Granted, it's not difficult to see the big change coming when the weather guy is predicting it, aided by a falling barometer and 50 years of daily temperature averages with which to build his 5-day forecast. But I like to think it can be done without meteorology. I like to think identifying those precipitous few hours at the tail end of Indian summer is an instinctual thing, like birds knowing - simply knowing - when to fly south, or bears when to hibernate. There is just something about this day, a uniquely bloated feeling in the air that announces it can bloat no more. It's plenty warm. The temperature has risen into the upper 70s, but with only the energy of a yawn. Cloudless and calm, no humidity at all, it's almost too lovely ('quiet...too quiet...!'), and for all of this, there's an unmistakable finality to the sight of the setting sun.
Sure enough, the next day will rise gray, cold and blustery and stay some version of that.
I live in a college town, and the river trail runs right through the campus, which is buzzing with students this evening, doubtless feeling the same sense of doing in what's left of the time to do. And it is on account of traipsing amongst the beads, beards, backpacks and dreadlocks, the long boarders, in-line skaters and foreign exchangers smoking their cigs with a carefully thought-through style and pecking away at their phones as though it might be the last thing they ever get to to post, that it occurrs to me, with no small amount of shock, this is more than just the end of summer 2012. There's a final countdown going on here for me as well, another type of 'Indian Summer' afoot all together.
In December, I turn 40.
Forty! Midway to the end (even a little past, in terms of life expectancy)...middle aged! They say 40 is the new 30, and that would be encouraging, except truth be told, turning 30 kind of sucked.
How could this have happened? Why wasn't I notified? Where did Saturday morning go? Saturday night, for that matter! Has anyone seen my angst? My acne? My infallible world view? I had one once, I know I did...I alone once held fully satisfying answers to everything, or at least answers I could live with.
Those days are gone for sure; but hey, my acne still shows up once in a while, at least...I've been hiding behind a five o'clock shadow since I was seventeen as a result.
I can't be forty. I still get pimples! Not in the mutinous aggregations I endured in high school (which caused the guy taking my senior portrait to brandish a perplexed frown, positioning my face and the lights a thousand different ways, searching for the best way to immortalize me without terrifying my as-yet unborn grandkids), but just enough to keep me in the market for Clearasil every once in a while.
Beyond zits, though, this still can't be right. I cannot be forty. You don't turn forty until you got everything figured out, right? Teachers are forty. Doctors are forty. People on TV are forty! Mike Brady, Mike Seaver, Cliff Huxtable...the fathers, the parental units, the grownups! Those guys are all forty.
Actually, though, Mike Brady (i.e., Robert Reed) was probably in his mid thirties on that show, and that is downright depressing.
How in the world did I let myself get older than Mike Brady?
How did I let myself become the age my father was when I was born?
All things considered, I'm happy to report that in spite finding it difficult to understand, I don't find turning forty all that difficult to accept. If you live correctly, and until something untoward happens, 'age' really is just a number, merely our way of trying to quantify things we can't wrap our heads around, like the passage of time and how our measly lives fit into it. And I neither pine for the things of youth (beyond a reasonable 'thinking young' philosophy) nor miss MY youth in particular. I don't want to get old, I don't want to die, but would I really want to be twenty again?
Walking through the campus tonight the answer becomes clear: hell no. These kids may have time on their side, and that's enviable to a point. I do miss, occasionally, just a little, the excitement of everything being a new experience and the resulting feeling that my life is worthy of a movie (or for this generation, perhaps a reality show). Oh to be young, to be 18 or 19, in school and away from home for the first time! To sleep and dream safe in the infallibility of a world view where love is tender, tender is the night, and night can be day. Where everything is as black and white as it will ever be, and right before their eyes. Where there are answers that satisfy, time to find them, and perhaps most important, a sense of mandate to do so.
I envy them their firmly bubbled sense of purpose, place and significance.
But only a little. The world can be a daunting chunk of rock at that age, and time is ultimately a fruitless covet . How many of these kids will waste it, and even if they don't, they may end up feeling like they did, because however much they carpe diem all over the place and each other, it will slip away without their realizing. For that matter, how many of these kids, God forbid, for reasons well within their control or completely out of it, will not make it to forty? How many of them will have something untoward happen along the way?
