On Turning 43 | A Birthday Reflection
One of, if not the last conversation I had with my paternal grandmother before she died was about the cold war between the head and the heart. Or, rather, the mind and the body.
“In my mind, I’m twenty-nine,” she told me over the phone. “But my body doesn’t agree. It feels much older.” Nonny died three weeks before her ninety-fifth birthday.
That’s aging, innit? At the time of this typing, I am rounding the final bend of completing my forty-third year of life. When the clock strikes midnight, I will be forty-three years old. That feels like an odd age to be. And I imagine every subsequent year will feel just as uncomfortable. How am I forty-three? I think about my dad at forty-three, friends, teachers, bosses I knew when they were forty-three and there’s no way I’m as old as they are. Physically, yes. I understand how time works. But mentally, I feel the same kind of desires, panics, fears, hopes, concerns, etc. as I did when I was twenty-five. Sure, there’s been some amendments, like, now I worry about the actual kid I have rather than worrying about the theoretical kid I might one day have.
That comment about her mind and body not aligning was the most pessimistic thing I ever heard Nonny say. And we were close. So, perhaps I’m better off for having met this realization at a younger age. Or, perhaps that’s how Nonny lived so long—she never crossed the line of contradiction until her mid-nineties. Or, she avoided the darkened weight that comes with it, which I have not.
I also type this out on May 25, the day after the Robb Elementary school shooting, so I can’t help but feel a little pessimistic, furious, sad, and scared. But! If I am to take pages out of Nonny’s book, then I must quote her further: “I must make what happens to me good for me.” So, let’s not focus on our decaying bodies and aching brains, not on the grotesque demise of our miserable American Exceptionalism. No, let’s look back at what I’ve learned in my forty-third year. Let’s see how I’ve grown and made what happened to me good for me. And let’s see if maybe, you learned something, too, and made things good for you as well.
It’s decided, I know who I’ll have dinner with
Dinner with three people? Lizzo. Hunter Thompson. Michael Zigler. Lee Harvey Oswald. Why? Lizzo is keeping good disco alive. Lizzo is funny. She seems like a good time.
Thompson? C’mon… Obviously.
Alek Hidell? I mean Lee Harvey Oswald? I just have so many questions.
My heart breaks and melts with the losses and wins of the people I care about more than my own
I’ve had a good number of friends go through some pretty surprising and/or rough breakups this year. Also had some friends experience some fantastic wins of the heart. The successes lifted me up into a euphoric cloud, the losses put me south of whatever Dante thought he knew. I can rattle off my loved one’s moments but I’d need a minute to recant my Ls and Ws. It’s easier for me to be empathetic and sympathetic to others than it is to myself. I am George Bailey. It is a quality that is equal parts wonderful and pathetically stupid.
10 years later, Call Me Maybe is still a brilliant song
Don’t be surprised. We all knew this was going to happen when we first heard the song in 2012.
I love Chicago for its filth
I love the degenerates, the drunkards, the ones with broken cars in their garages and beer cans littering their backyard patios. That, to me, is a sign of someone fighting that Chicago Fight—working hard against the winter and the Man and gentrification. Those beat down by political machinery that leverages our safety, our kids’ education, our health, and how criminal the cops can be against us—those are the real Chicagoans reping the real Chicago. The glitz, the city pride resembling that of a Big 10 football game found in the Northeast neighborhoods, that ain’t Chicago. Not really. That’s performative self-indulgence. You can find the real Chicago if you go west. Just like the best of our kind always has.
Don Hall is a pit bull with a bone—or a toddler
Between his nephew dying, his divorce, his adventures in employment, Don Hall is truly a survivor on the same level as a Twinkie and a cockroach. Pardon the mixed metaphors… The guy doesn’t quit or slow down for too long. Just enough to adjust his bite on the leg of the toddler that is his life.
The road to calm for me is paved by vacuum tracks
The state of my domicile is directly reflective of my mental health, physical confidence, and general wellbeing. When I was a kid lying in bed at night, I’d bring myself to sleep by closing my eyes and pushing the clutter of my mind front and center into a large white void that existed just inside of my eyelids. Then bit by bit, I would weed through the clutter of the day, of the stress, of the joy, of the hope and concern. And bit by bit, the pile of stuff would clear out until I was left with a spotless white void. At that point, with the clutter cleared away, compartmentalized or deleted entirely, I could calmly drift to sleep. Ahh…
I’m not sure why I stopped this exercise. But I have a theory it’s connected to the ability to drink myself to sleep or fade out with an iPad propped up on my chest. I’m distracted, which is the whole point of younger me’s exercise.
Cleaning things out, bringing sensible, functional order to your spaces brings peace. Cleaning is immediate gratification, which does wonders for one’s confidence. Where there was once a pile of Amazon boxes, now there is a hardwood floor you can vacuum and mop to a brilliant shine. Maintaining basic cleanliness and order doesn’t mean everything has to be perfect and spotless at all times, but it does mean you’re maintaining control of your environment. And routine maintenance/cleaning means the job is easier to do each time around.
An uncluttered home inspires an uncluttered mind. This is a task I’ve struggled with since moving into our new home. With the place in flux as we settled in and made updates, then the two dogs filling it with hair and toys and kibble spills, and the preschooler and wife and myself merely living, the house has become, well, not an ideal place for a person like me. I’d clean it, but what’s the point? The moment I place clean and ironed linens on the bed, the dogs are there to dust it in dander. Cleaning my home has come to feel like I am more like Homer’s Sisyphus than I am the me I’ve always been and want to be. So, I have to figure out a way not to finally get that boulder up the hill but blow the boulder up and raze the hill. Then happily vacuum up all that debris. Ahh…
Logging out of social media has freed me from mindless time-wasting and unnecessary annoyance
But that freedom has imprisoned me to a world where the common unwashed don’t know what I’m up to, which can work against me whenever I get that next damn book published. I want to be wealthy enough that I can hire an intelligent person to operate my social media. But there will be no need for that concern until I get those damn books out. The good news is that without social media to burn time on, I can use those found minutes to write and publish, right?
I’ve finally hit the point where I understand what parents mean when they say they’re exhausted and that parenting is hard
It’s not the physical act of raising a child, it’s the emotional and psychological might required to be a good example, a patient parent and spouse, and generally, not a disconnected zombie of resentment. It’s hard. Challenge accepted under duress despite my very conscious choice to enter this terrible agreement with Domestication.
Yep! Go fuck yourself, Zionists
One thing I learned and wrote about in last year’s birthday post was this: “I’ve become almost perfectly comfortable with my discomfort with my American Judaism. Too much to unpack right here right now. But I’m confident by age forty-three, I’ll have no problem telling American Zionists to fuck themselves in the face with an Uzi with the same passion I’d tell a Trump-supporting, Capitol-storming racist to fuck themselves with their stupid Confederate flags.”
Safe to say, that, yeah, now I’m forty-three and am perfectly fine to tell American Zionists to fuck themselves in the face with an Uzi. Especially if that American Zionist is “class act” Rudy Giuliani. Or my old rabbi.
I can do this shit
Trouble gives us the capacity to handle it. Self-doubt and cross looks from spouses and strangers is mere fuel to a four-plus decade fire burning in me. Fuck off, move, I got shit to do and I’m gonna do it. I’ll try to be nice about it—and mostly, I will be—but if you get in my way too much for too long, I’m going to have to push you aside. The clock is ticking, time is running out. I can do this shit and I’m gonna do it the best way I know how—a slightly adjusted manner in which I’ve been doing it all the while.
