Much of the year I feel like the speaker in that famous James Wright poem about lying in the hammock at the farm in Minnesota – "I have wasted my life" – but then the end of November rolls around and I get out the Christmas coffee cups I have amassed over the year – which I am now putting away – and I realize it hasn't been a waste after all.
What strikes me now, looking at this fifty-five-year-old picture of me (before I had even had my first birthday!) and my grandfather, my father's father, who has been gone now for more than thirty years, is that he was younger in this picture (by a few months, anyway) than I am now as I write this.
I realize that's the kind of thing I always say in these musings: "Hey, look how young everybody used to be! We aren't that young anymore!" And it's always true. As Mitch Hedburg once said, every picture of you is a picture of you when you were younger. But sometimes, pictures show you when you were really younger, and they also show other people when they were much younger, too, maybe even younger than you are now, as is the case here.
The other thing (or at least one other thing) that strikes me, is that my grandfather always looked like this. He may have looked a little younger when he was younger, and a little older when he was older, but he always looked like this--and dressed like this, too.
Eighteen years ago today I taught my first college English class.
It's significant that it was eighteen years ago because in that English 1101 class, virtually all of the students were "traditional" college freshman, in that they were nearly all eighteen years old and just out of high school. So, for them that class was half their lives ago; they were eighteen then – approaching adulthood – and they are 36 now – approaching middle age (with a rapidity that probably sometimes surprises them, if they're experiencing their late 30s like I did.).
For me, however, that English 1101 class in 2004 wasn't even quite a third of my life ago; I was 37 then, and had already spent a decade and a half in the computer training industry before being able to leave that field and move towards what I'd decided I really wanted to do nearly twenty years earlier, teach college-level English.
Next year, in 2023, most of those former students of mine will turn 37, and I will probably post something then about how now the students I had in my first year of teaching are the age I was when I taught them. The student has become the master (or something like that. I wasn't really a "master" when I was their teacher, but I was finally becoming old enough to begin to recognize that fact, which is perhaps the beginning of wisdom.).
Of course, I'll still be older than they are; they may turn 37 next year, but I'll be 56, the age at which…well, an age I've never been before, so I don't know "at which" what. I guess I'll find out. In any case, I'm pretty sure that then I won't be any wiser, despite being nearly two decades older, than they are; probably I never was. They may be approaching the beginning of wisdom, as perhaps I was at their age, but I'm approaching my dotage with a rapidity that sometimes surprises me.
So, anyway…eighteen years ago today I taught my first college English class.
(The picture above was taken eighteen years ago, around the time I started teaching; the picture below, for contrast, is just a couple of months old. I've changed a bit in eighteen years, no?)
See this dilapidated window-unit air conditioner? Ancient, rusty, falling apart; it looks like it couldn't possibly work, doesn't it?
Well, guess what (I know I'm broadcasting this so obviously you can't possibly miss)? IT WAS RUNNING!
I encountered this air conditioner yesterday afternoon while cutting through an alley in Clayton, GA, on my way back to my car. Since I saw it from the back, I'm not sure what store or office it was cooling, but I'm sure the people inside appreciated the relief from the heat and didn't care how dilapidated the air conditioner was.
As someone who is a little dilapidated, and who sometimes feels ancient and rusty and like I'm falling apart, I'm grateful for the lesson. Whatever it is.
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| Me, shortly after becoming a parent for the first time, and right around the time I turned 40 |
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| Another picture from around the time I turned 40. I'm not sure if I was really asleep in this picture or just pretending. |
I was forty when I became a parent for the first time.
Actually, that's not true, that's just what I tell people. I was 39 when my first child was born, though I did turn 40 about ten weeks later. For simplicity, though, I tell people (if it ever comes up, which frankly it hardly ever does) that I didn't become a parent until I was forty – even though the truth is that I was still in my thirties. Just barely, but technically in my thirties nonetheless. Practically still a kid!
There are, of course, a lot of things a person isn't prepared for when they become a parent for the first time, but in my case there was one extra thing I wasn't prepared for, in fact hadn't even thought about: How often I would be mistaken for, just assumed to be, the grandfather rather than the father.
The fact that I was going gray, was in fact mostly gray, by my mid-forties didn't help. By the time my second child came along when I was forty-three, I probably really did look like a grandfather. A young one, true, and devastatingly handsome – er, well, young, anyway – but lots of people become grandparents when they're in their forties. There are plenty of people my age, younger, even, who look like me, and who are grandparents.
But I was not one. And it really bothered me when people just assumed I was.
I can't remember the first time it happened, but I remember once when Elyse, my second child, was about three and I was forty-six, we went to McDonald's for breakfast – Elyse had gotten a McDonald's gift card for Christmas; whoever gave it to her knew that we liked to go there once a week or so and get pancakes and sausage after taking my other child to school.
