It’s 7:30AM, and I am several hours into my fifth decade of life.
After teaching last night, I headed home to a quiet dinner with my wife. We got caught up with “Sopranos”, and we sat and talked and opened presents. (My favorite gift from my wife: awesome seats for an upcoming Sparks game at the Staples Center; my favorite gift from my chinnies: really good vegan marzipan. I love my marzipan — my Viennese ancestry comin’ through loud and clear.)
I got up this morning and my first thought was to thank God for getting me to this age. I’m not dead, I’m not locked up in a state mental hospital or in prison, I’m not homeless and mumbling to myself. If you’d asked my family and friends ten years ago — or even twenty years ago — they would have quietly, desperately admitted to being profoundly worried about my survival. No one worries about this anymore.
Last week, I applied for a nice big chunk of life insurance. I never thought I’d qualify for life insurance, you see. Who would insure someone with my track record? But as anyone who knows life insurance knows, the medical questions they ask you when you apply refer to what’s happened in the last seven years. And for the past nine years, I’ve had a very clean bill of health (other than a nasty bout of giardia, a bug I contracted in rural Colombia a few years back.) A nice man came over to our house last week, took my blood and my urine and my height and my weight. He even gave me an EKG. He seemed to think all was in order, and unless there’s some problem with my blood, I’m gettin’ insured. Hugo Schwyzer is worth underwriting these days.
In a comment below a post yesterday, Treifalicious writes:
What does “40″ mean? Most of all, what does “40″ feel like, look like?
I just turned 35 last week. People tell me I don’t look like a 35 year old. What does a 35 year old look like?
A friend of mine asked how old I was at a little birthday celebration I had. I didn’t tell him exactly how old but said I was slightly older than he was (He turned 34 in February - I told him how much older I was than him last year but he apparently forgot). He said he was old. I said that I was not.
Personally, I think these ideas of what 30, 35 and 40 (or any age save early childhood when there are clear developmental goals people have to meet) are supposed to look and act like are arbitrary and ultimately meaningless.
Still, it would be good if you could elaborate upon what it means to feel 40. Granted, you don’t have so much experience being 40 as of yet but it would be good to get your imnpressions so that I know what to look forward to in 5 years.
I agree that the “rules” about what we’re supposed to act like at any given age tend to be arbitrary and meaningless. There’s nothing magical about the number 21, for example, that instantly gives folks the good judgment to handle alcohol that they lacked a day or week before. Society has to draw arbitrary lines in order to function, however, and I suppose we generally draw them in the right places.
I wrote a bit about growing older and closing doors last year. In that post, I was gently chastising men in my age cohort for continuing to chase young women. I wrote last October:
One of the most important doors to close is the door marked “everlasting youth.” Part of growing up is learning to accept that our choices are finite, that our youth is temporary, that the sexual desirability we may have had (or wished we had had) at 25 is gone, or at the least, significantly changed. Another door we must learn to close is the one marked with the unwieldy phrase: “constantly in need of validation and reassurance.” This doesn’t mean we won’t always need affirmation from others, but the kinds of affirmation we need will change. Whether we have “It” can’t matter anymore; whether we are loving, kind, safe, generous, and reliable will. The world doesn’t need us to be sexy in middle age. The world doesn’t need us to be “on the prowl”. The world needs us to close softly the doors to our past, to embrace our aging and changing bodies, to embrace our families (in whatever form those families come) and to embrace the great adventure that only promises to get better and more glorious. But it will only get better if we close those doors.
That’s what I think of as I turn forty.
But I’m clear on something else. I may be a Puritan preaching the gospel of radical self-denial on the part of the consumer as a tool for liberating the consumed. But this is not a joyless life. Indeed, I’m more playful at 40 than ever before. Yesterday, my office mate’s assistant was playing a song I found catchy: Rihanna’s “Umbrella.” I don’t normally like that sort of music, but the track worked for me. So I downloaded it last night and composed a small dance to it. Only my wife and my chinchillas will see this very special dance, of course. But I had a wonderful time last night bouncing around exuberantly, like a hippopotamus responding to the choreography of Irene Cara.
If you’re gonna be what Tennessee Williams calls an “ass-achin’ Puritan”, you’re gonna be an insufferable person to be around if that puritanism isn’t mediated by a goofy, wacky, sense of humor. And I’m afraid that sense of humor doesn’t come across on this blog. But if you could see me singing Barry Manilow songs to my chinchillas in a basso profundo or inventing dance moves that are both kinetically unlikely and aesthetically disturbing, you’d know I’m having a pretty good time.
