Today is my birthday. I am very old. I was born in a bleak December when
Patton was striking across Fortress Europa and the Japanese were pulling back
to defend the rim of their Empire. things were not so certain. The eggheads
at Los Alamos were vexing General Groves' stolid engineer's mind but the
uranimum separation pile in Tennessee seemed to be working. The great
illustrator Charles Dana Gibson died that year (I think I could have been
happy with a Gibson Girl). My old man was a young welding foreman in the
shipyards at Marietta, Ohio, and my mother was barely nineteen and very
beautiful. So was I, from all accounts.
I share my birthday with Leon Trotsky, Albert Camus, Marie Curie, Herman
Mankiewicz, Billy Graham, and the coloratura soprano Joan Sutherland, which
proves hands down what tripe astrology is. November 7th is the anniversary
of the October Revolution, and I'm working fitfully on making it even more
significant.
My health is damn fine, I seem to have outdistanced my depressions, my tennis
game would be a lot better if I had the time to play more, my sailing skills
are likewise atrophied, and I'm down to about eleven Diet Pepsi's a day. I
do notice being older, however. I'm more conservative in politics and design
and I like to take a nap in the afternoon. My ankles complain when I get up
to pee in the morning and I'm too well known at my dentist's office. I find
myself angry at odd times about missed chances twenty and thirty years ago.
Of course, I'm sometimes shocked by the strange old guy in the mirror.
It doesn't seem fair, in many ways. I know that age, sickness, debility and
forgetting everyone's telephone numbers is the common inheritance but we live
in our minds so much more than in these failing bodies but I'm just a
plealsant, goofy kid who got on what surely was the wrong bus and they
haven't let me off for fifty years. But that is a virtue I love in men: we
are perennially boys. I like to remember what Secretary of State John Hay
said to the Japanese ambassador about Theodore Roosevelt: "You've got to
remember this about the President: he's about twelve years old."
I worry a lot about love. It is a lonely time for me and The War of the X
and Y Chromosomes, bitter and divisive, has certainly reached a furious pitch
none of us would have expected in the old hippy days. Like the Civil War, it
is waged relentlessly, with high purpose on both sides, it pits potential
allies against one-another, and it do tear up the landscape. Ask a man to be
a "modern" man and he reverts to the courtly, sweet-talking swain he thinks
his father was in the forties. He considers buying flowers. As a woman to
be a "modern" woman, and she thinks about being the tough
business-person/warrior she thinks her father was in the forties. She
considers buying a gun.
That's too simplistic. It's so complicated, and there's the difficulty:
there are so many permutations, demands, mandates, that we have no good
models of what grown-ups are. Does being tough obviate being sensitive?
Does being environmentally conscious override being clear-headed? Does
being smart supplant being sexy? Is self-assertion always rudeness? Hell,
you might as well send your clone. He or she is having all the fun, anyway.
On my fifty-third birthday I am grateful for this odd thing: I can't afford
to worry too much about how I act because I'm one of those driven people
harried by their enthusiasms, their multiple personalities and their personal
devils from one narrow escape or embarassing situatiion to another. I don't
live life so much as ride through it with my hands up, yelling, like someone
on the big roller coaster at King's Dominion. I throw up now and then but,
you know, it's not all that bad and you see some nice scenery if you don't
mind the blurring.