I’ve been writing 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.
This is the sixth and, as I turn 40 tomorrow, likely the last. Which, come to think of it, is probably more than enough!
For most of the last decade or so, when I imagined my 40th birthday, I imagined a grand fête. It would have been like an Old World wedding or the civic holiday in some high fantasy novel: miles of wine, tons of food, live music for days and days, and the nights lit up by lanterns and Tiki torches (I imagined all this before the torches had been tainted by the white supremacists).
This vision wouldn’t have surprised people who’ve known me for a while. I spent most of my 20s trying (and occasionally succeeding) to throw high-concept art-parties. Moreover, my 30th birthday had set the bar pretty high. After years of jumping from low-wage job to low-wage job (I spent well over half of that time simply temping and cashing my checks at a currency exchange), all the while racking up tens of thousands in educational debts, I had bid the decade adieu on a high note: one of the last Chicago Lollapaloozas where a paralegal/clinical receptionist could afford a three-day pass. I finally got to see Nine Inch Nails, a band I had adored since I was in high school. And I also discovered The Go!Team, a band I have revered to this day. Plunging into the next decade of life with 80,000 of my best friends beneath the glittering skyline of my adopted second home, it’s no surprise that my fantasies of turning 40 would start out grandiose.
But my 30s have been quite a bit different from my 20s. For one thing, they have been more financially secure. My employment has been more occasional than ever, and the debt certainly hasn’t gone away, but my wife’s gainful employment as an RN has pulled us out of the post-graduate doldrums, even as many of our friends and family have continued to struggle. Secondly, I left my second home in order to return to my first. I had dreamed of making it back to Flint ever since I left, and the prospect of buying a home there and being close to family made this feasible. With homeownership and long-term roots, I’ve found community in terms of a neighborhood, church, work, and play in ways that I had missed during my time in Chicago and New York. On the other hand… friends have lived far away, my grandmother and my aunt have passed from this world, and my home has been riven by state takeover, environmental crisis, and hope against despair. And beyond all of this, the real game-changer has been my family. With two daughters, and chief responsibilities as a house-husband and a stay-at-home dad, my chiefest and most important responsibility has been to feed, to clean, to nurture, and to teach. Their growth has come before mine, their early ambitions and creative drive have taken center-stage, and this is a privilege for me to share with them, and one which has also caused me to see the world from a radically different perspective than I could have before.
Given all this, it shouldn’t surprise anyone — least of all me — that my plans for my 40th birthday have evolved as well. That they now reflect a decade of introspection and responsibility and quiet joy more than the chaos of my 20s.
Here’s what I’m planning: a perfect day.
If everything goes according to the script it’ll start like this. Civil twilight begins in Flint at 5:55 AM so I will wake up when the stars begin to lie down. I will take a walk through my neighborhood, stopping for a donut and coffee perhaps, and walk past the house where I grew up and down many quiet streets. When I get home it’ll be just about dawn and I’ll get to work in the garden. I told my wife I wanted to spend the day Reading, and Gardening, and Cooking, and the gardening is easiest to do in the cool of morning. It won’t take long: I’ve got some veggies to harvest, some flowers to plant, some weeds to pull, and this thirsty summer I’m sure they’ll need water as well. When I’m done with that, I’ll get started on the cooking. I’ll have to return to the cooking throughout the day in order to be ready for dinner. I’m going to prepare planked whitefish (which I’ll buy fresh from Donlan’s on Corunna Road) with garlic and chive butter (the chives from my own garden and the garlic from the Flint Farmers’ Market), a cherry pie, and — most important — my Grandma Turner’s Potato Salad… easily the most complicated recipe to prepare. Adding the right amount of sunshine is an art, not a science, and Grandma Turner will know if I take any shortcuts. And if there is time when I’m not gardening and cooking, I’ll read a book, purely for pleasure: I decided to go with Michael Moorcock’s Elric: The Stealer of Souls.
These pastimes won’t be continuous, however.
When my younger daughter gets up I’m going to take her out for breakfast. She’s obsessed with pancakes — the fat, fluffy ones — so I’ll be taking her to the IHOP on Miller Road. Later, I’ll take my older daughter out to lunch at Totem Books, my favorite bookstore. I have a gift certificate a friend got me a while back, and when we’re not eating I’ll be browsing the racks for stray Borges and Bulgakov and Morrison and Allende. And I also intend to go to noon mass at St. Matthew’s, and to eat an early dinner out on the back porch, and to attend my older daughter’s dance recital in the evening, and to ask my patient wife to sit through Roger Corman’s The Raven starring Vincent Price as the morose magician Erasmus Craven.
And that ought to get me to about midnight, at which point I will have already embarked upon a new journey toward 50.
Here’s the thing about perfect days, though: they don’t really exist when you demand them to conform to a train-schedule. This is certainly something I have learned in the last decade, and am probably a bit less of a control-freak as a result. Maybe I won’t get to all of those wonderful plans. Maybe some of them will have to wait for another time. Maybe a chance encounter, or a mishap during the day, or even a freak thundershower (August sunshowers really are a glorious thing) will rip my plans to pieces.
That’ll be fine.
The trick is not to surrender our desires, nor to erase our sense of self, but to fully recognize that we are creatures of a moment, that we change day-by-day, and that the greatest joy comes from an opportunity to breathe fresh air and to reach out for something precious and valuable. It might not be what we expect, but it is there, patient and hoping to be recognized. I’ll be looking for it behind every cloud and beneath every stone tomorrow, but most especially in the smiles and words of my family.
No, I would worry that a grand party would drown out this quiet voice.
So I’ll make my perfect day’s plans, but most of all, I’ll plan on listening as best I can.
That’s a good trick to learn before embarking on a whole new decade of life.
I first picked up The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien as a child, but through it all that book still has lessons to teach, and most of the most elegant and complex is the riddle in Bilbo’s final song… a riddle he sings in the summer of daylight, youth, and victory. He sings:
Roads go ever ever on
Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green
And trees and hills they long have known.
Among its many challenges is this elision of distance: actual roads separate distant objects by miles and miles, but in our mind and memories experiences of fire and horror are as close as we wish to the “meadows green.” And this juxtaposition, blown up against the even larger experience of life and death — totalizing concepts in which we never fully land at ease — I found a fitting companion song by R.E.M.: Find the River.
If our lives are the river and the ocean is the end, then what is the significance of each moment along the way? It might be as simple as the sights and sounds we experience as we travel:
“Me, my thoughts are flower strewn,
an ocean storm, a bayberry moon.
I have got to leave to find my way.”
and
“I have got to find the river.
Bergamot and vetiver
run through my head and fall away.”
There’s more to both the story and the song than that, but they both invoke the perception of the traveler, the traveler’s agency in determining his relationship to the journey and, ultimately, his power to shape his experience of the journey. Hopefully for the better.
And that seems a fitting place to leave off this last essay on this subject: with the pleasure, wakefulness, and action of the present moment, and acceptance and hope for what is to come.
Thank you for traveling with me.