Grown Children

My son turns 40 today. At one point in his pre-natal months, a rather complicated pregnancy, there was some doubt about his reaching any birthdays at all, even his ur-birthday, that is to say, his birth, but here he is, my first-born, a man in full. When your own birthdays have less and less significance as they multiply, the birthdays of others can mark the passage of time with greater salience. Give one pause. My father, at 93, couldn’t believe that he had sons in their 60s: An old, old man with old men for progeny. He was not long for this world.

For these 40 years, my son—and his sister a few years later—have been the unmitigated wonder and pleasure of my life, a buoyant tag-team of now early middle-agists composing an acerbic fam-dramedy forty years running. I cannot imagine more delightful long-term company. But as I watch them in their majority living the fullest of lives, I cannot remember having such energy and so little seeming time. How do they do it? How did I, if I did? Even as I trundle toward the great abyss, yet I do not wish to return to their heady days, that comparative youth.

Forty was not a good year for me. Things falling apart. And work. But for him, they continue to come together, which is as it should be. Thus, I will enjoy his 40^th with a special savor: the wisdom of an old man.

Last Respects

Photo credit: KSylvie

Two weeks ago, I attended the “No Kings” march at the capitol in St. Paul. Earlier that morning, and mostly unbeknownst to me, a Trump-voter with a gun had murdered the Minnesota State House Speaker emerita, Melissa Hortman, and her husband, killing her dog for good measure, among previous attempted murders. This Friday last, I attended, with my civic-minded spouse and ten thousand others, Rep. Hortman’s lying-in-state, filing by their photos, coffins and an urn to pay our last respects. When I contrast the cautious, sometimes raucous optimism of the march with the ensuing solemnity, and consider these past two weeks’ news from Washington—Iran bombing, deeper debt- and deficit-enabling legislation, and Supreme Court spinelessness—I must sadly conclude that the Republic is a republic in name only, made so largely by a Republican Party that is republican in name only and has been for a long time. We are at the bottom, the Constitution a dead original letter, our politics a tawdry and empty theater, a dumb-show.

Insofar as I have had an academic, an intellectual career, it has been in the study of republicanism in the United States. The concept of virtue—personal and individual, constitutional, and political institutional—the very soul of our political system over two hundred and fifty years strikes me now as quite antique and enfeebled. A few fragments and figments of classical virtue remain to disguise the almost perfectly complete corruption, but, and I’ve hesitated to say it for eight months or so at the risk of sounding like an old man, which I am, we have become not merely a long-standing if imperfect example, but now a complete and utter embarrassment of that ancient ideal.

I have never lived in a dead country before. Perhaps it is the living death of a zombie republic.

Going Home

When you’re retired, going on vacation, that is, taking time away from your normal routine of doing as little as possible, carries almost exponential possibilities for sloth, especially if you’re “going home,” that is, returning to your place of origin, where your family takes complete care of you, and doubly especially, if your “home” is Mercer, Pennsylvania, where, according to loved ones who still live there, “nothing ever happens.” If indolence is one’s objective, Mercer is the place to do it—or not do whatever it is that makes for it.

We watch the big screen TV, sports: NCAA women’s softball, NCAA men’s baseball, MLB baseball, the Buccos, an LPGA tournament, men’s professional golf, the NBA quarterfinals, a few minutes of the NHL, the French Open, and, yes, the American Cornhole League. And fishing, an actual broadcast of others’ impressive and yet imperfect attempt at inactivity. The chair into which I sink to spectate folds in around me, a throne of comfort, with an ottoman of ease at my feet, a nap-enabling matched set of cushions affording light dozes that restore my attention to mindless observational sufficiency but never, thankfully, to critical cognition. I’m not sure the world merits it anymore. We did get out to golf once, the most indolent, the least active of activities—the brothers carted. I walked the good walk spoiled. Then it rained. And we returned to the big screen.

When the weather allows—when it is warmer and less drizzly—I lounge in the sun, passively absorbing solar radiation, dissipating energy into the boundless universe, then golf again, a stressless bogey round, two pars, two double bogeys, and the rest bogey, not unlike the ideal even-par round of two birdies, two bogeys, and the rest pars—only bogey. Of a good morning I’ll sit on the front porch with a cup of tea and watch the traffic, truckers trucking, people going to work, poor devils.

