I was born on May 22, 1967; in the Gregorian calendar, that means my fortieth birthday is just over three weeks away. But I would like to point out that May 22, 1967 was also the 12 of Iyar, 5727 in the Hebrew calendar. Given that the Hebrew calendar is lunar, it means my Hebrew and Gregorian birthdays rarely match up.
And today is 12 Iyar 5767, so by that ancient method of reckoning time, I am forty today.
Another busy Monday morning finds me sitting at the messiest desk in the Western Hemisphere. Really, it’s appalling — Clif bar wrappers and old tests, coffee-stained handouts and framed wedding pictures all jostling together. Merely to type a post or an e-mail requires blowing the crumbs off the keyboard. (I need a new keyboard annually, thanks to the food and drink spills).
I’m thinking this morning about a dear relative of mine. Because it’s a private family matter, I won’t share much, but I will say that this relation is a man in his mid-seventies, now suddenly frail and weak and battling serious illness. Though his physical diagnosis isn’t immediately terminal, he seems to have lost much of his will to live. I am praying and meditating for him daily.
This man and I have had a lot in common for many years. My relation was the first endurance athlete I ever knew; he started marathoning in the 1970s, back when the sport was first becoming popular. He ended up doing more than 80 marathons, as well as several Ironman distance triathlons (including a strong finish in the Hawaii Ironman back in the very early years of the event.) He was a great bear of a man, not terribly fast but with a tremendous will to compete and and a tremendous capacity to live with physical pain — two things any serious endurance runner must have. He gave me lots of good advice when I first became a distance athlete, and in many ways, has been an athletic role model for me for more than twenty-five years.
What he and I share, more than a love of sport itself, is an intense desire to maintain our own autonomy and to pursue self-perfection through the endless disciplining of our own flesh. So much of our identity is built around the very satisfying thought that we do things other people can’t do. While others sleep in, we push our bodies to their limits, always seeing what else we can do to improve. And while there is much that is praiseworthy about this tremendous longing to achieve maximum fitness and performance, there’s a dark side to all of this as well. At its worst, this addiction to endurance sports can isolate us from others, cause us to ignore social and familial responsibilities, lead us to prioritize logging miles rather than spending time with those who love us most.
Berkeley-born Sharon Olds’ most famous poem is surely the marvelous Sex without Love. I loved it the first time I read it, largely because it was as close to a perfect description of how my companions and I lived out our erotic lives in our twenties as anything I’ve ever seen. And as a man who was both sexually promiscuous and athletically obsessive, I recognized myself at once in the closing lines:
They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health–just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.
I long ago surrendered my sexuality to God, and gave up “sex without love.” I have received indescribable gifts in return. But I struggle, Lord how I struggle, not to think of myself as going through life as a solitary runner, alone in the world, always racing against my own best time. The danger for distance athletes, both world-class and amateur, is that we can become profoundly selfish. Beating “our own best time” becomes the one meaningful battle in our lives. We discipline ourselves with restrictive diets, we beat up our joints on endless hills, we drag ourselves out of bed hours before dawn to do solitary combat on the roads and trails and treadmills. And if we’re not careful, we mistake the pursuit of our own individual excellence with authentic virtue.
Authentic virtue is never selfish, as Aristotle and a hundred other wise folks have pointed out. Authentic virtue is about balancing one’s own need to endlessly recreate and improve with one’s responsibility to the world at large. If our running gives us great pleasure, but leaves us so drained and self-absorbed that we are less available for our loved ones and our community, then we’re not being virtuous. We have to make choices, and in the past couple of years, I’ve made that choice. Many folks think I work out a lot (14-20 hours per week). But that’s nothing compared to what I would do if I gave up more of my outside commitments! Oh, how I long to take eighteen good months and train for a solid 100-miler. But running 120 miles per week would take too much from my wife, too much from my chinchillas, too much from my students and my youth group, my seven classes, my mentees, my colleagues.
