50th birthday

Tomorrow I turn 50, a milestone. Or fifty of them, stretching back to when Eisenhower was president and the Beatles were unknown. Penicillin was rare and the birth control pill was approved by the FDA. The interstates were just being built. Hawaii had been a state for only five months. John F. Kennedy was just elected and took the reins. The US sent the first troops to Vietnam.

One of my first memories was looking at the far away mountains in Texas from the steps of graduate student housing. My parents would tell me elaborate stories about how lovely it was there and the bridge and road that took you there. I remember watching TV when JFK was assassinated. My dad got work in Iowa. I remember the many space shots and the moon landing. I lived through Vietnam, Woodstock, Kent State, and the drug culture. I started driving (usually with my parents) when I was 13 and on my own all the time in a 1967 VW Beetle by the time I was 16 (12-volt engine finally, but still the funky tubular bumpers and no head restraints). "Women's Lib" was a big deal. I remember The Whole Earth Catalogue I poured over at the house of a neighbor in Iowa, a bearded man who lived with two women. I worked "walking beans" for weeds, detasseling corn and wandering through the fields, exploring. I was always exploring. I hated school, wore a headband to class in the early '70s at my deeply rusticated school, and felt strangely out of place. I read all the time, was sick a lot, was very interested in science (I cut my teeth on bio textbooks), read more, loved waterbirds, and beat up on my brother mercilessly. There weren't a lot of people around. We didn't have a color TV until I was maybe 14 or so. My dad would come home with stacks of punched cards that he used for his dissertation research; there were no personal computers. The first new car he bought was a 1967 Dodge Dart, no carpets, no radio, bench seats. I wonder if it had seatbelts.

We moved to Tennessee in the 1970s, and I felt a little out of place. Worked in a bar there, had a pretty girlfriend, never studied. Took root in English studies, though, esp. poetry and literary theory. Got into grad school in Syracuse, got married, had two wonderful boys, got my Ph.D. at S.U., and found work at nearby Cortland. Took over my dad's finances as he got older and my sister and I found him a place to live in Little Rock. Got divorced, bought a house, met my soulmate, met a son that a high-school girlfriend had by me and gave up for adoption. Trying to sell my house in Syracuse and am looking to buy with here here in Tully.  [footnote: found a house as discussed in other posts].

Nathan is 29. Joe is 15. Eli is 13. My girlfriend's kids are Drew (14) and Jackson (9). I'm blessed in every way: I have a job, enough money, an apartment, a car; my parents are alive and they love me. So do my friends and family. I even have a dog who loves me. I know how to write, I'm in a 12-step program that has changed my life and will do so for the rest of it, and I'm healthy as a horse. A fifty-year-old horse, maybe, but I can still gallop, rear and buck.

That's it. Some of the best things have been the kids and Jacqueline. Good friends. A good education. Music. I'm 49 tonight and I want to learn how not to take things personally, to let things go, to let other people take up more of the load, to be in the moment. All work I have to do, good work. I don't want for anything material, and I'm not bitter or resentful, frightened or obsessed. It's been a good ride. Though "sometimes all the light's on me / Other times, I can barely see," I'm grateful. Not Dead. So far, this has been one of the most interesting periods of history, both lacking in some fundamental securities and oversewn with too many insulations against danger. The environmental exploitation I see discourages me sometimes. But it's always on the edge. I've been lucky.

The Notebooks

So forgive the set up: a summer evening with distant thunder, cool wet breeze sloshing in the windows, trees filing up the sky like a tattered scrim, and me at my computer.  Almost too romantic to be endured.  If there were a few fireflies (or better, a moon or the tracers of distant fireworks) the metaphor of my passion would be stapled to the genre FOREVER.

But that’s what I’ve got to work with.  And in the little garret of my head the writer there has six worn notebooks open, each lit by the flickering light of one single, solitary, solemnizing candle.  Around him the yellow pages glow dim as various phases of the moon, and at his back stained-glass windows are squared out and high up in the castle:

The notebook for “business.”  In it is a description of the young hairy woman and a scratch-and-sniff spot with $1800 in new bills.  Along the side are lists of objects found for cheap by the side of the road.

The notebook devoted to “sex and women.”  In it he has a long digression on the admixture of excitement and loss that he feels when he wakes before his lover does.  It is parsed out in the style of John Donne.

The notebook in which he writes about his children, how impatient his has been and how he drove his motorcycle (horse-powered, of course, to keep with our pre-post-modern writer-in-the-garret metaphor) over to his sons’ house and left there on the stoop two cans of their favorite soda because he felt like there was nothing else he could do (and the mourning dove cooed a haunting cry, cry, cry!)

The notebook where he writes about writing, teaching, and learning.  He writes in this one with his left hand because suffering makes you honest (or so he says in the notebook, though it’s pretty much illegible and might just be talking about his desires).

The notebook where he writes the themes of his reading: how his joke about “printing a test page” made him think how academics spend time perfecting the printing of their ideas, not living them; how Dave Hickey makes him very uncomfortable because he admires and covets that mind and stance; how Benjamin Franklin has been worming his way into many conversations in the months; how his newly purchased book talks about how the humanities change when they go digital, an idea he never considered before;

The notebook where he talks about the English department his colleagues.  This notebook is torn and mud-scuffed, and he throws it against the wall repeatedly before picking it up to scribble a line or two;

Then a wind comes up and snuffs out the candle with its long, invisible fingers.  The man sits there for a moment, watching the lightning, then strikes a match and lights

The notebooks.

David