A Pilgrim’s Digression

Lately it has seemed like the march of time has raced ahead of me, to the point I feel like I can’t catch up. As we have rolled into June, a couple anniversaries have prompted me to dwell a bit on the past.

This month marks ten years since I earned my Masters Degree in English. As I told a professor and friend of mine, I don’t think I would know what or how to teach a class of college freshmen, today. When I finished my degree, the next, new thing was to write your CV in HTML and post it on your college’s webspace to prove to potential employers that you were up-to-date in your knowledge of technology.

My Masters Thesis was one of the first to be digitized and made available online through the University library. Now such a thing is done as a matter of course.

Also, this month marks twenty years since my wife graduated high school. I hesitate to mention that, considering she already plucks out any stray gray hairs as she discovers them. I don’t want to suggest that my wife is old–she’s not. However, remarking to myself that my wife graduated high school in 1988 makes me feel old. 1988 was 20 years ago! I have a hard time wrapping my head around that fact.

It doesn’t take much to make me feel old. I thank God every morning and every night that I discovered the benefits of therapy and anti-depressants, otherwise I’d be in a heavy depression right now.

This morning on the train, sitting there in a doze as the train jostled me from L’Enfant Plaza to Federal Center SW, I was absently stroking my right arm with my left, and I had this vertiginous out-of-body experience. For just a moment, it felt like I was a teenager again, looking at my older self from across the aisle, and thinking, “Is that me? How can that be me?”

Back in my body again, I asked, “Is this really my arm? My skin? My body?” It doesn’t feel like it, sometimes.

As the song says:

“And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself-Well…How did I get here?” Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime

The answer is, most of the time I really don’t know.

Biologically, I suppose my cells have died and regenerated millions of times since 1988, so technically I am not the same person. But so much else has changed, too.

I am not advocating that I wish we could stop time and never age out of our teens. Believe me, having lived with a teenage foster son for the past year, I do not wish to go back to those days (except as maybe an ironic observer).

I suppose what makes me sad (not depressed, but sad) is how time seems to speed up the older we get. My theory is that as our lives become more stable, less eventful, and as each day runs along the same monotonous track back and forth from home to work, we lose all sense of time. There are no longer any distinguishing landmarks outside the window of our train car (and yes, I am framing my metaphor as if we were mere passengers, not conductors on our own private rail line).

By landmarks I mean events such as graduation from high school, entry to college, graduation from college, wedding, or the birth of a child. The landmarks in a middle aged person’s life, ironically, are all funerals. If we’re lucky (bad choice of words, probably), our grandparents are the first to go, then our parents, then our assorted other relatives whose funerals we may not even attend, then our older friends start dying off, then friends from our own generation, and finally, ourselves.

Even our retirement from work is a sort of a funeral; and sometimes it is quite literally the death of a person. How many people retire, only to die within the year? I’ve known at least two in my lifetime.

Have you noticed no one likes to go to retirement parties, just as no one likes to go to funerals? Retirement parties are essentially a wake with the corpse walking and talking.

Anyway, to return to a previous point, a couple weeks ago I decided to update my CV with the conferences and workshops I have attended since starting my current job in 2002. I am not looking for another job, I just wanted to bring my CV up to date so that I would not forget anything relevant to my work history.

As I told a colleague, I could not remember even the year that I attended some of these conferences. The years have all run together. The one at Cornell might have been last July, or the July before, or the July before that. I did not know until I looked it up on the conference website.

Since my colleague agreed with me that he could not distinguish events that happened one year from another, we talked about it for a bit and decided that it is the sameness of every day of our lives that prompts this kind of amnesia.

Alzheimers is supposedly due to a plaque buildup in the brain; it sometimes feels like stability and lack of change in life causes much the same thing, a sort of glazing over of the brain.

A person’s job becomes rote; a person’s daily activities become rote, habitual, scripted. Many times the older a person gets, the more conservative they become politically, socially, and morally. People stop taking chances. Life becomes the same, year after year. Vacations might be considered landmarks in our journey, except that many people often go on the same vacations year after year, thus the vacation this year is pretty much indistinguishable from the one last year, or the year before that.

At age 34, I often find myself saying, “Self, you could find a better job if you looked.” But Self does not want to look. I’ve got a good job now that suits me perfectly, so why take the chance on a job that looks good on paper, but turns out to be awful?

I admit, many of these thoughts are prompted by my foster son, as well. He is 19, an aspiring artist, a tentative bohemian-type. He reminds me of me, a little, thus we don’t really get on all that well.

He is going away to college in August, and I feel a little bit of the excitement of that time in his life. It makes me a bit nostalgic. Mostly, I find myself standing outside myself, regarding his ambitions with skepticism born from my own disappointments. Then I regard myself standing outside myself regarding with something like contempt this boy who is like me, and the existential irony of the moment becomes palpable.

Somewhere along the line, I have become the bourgeois I once would have scorned. My foster son must wonder if I ever, even once, read any of the books that fill my bookshelves. He hasn’t seen me read much, so he must wonder.

He has such high hopes for himself, though! That’s what really reminds me of me. He has been encouraged in his art, not by parents (none were there for him), but by his teachers and friends. I look at his art, and I don’t see anything extraordinary. Is my artistic eye jaded? Completely blind from disuse?

I want to tell him, “Look, Kid, I hope you have some practical plans for your future because your art really isn’t going to pay the bills.”

But I don’t. The me of 1988 would be ashamed that I even think such thoughts. But the me of 2008 is jaded by his own experience.

When one is nineteen, the possibilities in life seem endless, and time seems to be on your side. There are no walls between you and your possible futures.

Eventually, everyone hits the wall, though. Many folks hit the wall when they come to the realization that some dreams really are childish, and that there is a limit to one’s horizon.

Some folks hit the wall when they realize that, for economic, social, or political reasons, they simply cannot do what they want to do, be who they want to be. Speaking strictly in terms of money and social status, most people only do relatively better than their parents; few people from the lower and middle classes break the class ceiling entirely and become wealthy and successful.

We all have our own individual walls. I keep thinking of my foster son, wondering when he will hit the wall and how he will react. He’s rather lived in an echo chamber for much of his life. He’s been told over and over what a great artist he is, how talented he is, how much potential he demonstrates. He has already hit one wall: he was not accepted to the somewhat prestigious art school to which he applied for college.

I think back and remember my disappointment when I was not accepted by the University of the South, home of the Sewanee Review.

My foster son seemed to rebound from his rejection rather quickly, however. Yet other walls lie ahead. Eventually, one reaches a point in life where there is no where else to go, and one’s lot becomes to walk alongside the wall for the remaining distance of one’s life, looking up at it and regretting that one isn’t strong enough or brave enough to go over it.