So this one morning I'm writing about, as Elyse and I sat and ate our breakfast at the McDonald's in Snellville, the one near the Target, there was an older couple at a table near ours – and by "older," I mean older than me; probably in their sixties if not in their seventies; old enough to justify an assumption that they were grandparents – anyway, this older couple was smiling and waving at Elyse and trying to make friends with her, as some people do when they see young children in public.
On our way out I tried to avoid them, but we had to go right by their table to get to the door, and Elyse smiled at them and told them her name (after they asked, of course) and proudly showed them her gift card. The woman looked impressed and said, "Did you take Grampa out for breakfast?"
My heart sank. Elyse was probably confused. (Grampa, or Pa, my father wasn't with us; what was this lady talking about?) I just smiled a smile I didn't really feel, didn't bother to correct them, muttered something about how we loved the pancakes, and got us out of there as quickly as I could. I hope I didn't show it to Elyse, but I was in a funk the rest of the morning.
This was not the first time some version of this had happened; by then it was common enough that I steeled myself for it, knowing it was likely to come.
Why did I dread it so, though? There's no shame in being a grandparent, even if you aren't even fifty yet, and, as I've already said, plenty of people are grandparents before they're fifty. I'm sure if I really had been the grandfather, I would have been proud and pleased to be recognized as such. But since I was not the grandfather, I felt a little insulted that these people might be implying (not on purpose or with any awareness, of course) that I looked too old to be the parent of a toddler. I wasn't obsessed with youth or with looking young or anything; it didn't bother me at all to look like I was in my mid or late forties when I actually was.
But to be someone who was forty-six, and looked it, and was just assumed to be too old to be the father of a young child? That bothered me. And I guess in part that's what I felt like was going on when someone referred to me as Grampa or Granddad or whatever.
But I was proud of my kids – still am – and didn't like it when people didn't realize I was in fact the father of these wonderful children. Now that their ages are in double digits – Elyse is less than a year from being an official teenager, for pity's sake! – people tend to realize I'm the father, which I appreciate. Also, it does give me a bit of added security, and also some pride, when I fill out an official form, at the dentist's office, let's say, and on the "Relationship to Patient" line, I get to write Father.
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| Kevin Eames, in his office at ExecuTrain, one Saturday very much like the one described below (except, obviously, this picture was made during the day and not at night). I really miss Kevin. |
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| A corner of my office at ExecuTrain in the middle of the 1990's (and man do I wish I still had that Marx Brothers poster!) |
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| The lake and the back of the ExecuTrain building |
It's dark outside. Sitting at my desk, not actually working, I can't see the lake that my office window overlooks, but I can see my own reflection in the window, and the reflection of my office and all the stuff in it. From my computer's CD player and speakers Ella Fitzgerald sings "Oh, Lady Be Good." [I realize now, more than twenty-five years later, that she was still alive then, though only for a few more months.] I love that album – The Songbooks (a compilation of some of the best songs from Fitzgerald's "Songbooks" recordings for Verve). I borrowed that CD so many times from my friend and coworker Chris Luse that my boss, Karen, gave me my own copy for my birthday. Ella Fitzgerald and jazz are still new to me, and I love this form of music that is so different from what I grew up listening to.
It's Saturday night and I am at work in my office at ExecuTrain in Alpharetta, Georgia. I'm twenty-eight years old. During a lot of weekday afternoons, when I otherwise would be at work, I go out looking for a house to buy, my first house, which I will borrow from my 401(k) to purchase. [The house I ultimately picked was that blue two-story in Lawrenceville, the one I lived in when I first met Anna, and in which we lived for the first three years of our marriage.] The arrangement I have with Karen is that I can leave work early in the afternoon to go house-hunting with my real-estate agent, Evelyn, provided that I still get all my work done and meet my deadlines. That is why, despite being in what is typically a Monday through Friday job, I am at work on a Saturday night.
My friend Kevin is here, too, working in his own office a few doors down from mine. He has an arrangement like mine with his boss, Jason, except instead of looking for a house – he and his wife Lisa already have a house – he is working on his Ph.D. at Georgia State. [I didn't know this at the time, of course, but a little less than a year later Kevin would have a heart attack, from which he recovered fully, but which was the first manifestation, as far as I know, of the years-long struggle with heart problems that would ultimately end his life, twenty-three years later.] I wish I could spend the whole evening hanging out in Kevin's office and talking about the things we like to talk about--books, music, Rocky & Bullwinkle, and sometimes even work--but we both have a lot to do.
So we are in our offices working. Right now, in this moment [and from the present I am writing in, as opposed to the present I am writing about, "this moment" is actually a quarter of a century ago], before any of what I know will happen to us happens, Kevin and I are both young – I have yet to turn thirty; Kevin is still five years away from forty – and healthy, and we have years of living before us. We have a lot to do; we are at work on a Saturday night; it is dark outside, and we cannot see the lake that's just outside our office windows.