The greatest danger for distance athletes, however, isn’t that we become selfish. The greatest danger, one that I see in the life of my ailing relation, is that we become so enraptured by our own physical capabilities that we begin to believe we are radically autonomous. Our bodies do such incredible things, and bring us such pride and satisfaction, that we start to think we’re indestructible. We become particularly loath to rely on others, jealously, often pridefully guarding our own independence. The phrase “our bodies, ourselves” takes on a radically different meaning: our identity as human beings becomes enmeshed with our sense of what our bodies can do.
We came into this world naked and helpless. We had no control over our flesh; we were diapered and dressed and spanked and bathed and fed on another’s schedule. We wailed and flailed, but for the first few years were utterly incapable of meeting our own needs. And unless we are taken young and suddenly, most of us will leave the world in that same way. Even if we retain the ability to use the toilet and feed ourselves up until the end, old age will rob us, sooner or later, of our precious independence. If we’ve spent fifty or sixty years building up a personal myth of indestructible autonomy, “alone in the universe against our own best time”, we’re going to be absolutely devastated by the slow surrenderings we will inevitably have to make as we age.
I’ve posted a bit about my Dad lately. His dying was relatively quick last year; he got the terminal diagnosis in mid-April and he passed on on June 22. A gentle man, not in the least concerned with “personal best times” or “faster and farther”, he surrendered himself easily to his caregivers. He was uncomplaining as he slowly lost his abilities to do for himself what he had done for nearly seven decades. He maintained his dignity and his sense of humor, and above all, he maintained his sense of self even as his body shriveled. My father, a philosopher by training and a wise soul by natural temperament, knew that he was not his body. While he had a hard time accepting the soul as separate from the flesh, he knew that his “Hubertness” was not defined by what his muscles and bones could do. That knowledge gave him the strength to surrender gently when his time came.
My ailing relative, my fellow endurance athlete, is not going so gently. He’s raging against the dying of the light. For him, the “light” remains connected to what his body can do, and losing those capabilities is devastating for him in a way that it wasn’t for my far-less competitive father. As for me, I have had both these dear men as role models all of my life. Though there is much I owe to my Dad, and though I love him still with all my heart, I did not get my manic restlessness from him. That longing I have to climb the next mountain, and the next, and the next, until I reach the final summit from which there is no descent — that obsession comes from somewhere else. My cousin has it in him; his were the first pair of eyes in which I saw what I so often see when I look in the mirror: the sense that life is a constant struggle against weakness, against darkness, against our own sense of limitations. And when at last our limitations overwhelm us… it’s hard.
On the list of the hundred most famous English-language poems, Tennyson’s Ulysses must rank near the top. I first read it in college in a frosh Comp Lit class. I loved it then and love it now, and remember fighting with my Marxist TA who insisted that it was the “Ulysseses” of the world who were responsible for colonialism and imperialism and slavery. She hated the poem (and hated Tennyson) and wanted her students to mock the sentiments within it. I nearly lost my temper, so eager was I to defend both the poet and his protagonist. And I think of Ulysses often as I think of my dear cousin, fighting so hard in his hospital bed.
Ulysses was a lousy husband, to put it mildly. He wasn’t much of a king either, if we take Tennyson’s view — he has no interest in doing what his son Telemachus does:
…by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness…
Ulysses is not centered in that sphere of common duty; he hears a different call:
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life!
It’s whopping hubris to compare oneself and one’s relations to the ancient heroes, of course. But when I think of my father, I think of one very gentle, loving, devoted Telemachus. My God, Dad was “strong in the sphere of common duties”! Though he was not a political man or a natural leader, he was a pillar of his family and of the broader community; the hundreds and hundreds of mourners at his memorial service were all touched and moved by him. In my life, especially since his death, I’ve sought to become more and more of the sort of man he was. Kindness and grace came naturally to my father, and I long to emulate him in those virtues.
But my cousin and I — like so many of my friends in the endurance running community — have the restlessness of a Ulysses. We are the ones who find “how dull it is to pause, not to shine in use.” And though we don’t kill monsters, we devote our lives to killing our own limitations. Contentment scares us; complacency unnerves us; we embrace domesticity with often considerable unease. We are capable of common duties, but we’re not centered there. Our center is always a mile further up the trail.
