Adult Onset

Dec 15 2014

Adult onset
just when you thought
you'd escaped adolescence unscathed.
That it was all clear sailing
from here,

well launched into gracious old age,

in your prime, pensioned-off
grandfatherly.

But advanced chronology
doesn't mean you've grown up,
the generation of men
you wish you'd been.
The rites of passage missed

the taken-for-granted drift,
a life lived
out of sync.

Squirming

in the thin constricting skin

you still don't fit.

You were an old soul
in a young body
that's finally caught up.
Adult onset disease
to ease you
into irrelevance.

The super power
you always wished for
was flight.
But you ended up
with invisibility.
And soon, forgetfulness,
so you can altogether
disappear.


I noted the title of Ann-Marie MacDonald's new novel, Adult Onset. I haven't read it, but I understand it has to with becoming a parent; undoubtedly the single most important rite of passage into adulthood. I ended up appropriating not only the general theme, but the clever title: so my grateful apologies to Ms. MacDonald.

But I'm suffering with a bad back today, and all I can think of is Adult Onset Disease (type II diabetes; which is, of course, a misnomer, since it doesn't necessarily occur only in adults). I was going to get specific in the poem, and go on about "golden honey, you pee" and "halting streams", but I thought it was starting to sound like a medical textbook, and that the double entendre of the opening line was clear enough without spelling it out. (Not to mention that I suffer from neither diabetes nor prostatism, and have no intention of making myself seem even older and more infirm than I am!)

I've gotten to the age at which I find the number shocking. When I see it applied to someone, I immediately picture someone old. It's only a second later I'm shocked to realize I'm also that old ...or even older! And not only don't I imagine myself that age, I often don't even feel grown up. I think one's self-image gets arrested at a particular age; for most of us, probably somewhere from the late teens to the early twenties. In my case, it's not just the self-image that's developmentally inappropriate, and the poem pretty much explains: missed, drift, and out of sync.

I like the play on disease, a word compounded from dis- and ease. So here, it's just as much discomfort as illness: how you thought with advancing age you'd acquire the wisdom of self-awareness and self-acceptance, and eventually learn to be comfortable in your own skin; but somehow ended up just as squirmy and ill at ease.

I prefer to write in the 1st person in my poetry. But I think here "you" is a more effective voice. By the mere act of presumption, it automatically conscripts the reader into the piece.

Women of a certain age often complain about becoming invisible. This happens to men as well; but because men are not so culturally invested in a youthful appearance, and not so often judged on looks, we feel relatively less oppressed by this indignity. Still, advancing age makes all of us more and more invisible. What an irony that invisibility can also be perceived as a super power! (Not to mention that I suspect a lot of older women wouldn't begrudge a few of those leering looks that made them so uncomfortable, or that they took so much for granted, when they were young immortals.) And then, the ultimate indignity: when we forget ourselves in insidious dementia, and completely disappear. Which is very much so, since it can be argued that all we are is memory; and when our past no longer exists, neither do we.

So the poem isn't much more than a cranky litany of angst and complaint. But one I hope resonates, nevertheless.