On Growing Old

There’s nothing good about it. We have reached that point where our prolonged adolescence has run up against the cruel logic of years, sixty of them to be exact.

Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be? Not so, Robert Browning. Your Victorian vanity is as unpersuasive as our new millennium variety. If Beelzebub himself were to pop up this instant and offer to return us to, say, age 25 in return for our immortal soul, we would take the old trickerator up on it without blinking, cloven hooves and all.

As a matter of fact, like most of us we always fancied ourselves a handsome devil, not Johnny Angel; a rake, not Casper Milquetoast; a bon vivant, not Cotton Mather; a jaywalker, not Dudley Doright.

As it turns out, these were only noms de guerre in a battle never sought but always fought, not on some romantic foreign plain, but in a mirror house once a gauzy sustainer of self-deception now become a horrible reflector of the real, the wretched grown-upedness of a man who once could dream himself to a dreamless sleep now spoiled by those unrelenting years.

Oh, the years. A special circle of hell is surely reserved for souls once in thrall to the imagined self. It is a place where knees creak with rust and cry out for WD 40, where pillow cases drenched in drool are hot on both sides, where endless, mocking reels spill laughable visions of glory on tarnished silver screens. We’re ready for our close-up.

Yet within our decrepit cocoon, we hide a kernel of the seed corn we once consumed without a glimmer of the years that would pile up. It is but a memory, something once smelt and tasted.

Above was the roar of the coliseum. Beneath was the sweet smell of expectant autumn, an intoxicating blend of cigar smoke and mustard circulating like a promise in the cavernous catacombs. Then out in the daylight, paper visors our shields. On the cover of the program we held was a young man in shoulder pads, a helmet in one hand and a bottle of Coca-Cola in the other, talking shyly to a blushing cheerleader.

On the walk back through the campus in the fading afternoon, boys in parkas ran to what daylight remained, crashing into shrubs. “I’m open,” each voice cried. We longed to join them but the bus was waiting. “I’m open,” they cried again, more faintly as the evening descended but reverberating through the chill toward the airy heaven, where we suspect they echo still.