Near the end of the poem, Ulysses says:
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are…
That which we are, we are. I am thinking this morning of a man I love and admire, lying in his bed four hundred miles from here. A man who has climbed mountains, swum through oceans, run marathons on five continents. For him, the great question is finding the will to live now that so much has been taken. The question for him is whether “much abides”, and whether or not what remains is enough to continue to live.
Those with the spirit of Telemachus have an easier time letting go. They give up the bicycle, the running shoes, the car keys. They may mourn the loss of their independence, but they haven’t staked their identity to their autonomy the way those with the spirit of Ulysses have. And as one who struggles to reconcile his inner Telemachus with his inner Ulysses, I have much to think about this morning.
I am feeling a bit better as the day wears on. I will be re-energized for my classes tomorrow and the rest of the week; I’m on retreat this coming weekend in the mountains with the All Saints confirmation class. Three adults, twenty kids, and lots of prayer, discussion, team building, and snowball fights. I’ll need lots of energy for that.
Lately, I am happy to say, many people have been telling me that I’ll be a wonderful father. (This marks a huge improvement — a decade ago, I was told by more than a few people “never have kids, whatever you do, Hugo.”) I’m happy to hear this from folks, because I am now at last at the point where I feel truly ready to be a father. Until very recently, my own impatience and my own narcissism would have made me at best an uninvolved Dad. I’m eager now, and though I can’t possibly understand what it’s like to become a parent until I become one, I’m as ready as anyone can be who has no idea what he might be getting into!
And all of these strokes have me thinking about male privilege. Let me explain. Not long ago, I was at a party with some friends who had recently had a new baby. Until very recently, I would have found any number of reasons not to hold the newborn. But this time, when the little one was placed gently in my arms, I responded enthusiastically and genuinely. I rocked him and cradled him without anxiety; it felt marvelous to hold someone so small and so new. (In the past, those feelings have been primarily directed towards four-legged children; until recently, puppies and kits were more interesting to me than human babies. Now it’s at least equal.)
What I noticed, as I rather reluctantly handed the tiny lad back to his Mama, was how much “stroking” I got. Several women (and one or two of the men) gushed over my “performance” with the child. “You’re so easy with babies”, one woman said, “you’ll be such a great father!” Another said: “Don’t you just love seeing a man showing so much nurturing?” These women didn’t know much about my past. They weren’t praising Hugo for having come so far, they were praising a man they only knew slightly for demonstrating a basic level of competence with small children. And that struck me as profound male privilege.
We assume that women, both those who have had children and those who haven’t, are “natural” nurturers. We take it for granted that women will enjoy holding and cuddling small babies, including those who aren’t their own. We don’t gush with surprise when we see a woman rocking a little one, singing a lullaby. And perhaps in some more enlightened and egalitarian circles, there are those who are equally unsurprised by a display of authentic tenderness and nurturing from a man who isn’t a father. But from what I’ve been seeing lately, far too many folks are still agog at the sight of a child safe in the arms of the likes of me.
Feminists have long pointed out that we tend to praise in men what we take for granted in women. When a man does do his share of the household duties, when he does show some willingness to wash the dishes and fold the laundry, he’s far more likely to win praise for it than would a woman. This happens with child care too, of course. And what’s striking to me now, as I finally get around to the idea that I might be a really good and devoted father, is how much approbation a man gets for expressing genuine interest in his children. Even after all this time, after all the social change the world has seen, there are many of us who are still awed and impressed by adult men who show signs of being as devoted to children as a woman. That bothers me.
I’ve spent a long time thinking about fatherhood. Without opening up the old debate over post-abortion syndrome, I will say that I still think about the child my high school girlfriend and I chose not to have. If we had kept the baby, my firstborn would have turned 21 last month; he or she would be older than many of my students. I would have been a hopeless father as a teenager, of course, but the sense that we made the best decision we could doesn’t entirely make the sense of loss, of absence, disappear. And as I get closer and closer to becoming a father, I think of all the years and years I spent making sure I wouldn’t become one. And I’m grateful that I had the choice to postpone fatherhood until I was authentically ready.