I should be thankful to have made it this far, for, literally, each sunrise I get to see.
And I am.
 |
LATER THAN THEY THINK - On the 'last' day of summer 2012, students
cross the Chippewa River on their way to class or from class, without perhaps
realizing by the time they get to the other side of the bridge they will be thirty.
Forty by the time they wake up tomorrow morning. |
Yes, that's right: I am still, and will always be, two months younger than Slim Shady.
I used to mess with my son's mind when he was a teenager going through his own angst, during which Eminem wound up on his radar for a brief time. I was ambivalent by this phase of his development. I didn't want him getting too swept up in that message of course, but believed (and still do) that music and message alone do not a troubled teen make. Nevertheless, whenever it seemed he was a little too comfortable with how he believed things to be, I felt the need to burst his bubble, and I would do so by quipping, "Just remember, Eminem's two month's older than I am, dude."
He was shocked by this fact (or maybe my use of the word 'dude', as kids seem to be; although my generation invented its use as slang, as far as I can tell...). He wouldn't show it, but how could he not be? Granted, I was younger than most dads (I listened to Eminem in some measure), but still...in my son's eyes, how the hell could 'Slim Shady' be older than 'Dad'? That was really treading on something for him. Now, for a couple of months anyway, the disparity is even more apparent. Eminem is in his forties, while 'Dad' remains in his thirties.
Even Eminem has realized he can't be singing about spitting on onion rings at Burger King at forty. That would not be logical...and art, any art, has to proffer some semblance of logic. It has to make sense, if only to be relatable, which in turn is what gets people to care, which I believe is (or should be) its primary function: getting someone, anyone, to care.
Is it really art if nobody gives a shit?
So what did Eminem do? What coud he do? He had to adapt, grow as an artist, drop the 'new' Eminem a few years ago - more mature, less bratty. Grow old gracefully, surrender the things of youth, as the timeless Desiderata says.
I like to think that's what I have done, in my way, on the doorstep of my forties. Although dropping the new Jared Glovsky just means I've tripped over something, and that happens frequently.
Forty...
A boat moves past me, a gentle upstream glide to the persistent whine of a little outboard motor. There is a man perched in the stern guiding the craft, his hat and sunglasses dissolving the identity his face would otherwise establish, and by this I am strangely reminded that I am not a luminary.
Forty...
If I die tomorrow, nobody outside of my immediate family and friends will care. I have not made much of an impact in the world. That's okay; I'm not fundamentally unhappy. But it's not quite what I had in mind when I was twenty either. I wielded some big dreams then, and a tremendous (sense of) promise has had to be pared down to make room for all the new furniture we collect in our day-to-day lives. At times, even, I've had to eat portions of my ego like a rodent consuming her babies to make ends meet, to stay afloat, to feed mouths, and what's always got me through those moments was looking to the future, shouldering through the pain with the notion that I'm just paying my dues, there is still time, I'm still working toward something, building to something, everything is still before me.
But that is no longer true. Everything isn't before me anymore. Some things are, perhaps, I'm by no means ready to cash in and cash out, but not everything. I've spent the last year thinking a lot about this, about what I said to people (most of whom I no longer know), about my plans for the future, in the days when a year seemed a lot longer than it actually is.
I kneel down on the shore, place my hands in the water busily making its way toward the Gulf of Mexico. It is cool but not cold, inviting, and the gentle tug of the current feels astonishing. I get the sense it's trying to coax me in, and there is a powerful moment's consideration of my own mortality.
But then, as always, a unique rage settles in - a rage to resist too much comfort and resignation, a rage to resist long thoughts or feeling sorry for myself or distressing myself with imaginings (thank you again, Desiderata...). Have I accomplished everthing I thought I would? Of course not. But surely I would rather keeping on living anonymously than be some bright star that burns out too fast, or gets extinguished, or worst of all, turns jaded.
My goal for my forties? What was initially a sprawling, multi-page mid-life bucket list, has been pared down to one mandate, elegant in its simplicity:
Never get jaded.
So far so good. It really is enough, if nothing else, after all this time, to see each new sunrise.
