Cocktail Chatter

Jan 1 2020

Mostly, it's bad hips and which pill and whose back went out.

Before that

it was real estate and mortgage rates,

while the young parent (who rarely partied)

had just about had it

with the homework piling up

and not near enough sleep.

Even longer ago, it seems

it was big questions

about life and death and purpose,

alternate bands

even the cool kids hadn't heard of,

passionate plans

you were sure would change the world.

Our small lives

have familiar trajectories.

Like a ballistic launch,

rocketing off

in fireworks of heat and light

bright and loud and beautiful.

Then rising unstoppably

before flattening out,

our momentum lost

in a powerless arc

as we drop back to earth.

Some achieve orbit;

but for most of us

escape velocity

proves impossible,

and we surrender to gravity, descending hard,

hair falling

faces sagging

backs losing height.

People of a certain age

who bend your ear

and kvech and complain

as if awaiting martyrdom,

in a competition

of minor afflictions,

the bad temper

of advancing years.

So the meaning of life can wait

even for us

at least until we're old enough.

Perhaps by then

it will all be as clear

as it was so long ago.

For now, though

how about joining us

for a little bite   —

salt-free and low-carb

      . . . so what's not to like?

The other day I caught myself talking on the phone with my niece about my bad hip and barking achilles. Oh oh, I thought, am I becoming one of those? People of a certain age, whose conversation is all about the latest health problem and status update.

Although the voice of the narrator here isn't really mine. My life trajectory has been atypical: none of the usual milestones and rites of passage, such as marriage and children. Or even cohabiting. And I was always rather anachronistic in my tastes and enthusiasms; so never knew of any alternate bands, and almost certainly wouldn't have cared for their music if I had. Still, like everyone else, we all get old and our bodies betray us. I guess the secret is not to get tiresome as well.

I think, though, we do wonder late in life as much about death and meaning as we did when we were young idealists. Probably wonder more, and with more sense and wisdom. Either that, or we're in denial. Or, if not so reflective, perhaps just too preoccupied, as in all the other stages of life, by the diurnal and immediate.

So, will we ever be old enough? To seriously contend with the big questions, or to possibly even feel sure we know? I like the irony in that line ...can wait / even for us / at least until we're old enough. Because even the elderly never feel as old as their chronological age; never feel as old as others see them.

This poem struck me while reading a piece by David Brooks, online in today's Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/gertrude-himmelfarb-historian-moral-change/604276/). His subject was the recent death of Bea Kristol (nee Gertrude Himmelfarb), a historian and philosopher and public intellectual whom he celebrated as a chronicler of “moral change” and “physician for the national soul”. But it was not her work or the big questions with which she contended that caught my attention; it was this line: Like all great teachers, she loved being around young people, who brought vibrancy, asked the big questions, made great talk possible. For such a brilliant and eminent figure, she listened more than she spoke. I thought about this vibrancy of young people – passionate, earnest, idealistic – and this stereotype of the old – kveching and complaining and self-absorbed. Thinking of this, I recalled that phone conversation ...and the poem was there, waiting to be written.