And of course, my male biology has allowed me to wait to “get ready.” Though there is some evidence of higher rates of certain birth defects in children born to older fathers, there remains no question that men can still father healthy babies into their forties, fifties, sixties, and beyond. In my family, we have a large number of men who became fathers in their forties and fifties; most were marvelous Dads. Many had had a “first family” when they were younger, and their parenting skills were invariably better when they got around to the second batch. There’s a tenderness that many men often only find on the high side of forty, or fifty. And because our bodies allow us to become fathers at that age, and because our culture indulged our prolonged adolescences, we could afford to wait and wait and wait. That’s another form of male privilege.
I read a lotta blogs, and one I check in on from time to time is Amber’s. And a few weeks ago, she wrote a very brief, one-sentence post that brought me up short:
The deadpan flirtatiousness of certain married male bloggers is baffling to me.
Now, I was pretty damn certain Amber wasn’t thinking of me. I don’t know to whom she was referring, actually. But it made me reflect a bit about my past, about marriage, about neediness, and about unlearning flirtatiousness.
From early adolescence on, I was a student of flirting. I remember having the word defined for me in eighth grade by a girl named Jenny Nicholson. We sat together in math class, and I was a bit infatuated by her, a mild crush that was unreciprocated. But we chatted a lot, and one day she smiled and asked, in response to something I had said that I can’t remember, “Hugo are you flirting with me?” I said “no”, but obviously looked confused long enough for Jenny to throw out a definition: “It’s when you kinda like someone but don’t want to say it.”
I think I grunted out an “oh”, and left it at that.
I went home and asked my Mom about flirting. She gave me a more thorough definition, which I seem to remember as “Showing subtle romantic interest.” I also looked it up in a dictionary or two, and began to get the picture.
My mid-adolescent attempts at conscious flirting began not long thereafter, and they were predictably excruciatingly obvious, puerile, and unsuccessful. But my interest in girls was strong enough to help me overcome rejection after rejection, so I kept practicing what I thought of as my “technique.” I watched two of my older teenage male cousins, young men in college whose bodies were hard and chiseled and whose “patter” was smooth and (judging from their large number of girlfriends) successful. I watched their hand gestures, listened to their voices, studied their apparent effortlessness. Slowly, as my own body matured and changed, my confidence began to increase.
Bottom line, I spent years learning how to flirt. I suppose I only got good at it around the time I stopped consciously thinking about what I was doing and simply let myself “do what came naturally.” And for years and years, I did a hell of a lot of flirting. I flirted in and out of both of the disastrous marriages I had in my twenties. I found that my need for validation was stronger than any commitment I had made to any one particular woman. Even when I was physically faithful, I still loved the “intrigues” that had become second nature to me.
It was only in my early thirties, when I underwent my spiritual conversion, that I became willing to rethink my own flirtatiousness. Doing a written inventory of my romantic and sexual history, I realized that from 13 to 31 I had devoted a colossal amount of time and energy to flirting. The goal was rarely sex — the goal was validation of my own desirability. I was a first-rate narcissist, always eager to “stir the pot” to see if I could arouse a spark of interest in the various women I met in my life. It never mattered if I was single or attached, and I didn’t much care if these women were available or not. My ego needed feeding, and flirting was the best damn way I knew to get it fed. If the “intriguing” led to a short-term relationship or brief encounter, so much the better — but that was just icing on the cake. The “cake” in these instances was the knowledge that I was wanted. And knowing that I was desirable was the ultimate payoff.
I wrote last year about my 1998 “experiment with celibacy.” Not only did I not have sex or date, but for the first time since early adolescence, I consciously refrained from flirtations and intrigues. Cutting off that source of validation was extremely painful. I felt panicky and anxious. I was forced to do a lot of praying. And God was faithful. He brought me that sense of well-being that I needed so badly, that I had wanted so badly. My promiscuity and my addictive flirtatiousness had been all about filling a hole inside of me that only He could fill. But His grace could only fill that hole once I had made the decision to give up this habit that had sustained me and driven me for so long.