After 8 hours and 17 minutes, being forty rocks.
And that “Umbrella” song is still in my head.
Hugo, I’ve had a lot of friends calling me up wishing me a happy fortieth, with the older ones assuring me I’m “still a pup” and the younger ones amazed that I’m taking it in stride, rather than hearing—I dunno—the tolling of heavy iron bells? I think turning forty rocks too.
I like the “aura of authority” that comes with turning forty, even as I shake my head at the folks that seem wrapped up in the stereotypes Treifalicious mentions about what certain ages are supposed to look like or feel like. I know that “authority” is just another stereotype on age, but I experience that as a welcome positive, after hearing a sea of negatives surrounding this age.
And I still come back to that Chrissie Hynde interview in CREEM magazine, after “Brass in Pocket” came out, when the interviewer alluded to her age (then, 28) as possibly being a little old for a woman in rock and roll. She replied that if she was going to lie about her age, she’d add years instead, so folks would be more impressed she was still rockin’. That made an impression on me as a kid, and I never forgot that line—it was an interesting way to deflect the criticism one can get from being “too old” or “too old for a woman” to break the rules. ‘Cuz the fact is, if you live long enough, you’re going to be breaking plenty of “rules”.
May you have many more years to break many more rules, brother.
I wonder how much of our concept of 30 and 40 is tied up in marketing people telling us what we should like at our age and novelty companies trying to sell black “over the hill” pinatas by selling us on an idea that an arbitrary number is some kind of horrid thing.
cheers for completing the first 1/3 of your life! ;) i think life just gets richer and sweeter…and here’s to rihanna and you getting your groove on…
Happy birthday!
Can’t offer much advice on aging (I’m in my twenties), but my parents (mid-sixties) tell me that feelings of basic sanity and contentedness get stronger through your forties and fifties. :)
Imagine five cats and one little white dog lining up in one row somewhere near Santa Barbara, singing “Happy Birthday To You.” Add my human voice to that chorus, too.
I’m glad that you’re so excited and optimistic about your 40th. For women, this is often a more dreaded milestone, wrapped up in biological (fertility), cosmetic (wrinkles), and various other concerns. No matter how much women persuade themselves that aging is a natural, beautiful process, we can’t extricate ourselves from a culture that tells us to “defy” age (despite Dove’s only thinly veiled “pro-age” PR gig) and extend the “unending potential” that the young female body promises far beyond its otherwise natural reach (Botox, Clomid … need I say more?).
happy birthday hugo. if you visualize it right now, i’m doing a little happy birthday dance for you. i don’t get what’s the big deal with forty though, you still got a lot more decades ahead of you. don’t worry, you’ll still be blogging when i’m forty.
The world doesn’t need us to be sexy in middle age. The world doesn’t need us to be “on the prowl”. The world needs us to close softly the doors to our past, to embrace our aging and changing bodies…
Happy 40th, Hugo.
I turned 40 last year, and have experienced the opposite of what you describe in your post. After a long period of sexual latency — I had two children and raised them to elementary age, with all of the backbreaking work and self-sacrifice that implies — I hit 40 with all the baby weight gone, and then some, and a sense of ferocious sexuality that is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before.
I am, I suppose, middle-aged. And I am sexy. It is not something I am trying to be, nor is it my attempt to hold on to validation from others in the face of my disappearing youth. My “aging and changing” body is better than it ever was at 25. In spite of the fact that popular culture tells me that my face can’t possibly be as attractive as it was at 18, I look in the mirror and it tells me something else. I see it in the gaze of others, too.
My sexuality is not predatory, but bright, open, self-assured, joyous. I’ve never received as much good male attention (not the street stuff aimed at tearing me down; for those purposes, I’m practically invisible) as I have in the past couple of years. From men my own age, and from men much younger than I am. My age has made no difference to them.
I suppose I’m saying all of this because this has also been the experience of other women I know. Childbearing and intensive rearing is over for some of us, and a surprising “it” has returned to us — and it’s a gift. Perhaps many men experience 40 as the closing of a door. I’ve experienced it as a door being flung wide open.
*I meant childbearing and intensive childrearing…
I have heard this, Jen, from some of my friends — it’s a marvelous revelation indeed. It’s only possible, I suppose, to reverently close a door that has been open for a while.