20 Days to 40: “I’ll Be Around”
Not-so-secret secret here: I can be a bit of a control freak in my own way. It doesn’t manifest in the stereotypical ways… I don’t try to micromanage the people I work with or freak out if there’s snow instead of sun. I know that an honest sense of productive happiness depends on one’s attitude, so I have come up with dozens of strategies to manage my attitude, and I enforce them upon myself with robotic rigor. The use of different colors at different times of year, or the distribution of meditative walks, or the codified shorthand of my to-do lists… these are just a few of these strategies. Sometimes they actually do work. Occasionally they are more burdensome than they are worth. Symbology, personal and cultural, is key… so you can imagine that as I’m approaching my fortieth birthday this year, I’m itching to find some meaning in the event.
I’m hoping to write a series of blog posts – extemporaneous, unscripted, mostly unedited – to reflect on turning 40. I’m doing it mostly for myself, but I’ll post them here in case they are of interest to others. Maybe I’ll finish them, or maybe not. There’s a lot going on.
And this is the third.
Change is in the air, and it isn’t just because I’m turning 40.
Despite the fact that I had been gone from Flint for fourteen years when I moved back in 2011, there was a lot that seemed familiar to me. The atomic age tower of the AT&T switching station still spiked up almost as high as the vacant Genesee Towers a couple blocks away, the East Side was still crowded and messy, and the Todorovsky brothers still served up greasy coney islands at the Atlas on Corunna Road. I was 32, I had a baby daughter and I could walk down this block not so far from my childhood home under the shade of trees that had been ever so slightly smaller when I was a kid.
Things were different… fourteen years different. But enough was the same to give a certain level of comfort. A certain level of stability.
One vivid memory from when I was a kid – probably seven or eight – and my mom came home with a slightly different haircut from what I had expected. It was a bit shorter or had been colored a bit differently. I was upset, and she tried reasoning with me in various ways before she had a light bulb expression and said, “I don’t think you like change.”
It had maybe been a surprise to her, because I was exuberant, and outspoken, and creative, and colorful, but she hit the nail on the head. I didn’t like change. In some ways I still don’t.
On some level, I don’t think many people like change. Oh, we have different appetites for it to be sure. Some of my friends are much more comfortable switching up relationships and careers that I am switching up shoes. But we all have our sacred cows. We all have our pillars and cornerstones about which we build our identities and we freak out when we see movement there, because their change is a change in us. To change their identity is, perhaps, to change our own. Or maybe it isn’t, but then it is nevertheless to become unmoored from that which made us who we are. Even serene souls partake in a bit of angst when they contemplate that biggest change of all – death – which we study and analyze our whole lives, knowing that we will encounter it one day, and that encounter will be our last on this earth.
I’ve been back in Flint for seven years, or roughly half of the time that I had been gone from the scene out-of-state. And I’ve been surprised at how many of those things that had remained stable while I was gone have scattered like dandelion seeds since my return. And let’s not conflate all change. Change is good, change is bad, change is avoidable, change is inevitable, change is. I was nostalgic when the local planetarium took out their optomechanical projector – a beast of a machine that resembled nothing so much as Aughra’s lair in the original The Dark Crystal, but which in practice worked more like a massive and exquisite Swiss watch – and replaced it with a new digital version, but I also recognized that as a positive change for a more versatile and educational machine. Less positive, on the other hand, has been the decay in city services since I’ve been here, notoriously in the form of the water crisis, but really permeating our experience of life from top to bottom. Unmowed parks, for example. Emptying neighborhoods. Then again, the golf courses I avoided as a kid have gone to seed, and I won’t complain about that. One of them has come back as a disk golf course, and another has transformed itself into a wild prairie full of deer and butterflies. Of course, I resent the Hell out of the fact that my beloved Atlas Coney Island has lost its owners, its name (it has been rechristened “Don’s”) and – most likely in the near-future – the glowing globe marquee of the earth that projected hope and light down Corunna Road on steamy summer nights and through the bitterest winter cold. That’s both a nostalgic and an irrational resentment, but that doesn’t mean I feel it any less powerfully. As a friend reminded my last night, “emotions aren’t reasonable.”
Sometimes I think we focus on our attachments to things and places because they act as a buffer to save us from having to contemplate the changes to something even more precious: the people in our lives. The main entree of turning 40 as a middle-class American is, of course, the notion that we’re halfway along that bounded path between birth and death (in reality, most of us are more than halfway), but as you age you learn that the totality of such moments are far more expansive and intimidating. Turning 40, for example, might not feel like such a big deal. On the other hand, it is certainly an opportunity to reflect that everyone you first remember is also 40 years older than they were when you were born. All of them look different. All of them are in a different place in their own lives, worried about different things, thinking different things, doing different things. They have felt the passage of time just as powerfully. The world and the city has changed around you. In 40 years, these changes are visible, palpable, conspicuous. You can smell and taste them. You’re old enough that birth, when the world was new, feels far away, but you’re also (finally) old enough that twenty feels distant as well. Driving for the first time, or kissing for the first time, or saying goodbye to your parents after they drop you off at college is a distant memory and those details are starting to get cloudy and variable in their particulars. Turning thirty, starting a family, finding a home… these are not so distant, but they are fast-receding nonetheless. And as you look back at so many changes – thousands that you notice, and millions that you don’t – you have finally become accustomed to the notion not that change is constant, but that change is not an abstraction. That you will be immersed in it and will experience it daily, until one day you don’t.
I don’t think that a reflection about being halfway through your life is really the most unsettling thing about turning 40. That isn’t a big deal, really; that is just another point along the trail, and for many of us it won’t be the most important or remarkable. Looking back, we’ll remember the best conversations or the most spectacular vistas, not the moment as which we said, “welp, we’re halfway there.”
Far more unsettling , to me, is this internalization of change. This evolution from simply acknowledging it to actively experiencing it in a way that reeks of experience and which seems to contradict the tidy binaries of youth.
Last night I drove down to Detroit to see my friend – the same friend who cautioned me about the irrationality of emotions – and I couldn’t find the music I wanted, so I put on something different instead. Mazzy Star. “So Tonight That I Might See.” I was introduced to this band when I was new to college – 1997 – and I haven’t listened to them often since, and all of a sudden the past and the present collapsed together. I associated the particular notes and pauses I heard with a time when the Atlas was still called the Atlas and its bright ball was blinking. But I was making the music into a new memory in a changed time. The Atlas is now Don’s, but my friend was still there, wise and present and as willing as ever to listen. And when I came back home that night, it was to my wife, whom I could not have possibly imagined in 1997. To my two young daughters who now their own names and dreams and ambitions and tidy binaries that will be dispelled by all of the changes they experience over the course of their lives.
I’ve never tried surfing, but it still feels like an apt analogy to the current of life (and maybe this is why some philosophical hippies were so into surfing?): nobody starts out on a wave. You climb on. And eventually you get knocked off. And you gain practice, and then you ride the wave for as long as you can, right?
Living is like riding a wave of changes, and eventually we all get knocked off. But capable surfers seem to reach a point where they aren’t wobbling around, where their eyes are angled toward their next destination, and they’ve found their balance, and they’re equal to the currents pulling them along.
That, too, is what it feels like to be confronting changes at 40.
You enter them with resolve and experience.
I’m looking forward with resolve and experience.
Postscript: At the top I’ve embedded Mazzy Star’s most upbeat song, but listening to it on Spotify (something else that didn’t exist in 1997) while writing this essay led me to Ya La Tengo’s “I’ll Be Around,” which inspired the title here. That’s also a great song, and a bonus!