When Socrates insisted that "the unexamined life is not worth living," most people agree that he was encouraging us to examine our interior lives, the ideas and beliefs and motivations and choices and reactions that propel us through the world. Ever since I turned 50 a few months ago, however, I've been equally interested in doing some exterior examination: How have I changed over the years? Do the physical changes I've gone through in the last few decades--the added pounds, the new wrinkles, the ever-multiplying gray hairs and slowly-receding hair line (and, if I'm really honest, the additional chins...*sigh*)--say anything about the interior changes that I've also experienced?
Yeah, probably. I don't know. Maybe.
But there's one thing I can say: My hair has changed quite a bit over the years, but my hair style hasn't changed at all. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, indeed.
The above picture is me from sometime around 1977 until July of 2017, approximately every thirteen or fourteen years. Maybe one of the reasons looking back on my life like this is valuable is because, seeing myself at ten, at twenty-three, at thirty-eight, I can remember many wonderful things from my life at those times, and, if I'm smart (and that's a big if!), it prompts me to count all the wonderful things there are in my life right now, even if I am (gulp!) fifty years old. Midlife may not be quite as much fun or as free as childhood, or young adulthood, or not-young-but-still-not-old adulthood, but it's still life, and that's worth a lot.
Also, I find a great deal of pleasure in this Peanuts strip from 1973, drawn when Charles M. Schulz himself was fifty:
Six months ago today someone who was very special to me lost her life-long battle with depression. I can't tell you how sorry I am she's gone.
Her name was Laura Travis when I got to know her, but for more than half of her life her name was Laura Caudle. She was only 14 when we met, 15 when this picture was taken, 46 the last time I saw her, and just a few weeks short of her 48th birthday when she died. She is survived by her sister, Kate; her husband of twenty-five years, Keith; her daughter, Lisa; and two grandchildren.
I am grateful that I knew her when I did. She was good for me when I was 16 and 17; it was a great gift to be close to someone who was smart and funny and loved books. It was because of her that I read Stranger in a Strange Land and learned to play backgammon. She helped shape who I am today.
We grew up and went our separate ways, as people do, and stayed only loosely in touch as adults; we both married people who were good for us, and had kids, and led our own lives, and, frankly, probably didn't think about each other all that often. But the world feels emptier without her in it.
Here's me, back in 2002:
In this picture I am ten years younger than I am now, forty pounds lighter, and have very little discernible gray in my hair or beard. Anna and I had been married only a year, and we were still five years away from having our first child. I was only thirty-five, older than many newly-married men, true, but still young by many standards.
When I look back on pictures like this, I often think, "Wow, I wish I had realized then how wonderful my life really was. I should have appreciated it more at the time. I should not have taken it so much for granted."
And then I realize: My life today contains so many moments that someday I will look back on and realize were wonderful. Among the best things I can do for my wife, for my children, for myself, then, is to try and appreciate how wonderful my life is right now, while it's actually going on, to not take it for granted but to know it for the gift that it is.
I am blessed. But then, we all are.
Here's a brief glimpse of how I've changed over the years.
First, here I am in 1989:
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| (picture by Margarette Rogers) |
I was nearing the end of college--my undergraduate degree, anyway; I didn't know it at the time, but I would keep going back for sixteen more years until I eventually earned two master's degrees. I cut most of that mass of hair off just a few months later, though frankly I miss it sometimes. I liked having long hair.
Now, fast forward ten years to 1999:
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| (picture by Heather Dobson) |
And here I am, about a year and a half ago, in the middle of 2009:
By this point, I was a full-time stay-at-home dad of one, and a part-time college English instructor. Not a whole lot has changed since this picture was taken, except that now I'm a father of two, and I have even more gray in my hair and beard.
As I write this, I am just three months away from turning 44, twice the age I was in the first picture above. Sometimes I miss the person I was in 1989, half a lifetime ago. You give up things as you get older, like the notion that you've got in you a string of great novels just waiting to come out, or the idea that someday you'll be a well-respected professor at a prestigious university. But after a while, you realize--or, at least, I realized--that it's okay to reach middle age without having published a book, there's still time. And the people teaching at prestigious universities are so busy with grading their students' work and reading the Important Books that they're s'pose to read that they don't have the luxury of reading cool science fiction and fantasy novels (especially the ones with covers by Darrell K. Sweet), lots of Ray Bradbury stories, and books about Zen Buddhism.
So in every way that really counts, I'm better off now, certainly happier, than I ever have been.
"...If you're going to care about the fall of the sparrow you can't pick and choose who's going to be the sparrow. It's everybody, and you're stuck with it."You can't pick and choose, it's everybody. As Father Doug points out, we are commanded to love and care not just for those people we like, or who have the same beliefs as us, or who look more or less like us, or who live in the same city or state or country as us. We vow to strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being. A daunting promise, yes, but one worth contemplating and trying to keep.
