my life completely devolve into a country music lyric.

I no longer felt like I was thirty-four. Maybe it was time to just make peace with Geezah and go gentle into that good night.

As my head was thinking this, my heart took hold of my hands and did something unexpected. Surprising everyone (including myself), I took my last $10,000 and bought two secondhand adventure motorcycles. Despite never having ridden an adventure motorcycle, I was suddenly on one on a trip to Canada along the Continental Divide Trail. Crashes, mechanicals, flats, and dead batteries ensued. And I never felt more alive.

I’ve always felt a welcome calm that comes with the steady focus of riding a motorcycle, but it had always been fleeting. On a two-hour trail ride in the desert, the intense adrenaline hit of the motocross track, or even on a moto commute, the myriad voices in my head were quieted, but never quite quelled. On a multi-day, backcountry trip, however, the time on the bike is multiplied, and eventually, all the voices just get tired of trying to be heard over the hum of the engine.

A Baja adventure, Death Valley, and Backcountry Discovery Route trips followed. These were missions of escape to be sure, but they were more than that; inside the helmet, I was searching for a way to put my life back together, leap the threshold into life’s third act, and most of all figure out why this threshold felt so different and lousy. Why, I wondered, is this one so damn lonely? Where is everyone?

Unlike other major life changes that come with community and ritual—first communions, bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs, progressions from one sports team to another, graduations, first jobs, marriages—you walk through this door alone and vaguely ashamed. Gone is the gold watch. The retirement party was canceled by the 21st century. Today, you’re more likely to be whisked away in a whirl of corporate downsizing. Or maybe you’re rewarded by an acquisition that fills your bank account but empties your sense of purpose.

The more I thought about it, the more it wrankled. I could accept the invisibility of the over-50 years, but was I really so disposable? And why did this transition have to be so damn demeaning? While traversing large swaths of backcountry on two wheels, I began to feel indignant. Although it was a whole lot better than feeling defeated, those thoughts did little to comfort.

This is when a new voice emerged from somewhere beneath the moto armor: Yeah, I’m old, and yeah, I just lost some big battles, it said, but don’t you dare count me out. I remember how to win and I’m not done yet.

I liked this new voice and held long, rolling dialogues with it. At every juncture, it chirped, challenged, and goaded me to get over myself. Eventually, I realized it needed a name, so I gave it the one I’d been trying to escape: Geezah.

Oddly, this helped. Geezah was not going gently into any good night. All yang, there was not a lot of yin in the Geezah. He persuaded me to just get my shit together and get on with it. Geezah drew up the list of challenges that needed tackling, listing them in order of priority—create better health, more time with the people I love, more income, stable housing, canine companionship, and, of course, a new truck—and then went to work on them in the background as I kept riding.

I set my new tough-love AI—GeezahGPT—in motion and checked in with it daily.

It didn’t do much. It didn’t butter me up, nor tell me how splendid and gifted I was. But Geezah did have a quiet power. Get out of your head, it whispered, trust your sixty-year-old gut, and, most of all, keep twisting the throttle back.

I started making decisions faster and with less fear, and I felt like I’d finally let go of something that had been holding me down. Velocity became strategy as I favored boldness over caution and let go of the fear of ridicule. Okay, that’s a lie—I’m still as insecure as the next guy—but I wish it were true. Still, I did look further ahead, and never back. And then, one day, almost four years later, I realized that gunning the Geezah mindset had worked.

I’d signed on to help another entrepreneur turn a company around, which was a big change for me; for the first time, I wasn’t the guy in charge, and I realized I didn’t mind being second banana. I was actually kinda good at it. Who knew? The turnaround worked, and we sold the company. In short order, I scheduled double knee surgery with an Olympic gold medalist as my surgeon, booked a three-week family trip to New Zealand, and parked a new (used) pickup at the curb in front of my house, which I’d bought back so that our new pitbull puppy could have plenty of couches and rugs to chew apart. I was a country lyric in reverse.

I wasn’t the same guy I’d been before, and this was a good thing. I felt a renewed vigor and hunger for different challenges that was difficult to enunciate, even to myself, much less the world. So, I asked the same creative director who’d helped with the turnaround—the amazing Casey Christian at Hodag Creative—to take a crack at rebranding me.

Before I knew it, I was in the Utah desert with a drone flying over my head and a photographer directing me on my motorcycle. Although I hadn’t been in front of the camera since my skiing days (I’d skied in still photo shoots, commercials, and the odd movie), I found that the new me, the Geezah, was getting a boot out of it. I listened with amused interest as Casey directed the shooters to favor angles that spotlighted my wrinkles, to capture the crinkles in my weathered skin, and zoom in on my gnarled hands. He wasn’t trying to hide my age, but to highlight it, enhance it, display it as a badge of honor. The result is the website where this blog lives. I can’t believe how old I look, but since he did capture me as I am, and in my happy place, I'm rolling with it.

We all know how our stories end, but between now and then, there are adventures to be lived, boundaries to be bashed, and loved ones to be cherished. We’re all going to get old, but only some of us will confound expectations, veer away from the safe and sedate to become full Geezahs. And those are the people I want to meet, the stories I want to celebrate, and chronicle.

Here’s one: Dick Bass, another man I admire, tells a woman who he is trying to impress—a much younger woman, mind you—that he is going to climb the highest peak on each of seven continents. Ignoring the fact that at 51, he’d never climbed a mountain in his life, and while the smug naysayers are chuckling in their beer, he steadily puts one foot in front of the other, reciting poems to himself as he knocks them off: Denali, Aconcagua, Kilimanjaro, Elbrus, Vinson, Kosciuszko, and Everest. Four years later, he’s become the first person to ever climb the Seven Summits. And then he writes a book about it.

The guy was Geezah+.

He’s dead now, but not to me; his story still inspires. There are many other stories that speak to me—the lifelong lawyer and general counsel/director of a public healthcare company who, despite being in his mid-60s and living in a landlocked state, decides that he’s going to go from beginner to barrel-riding surfer, and at 78 he’s getting tubed in Hanalei Bay; or the forty-five year old desk jockey who throws his leg over a BMW Dakar motorcycle for the first time and nine years later is racing in the Dakar Rally for the second time—but as those folks are still alive, I need to ask them how they feel about being called Geezahs.

It did take me a while, after all.

What about you? Do you have an older-and-bolder story that you’d like to share? I can’t offer you anything except an ear to listen, and if your story fits, I’m happy to write it and post it on this blog. And yes, I also plan to collect the best stories in a book—something like Geezah; A Field Guide to Growing Older and Bolder—and publish it by Father’s Day 2027.

If that sounds interesting, please write to me at bk@billkerig.com.

Perhaps, in the telling of these tales, we can provide a little context and a lot of dignity to the Geezah transition. Maybe they will resonate with some people you care about, help them transform themselve and participate more energetically in life’s third act. Wouldn’t it be cool if many more of us could throttle into all our tomorrows with humor, power, and grace? I know I could sure use the inspiration from some more like-minded souls.

Geezah? Let’s go.