(For the audio version of this essay click here.)
This time of year, these essays are likely to be hatched in the hot tub, and what arrives in your inbox is half mine and half the result of mild heatstroke.
The spa came with the house and is now 26-years old, and though I’ve replaced most of its components and keep it bubbling along at a heady 110 Fahrenheit, there are unseen rumblings that hint at future faults deeper than can be fixed. Today is my 47th birthday, and as with the spa, there are rumors in the machinery of the slow tragedy to come. Little tidings of future shipwreck washed up on my shore, the flotsam and jetsam of morning aches and pains left by the slowly retreating tide of my youth. My wife knows it too. She got me this T-shirt I’m wearing that reads MADE IN 1975: ALL ORIGINAL PARTS. Editor’s Note: Fact checkers have labeled this claim “Half True.”
There are other less bold reminders. My YouTube queue that once suggested skydiving clips now serves up campy PT videos from Doctors Bob and Brad (I knew it was a mistake to buy that hernia belt online!)—but wait, it gets worse! I watch them. Or when I recently bleached my hair (a cosplay Billy Idol singing “Sweet Sixteen,” but feeling closer to sweet sixty) and someone at the salon said I looked like Machine Gun Kelly, I thought Memphis mobster, not the millennial rapper boyfriend of Megan Fox. And who is Megan Fox anyway? “She’s the girl on the posters on all the boys’ walls.” Harrumph! I had a poster of Alyssa Milano on my wall. At any rate, I feel myself destined and drifting for the most dreaded group a man can join: old men in pools.
What is it about old men exercising in pools that makes them such a Hollywood staple for comedic relief? There’s something harmless and cute about them, isn’t there? And therein lies a man’s doom. A man in his prime is not harmless, and “He’s so cute!” is an epitaph to masculinity usually followed by a move to Florida. I sometimes wonder if I’ll move to Florida and take up aquatic yoga, trading dumbbells for arm floaties, trading sunsets in paradise here for Sunset Paradise Village there, going out in style doing deep knee bends in the shallow ends of public pools. There are worse fates I suppose. And yes, I know I’m preaching to the lifeguards here.
My best friend and writing mentor passed away a month shy of his 93rd birthday, and last night as I watched the sun slip behind the Olympic Mountains from my spa, I thought about him. His nickname for me was Great Big Little Panther, and I called him Crunch. Our birthdays were just a week and 53 years apart, and somewhere around mid-March we could be found at Bing’s in Madison Park, passed out after our “imaginary meal” like the Lost Boys in Peter Pan, with our foreheads propped on each other’s and drooling over our melting mud-pie, until Mr. Bing had to wake us to lock the doors. We used to write to each other daily, and I miss those emails mightily.
Crunch hated being old. He hated the way people ignored him until they saw the Emmy on his shelf. He hated that he had to walk with a cane. He hated that what hadn’t already fallen off was slowly being cut off, one visit to the VA Hospital at a time. But while he didn’t float platitudes about aging, he didn’t let it sink him either. He knew his remaining days were scarce, and the original “rebel without a cause” found a cause in living each of them fully and teaching his craft to lost boys (and girls) like me. He even found time for water aerobics at the misnamed YMCA, so maybe the old pool won’t be so bad after all.
These are but a few of the sundry things I contemplate while overheating in my spa. Some of my younger friends have new spas with LED light shows and LCD screens and Bluetooth woofers that probably don’t allow you to contemplate at all. But newer isn’t always better, and time has taught me that when you care for something you come to love it. You fluff a pillow for a sick friend’s head and lay upon it your own heart. Your teacher forgets his cane and leans on you for an afternoon in Texas and you’re no longer his student but his best friend instead. You can’t toss away something so long as there’s life left in it. Not with a clear conscience anyway. Not me.
Sometimes I wonder if the salvation of our collective conscience doesn’t lie in listening to our elders instead of discarding them. Perhaps we should stop worshiping youth and beauty and start admiring wisdom and grit instead. (Sorry, Machine Gun Kelly; sorry, Megan Fox) Perhaps we should turn for guidance not to those who complain the loudest during the best of times but to those who have quietly survived, even thrived, through the worst. To hell with perhaps; certainly, we should! This is my wish, my will. But then what is aging if not the universe laughing at our wishes and forcing us to turn our certainty and our wills over. And over. And over.
I remember sitting with Crunch at The Museum of Flight on his 88th birthday, in front of a replica V-1 flying bomb, his first time seeing the terror the Nazis had sent buzzing overhead while he lay in the forests of the Ardennes in the frozen trenches of the Battle of the Bulge. He was wearing his World War II veteran hat, and a young girl tugged on her mother’s shirt and asked permission to come over. “Excuse me, Sir, but I’d like to thank you for your service.” It was all too much, and when Crunch started to cry, the girl threw her arms around him, before blushing and running away. I’d bet my hat on that girl having turned out okay.
Now Crunch has passed on, and Great Big Little Panther has grown up. But if there was just somewhere to post this letter, if only I had a Forever Stamp that would reach Neverland, I’d like to wish him a happy birthday and thank him for his service to me. Postscript birthday prayer: Send him back please, at least for one final sunset together, I need a little midlife advice. Amen. If only this hot tub were a time machine!
But I suspect his reply (more eloquent than I can write it, of course) would be along the lines of telling me my best years lie ahead, and of cautioning me against spending them indulging too much in nostalgia. And even before he’d finish saying it, I’d see how silly I’d been for mentioning my midlife malaise when the antidote to it was right there written on the smile lines etched like a map around his eyes.
And now, the power of memory has mixed with the chlorine vapors and Crunch is here. He sees that I’ve learned my lessons, that the teacher is dearly missed but no longer needed, and he turns his gaze to the setting sun and sings a little song he always loved, something written by Bricusse and Newley in his friend Beatrice Lillie’s New York apartment before I was even born:
Gonna build a mountain From a little hill Gonna climb that mountain Yes, I know I will Gonna climb that mountain Till I touch the sky Don't know how I'm gonna do it Only know I'm gonna try
Now if that memory isn’t an answer to my birthday prayer, I don’t know what is. If I drank, I’d drink to another blessed year, and to my birthday twin who’s crossed over the mountains into fairer skies. Someday we’ll all climb that mountain and touch that other sky. But not today. Today I’ll settle for sipping my morning coffee from this mug that says I’m cute and sending this little birthday wish out into the wind, and then diving headfirst into a mountain of mud-pie.
Editor’s Note: But where do we send the gifts, we hear you say. In lieu of gifts, we suggest you consider treating yourselves to a slice of cake, if not in celebration of Ryan’s birthday, at least as a reward for having read this far.
An audio recording of this essay can be found here:
In case you’ve missed any, an archive of prior essays can be found here.
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Happy birthday Ryan. I enjoy this so much.
Happy birthday Ryan. Mine is tomorrow just older and wiser?