56

It has been my practice to, as best as I can, as much as I’m allowed, ignore birthdays.  My birthdays.  I love the attention, don’t get me wrong, but I have always been a bit nervous about attention, especially undeserved attention.  I mean, what the hell, it’s just another day of the week, a point in the arbitrary cycle of time humans impose on nature, and I’m just passing through.  What’s so special about that?

Birthdays are markers, to be used by people to order their universes.  It matters little to me that I am now 56 years old (fifty-six!  shit, how did that happen?  I was just…) but it matters to me how long I’ve had the life I have, the friends I have, have done the things I’ve done, and know the world as I do, and in that respect birthdays are just as important as any other marker.  It’s an anniversary and if people want an excuse to say to each other “Hey, I’m glad you’re in the world and that I know you” then by all means, birthdays are a good one.  The anniversary of one’s advent into the world.

But fifty-six?  Seriously?  Damn.

Middle-aged.

At this point, I have to say, I’ve had a hell of a good time.  It didn’t always seem so while I lived it, but in retrospect there is very little to complain about.  Most people have a list—you know, A LIST—detailing all the things they want to do.  Probably a goodly part of anyone’s list never happens.  That trip to the Antarctic, hiking the Swiss Alps, seeing Europe, lounging on a beach in the Mediterranean…or more mundane things like, building your own house, learning to fence, owning a really frivolous car (just because), or playing in a band…lists contain a lot of wishes, some dreams, a lot of stuff that once we reach a certain age we realize we didn’t really want to do after all.

I have a list.  There are things still on it that I want to do that I haven’t and may never do.

But the number of things that I have done…

It’s been a pretty good life to this point.  It would have been nice if this or that had gone differently and produced a better result, but the fact is I have done much of what I wanted to do.  I’ve photographed mountains, played in that band, met a lot of very cool people (and some not so cool).  I grew up blue collar not-quite-poor (and my parents worked their way out of that into a comfortable gentility) and managed to sabotage my own educational opportunities—which only means that where others went to college, I went to the local library—and yet I can count as friends a few of the best writers on the planet, a couple of top drawer philosophy professors, fine artists, and, most importantly, the best kind of friends anyone could hope for who are, regardless of any other merit, simply wonderful, decent people.

I’ve published books.  That’s something that figured large on my list.  I’ve done it.  (I’d like to keep doing it, which is a problem right now to be solved, but hey…)

One thing on my list that I actually believed would never happen because I was such a screwed up kid, was falling in love with a woman who would be my best friend and staying with her for life.

I did that and there was a time I thought I didn’t want that.

Kids are messed up.  They draw their images of potential selves from the world around them because, often, it’s easier than sorting through the mass of conflicting impulses that passes for a psyche at that age.  So they end up “trying things on” and pretending to be various things at various times.  If they’re lucky, they don’t get stuck with something that doesn’t work for them and grow out of it to find out who they really are.

(When I was a kid, that phrase was a prominent source of bitter discussion in my home.  “I don’t even know who I am” was not a statement that got a lot of sympathy from my parents.  Firstly, they thought it was ridiculous—how could you not know who you are?  You live with you!  Secondly, they were Depression babies, and for many of them the necessity to grow up fast and deal with a world intent on crushing them materially allowed little time for esoteric self-contemplation.  Who you were was whatever you did to survive.  The luxury of taking the time to go on a discovery tour of your own self seemed absurd to them.  And yet, the fact is they often benefited from not having the time to toy with options—the crucible of life, as it were, burned away the unnecessary and left them only with what worked.  It resulted in a kind of admirable self-confidence if not the most sympathetic of personalities.)

I had a list as a teenager of all the things I thought it would be cool to be.  I’ve joked from time to time that, basically, I wanted to be James Bond.  (My teen years were the first periods of my life when I felt a little personal power.  I’d been a small, weakly child with what later would be termed Nerdy interests and it got me bullied, a lot.  Power was important to me and once I tasted it I wanted more.  James Bond was the dude, man.  Nobody screwed with him, he knew all the right lines, slept with all the finest women, and went wherever the hell he wanted to go.  Despite working for MI6, he was no one’s tool, and that appealed powerfully to me.)

But I also wanted to be an artist.

So by the age of 21 I was a conflicted mess, pretty much worthless for anything long-term.  I was living a kind of life that seemed to be what I wanted.  I won’t bother to go into details, but superficially it was almost everything I thought I wanted.

And I was lonely.

But I’d finally begun to write.  Interestingly enough, a pattern emerged from my early stories.  I had a number of sympathetic characters who were craving stability and opted for the security of life-long commitments.  Of course being adventure fiction I stacked the odds against their achieving it—and then having them triumph.  I still had no idea what I actually wanted, but clues were appearing.

There was a period of almost nine months when I totally overturned everything I thought till then I’d wanted.  I fell in love—deeply, so powerfully—and within weeks realized that I’d been doing everything wrong.

One of my annoying personal habits has always been to ignore the instruction book when learning a new thing and tackling the most complicated aspect of it first.  Headlong dives into top-level stuff, which leads to a lot of flailing, near-drowning.  Never walk when you can run and never play scales when Rachmaninov’s Preludes are in front of you yearning to be played.  (The fourth print I ever made in my home photolab was a multiple collage ala  Jerry N. Uelsemann.)  So I tackled this the same way.  Overnight I walked away from the life I’d been living, made a commitment, and then tried to make it work.

It blew up, leaving a crater the size of my heart (at the risk of being a bit melodramatic) and I drifted back into a ghost-image of what I’d been before.

Then I met Donna.

Come spring, we’ll celebrate 31 years together.  (Thirty-one?  31.  How’d that happen?)

She has backed me in everything I’ve ever tried to do.  I cannot ask for a better partner, and while many times things haven’t been exactly pleasant, they have always been meaningful and suffused with the dream-stuff of reality at its best.

Turn around three times and now I’m 56.  I’m frustrated by many things right now.  But that is a direct result of being engaged in complicated, difficult, worthwhile stuff.

I’m in my last year with the Missouri Center for the Book.  Come March, per our by-laws, I leave the board (for a year, technically).  They elected me president in 2005.  Taking office, I found I had responsibility for an organization that was crippled, reeling, and about to lose its place in the world.  Now we manage the state Poet Laureate program, we’ve been conducting our annual Celebrations again, and we have direction.  We’re about to become a membership organization and expand our outreach to various institutions and organizations around the state.  We’re doing Cool Things.  When I leave, I trust the organization will be humming along nicely, all by itself.

I’m still looking for a new publisher.  My agent and I have just selected a pseudonym to market me under, since apparently my name is a negative in the marketplace due to some, er, problems with my previous career choices.  But I’m writing short fiction again.

Best of all, though, I have great friends.  My dad once told me that in life I’d have many acquaintances, but I’d be lucky to have one real friend.  Well, by that metric, I’m wealthy, because I have several real friends.  Starting with Donna, I can off-hand name Jim, Tom, Greg, Kelley, Nicola, Tim, Bernadette, Lucy, Terry, Lloyd, Carol, Carolyn, John, Nathan, Peter…

That’s the short list.  Really good friends.

And on this day, I wish them all well, wish them the best, and thank them for being part of what has to date been a damn good life.  Thank you all.

(But, really…56?)