Today, a visit to the cemetery: to the only population less active than myself. They’ve perfected repose. I commune with my dead. They don’t say much. We listen to the wind in the trees, the cooing of a mourning dove, a single fly buzzing. I leave a token of the visit for my father, a golf tee from St. Andrew’s, though I miss my mother more. They walk the earth no longer these five years. I see a stone for Frank D__, whom I had, coincidentally, just seen up at my brother’s, spry as ever, though recounting the recent implant of a pacemaker. His wife had died in 2019. Only Frank’s birthdate was recorded. I calculate he’s eighty-five.

I am agnostic about posthumous consciousness. Of many possibilities are these two, which come to mind:  Heaven is either an extension of retirement or retirement the only heaven many of us will know.

Traveling While Old

Traveling some months ago in a southern city I was sucker-punched in my left ear by an apparently disturbed younger man passing by in the opposite direction. (They are all younger now, it seems.) Though momentarily stunned by the blow, I sustained little pain and no serious damage, and by the time I turned to confront my assailant, he had moved on at some distance, verbalizing and gesticulating, though in truth I retain few details. My dear KSylvie, however, whose sense of righteousness and justice far exceeds my own, took off in vocal pursuit, which, in a state where firearm ownership is sort of a thing, I thought not the wisest course. And my dear tends toward the petite such that a physical confrontation with someone not likely to respect gender conventions as well might result in more than one boxed ear. So we settled on at least reporting to the cops, a number of whom happened to be in the vicinity.

Just like on Law and Order—and nowhere else in real life—they tracked down the perp after an hour or so, and I was invited to press charges because, as an old man (I’m sure being white didn’t hurt), I was in a sort of privileged victim status. The other folks who had experienced assault at his hands that afternoon, including someone whose hearing aid was damaged, were younger apparently, and assault against them fell only into the misdemeanor category, punishable by a citation. Punching an old fart in the ear, however, qualifies as a third-degree felony. Don’t fuck with the jerontion. To get that young sucker puncher off the street, I said okay.

So he’s been off the street in jail for a couple of months now and set to go on trial for up to two years, when the D.A.’s victim support office called today to update me on the case, including alternative options, like a Pre-Trial Diversion program. Which, of course, I’m cool with. Old and wise and not vindictive, I appreciate that the criminal justice system takes age into consideration in these matters, but really, I ain’t no candy ass.

 And you cross my spouse at your own peril.

Two Months Later

Two months later we’ve hit the streets, more than once, even in the persistent cold. Not only are our once republican institutions functionally inert, owing to the Republicans who occupy them, we are now in an economic/tariff war with the entire world, including neighbors, allies, and penguins. If it were not so profoundly sad, the absurdity would be entertaining as a Netflix farce. Alas, though, innocent people, thousands, even millions will suffer, some even unto death. This Devolution will be televised on Fox Lies—and cheered on.

For an old man who has seen sixty-plus years and read many, many volumes of history, these days seem historic—beyond the simple, genuine historicity of the everyday—quite possibly historically bad, red-letter days, one of those moments when large-scale systems verge on collapse, tipping the secular apocalyptic. How we confront, resist, finesse, escape this predicament, I do not know. Holding a sign, I suspect, will not be enough. 

I remind myself that the Fall of the Roman Republic did not lead immediately to the Fall of Rome, but then, Donald Trump is no Julius Caesar. And if stupidity is infinite, as Einstein quipped, the consequences of it in key positions of complex systems, like, say, a presidency of the United States, could dwarf all the geopolitical disasters of the past. In which case, I will have lived too long.     

 

Decline and Free Fall

Well past the decline phase, the republic appears to be in a free fall in my old age, with the Republican Party the chief engine and proverbial handbasket—“republican” in name only since, well, Eisenhower, maybe as late as Ford. Its current House representation gathers the sorriest collection of the weak, the loud, and the bizarre; its Senatorial majority, a self-deluding parade of embarrassing invertebrates. Only the Republican-dominated Supreme Court remains as a possible check on our collective disgrace. I’m not encouraged. But institutionally, they’re all that’s left.

And then there’s the streets. My old lady, who has deeper experience of the 60s, is ready to hit ‘em now. “It’s -20, dear. Maybe let’s wait until spring, or at least a thaw.” Snow pants, she says, snow pants.