It’s been nearly nine years since that experience. And of course, I’m married once more, in a relationship that is deeper, richer, more challenging and more fulfilling than I have ever known. And finally, in this marriage, I can say that not flirting is truly second nature for me now. I still remember all of my old tricks, mind you. Even now, I often pause and examine my own words and actions to make sure that nothing I am doing or saying with any of the women in my life rises to the level of flirtation or intrigue. I’m gradually growing less hyper-vigilant as I learn to relax into my own skin. I’ve finally learned to stop using other people in order to feed that insatiable ego. And I’m finally in a marriage where all of those sparks, all of that heat, all of that “intrigue” is directed towards my spouse and my spouse alone.
Flirtation, particularly when we are married or in committed relationship, brings us dangerously close to one of the most pernicious sins of all. No, I don’t mean adultery. I mean the sin of using another human being to soothe our own anxiety, to feed our ravenous ego. Sending out “mixed messages” that arouse interest, deliberately fishing about to see if we can get a little “stroking” — this is toxic, manipulative, adolescent. I did it for nearly twenty years. It took several years more of hard work to break myself of the habit. Even now, I remain vigilant, knowing that it would be false pride to claim that I am forevermore immune from the temptation to soothe myself this way.
In my blog presence as in my “real world” life, I try and make it very clear that I am safe, romantically unavailable, happily married. I do this to honor my wife, of course, but there’s more to it than that. The other women in my life, be they colleagues, friends, or students don’t need me trying to pry out some sort of response from them. To put it vulgarly, using people sucks.
As it’s clear to regular readers, I’m spending a lot of time these days thinking about getting older. 40 is just around the corner. And of course, there’s a little nagging voice that says “Hugo, whatever looks you’ve had are fading. Do you think you can still “pull” (as the English say) as you used to?” And it’s my job these days to quiet that voice and not let that ugly, poisonous, neediness back into my life.
When that voice comes into my head, I remind myself that my real validation comes from the truth that — just like every other creature on this planet — I’m God’s beloved favorite. That’s true whether I’m lean or soft, wrinkled or smooth, handsome or homely, 29, 39, or 59.
And my wife, bless her, thinks I’m hot. The chinchillas just want to know if I have their shredded wheat treats, and it’s time to fetch those for them.
As I contemplate turning forty in a few short months, I’m noting it’s been a bad month for other famous folks born in 1967.
The first truly famous pop-culture figure from 1967 was the late Kurt Cobain; he died on the very same day in April ‘94 that I was offered a full-time tenure-track job here at PCC.
Last week, Anna Nicole Smith (six months my junior, born November ‘67) died. Keith Urban (October ‘67), now married to Nicole Kidman, has been in and out of rehab. And two weeks ago, news broke of the unfortunate fall from grace of Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco. Newsom (born October ‘67), whose career I’ve followed since he was first elected to the Board of Supervisors when he was barely 30, has confessed to having an affair with the wife of a long-time campaign aide. He has also, like Urban, entered treatment for alcoholism. I once thought he would be the first person younger than me to be elected president; that prospect seems somewhat less likely.
Other 1967ers seem to be doing fine. I’m turning forty this year with Julia Roberts, Faith Hill, and my fellow animal rights activist, darling Pamela Anderson. But for some reason, the sad end to Anna Nicole’s life and the tawdry revelations about Mayor Newsom have me lamenting the varied misfortunes of my fellow 39 year-olds. Clearly, some of us won’t ever see forty, and some of us (like Newsom, who has also been dating a twenty year-old) seem eager to pretend that this momentous milestone isn’t happening to us.
As for me, I’m quite excited about my fortieth. I think I’ll have a party, the first proper birthday party I’ll have had since I turned 21. And don’t anticipate any falls from grace on my end! But however eager I am to hit this milestone, I’m also spending at least a bit of time thinking about my fellow ‘67-ers, and the various triumphs and tragedies that have befallen them.
On this holiday MLK Monday, I note that 2007 marks 39 years since the great civil rights leader was slain. He was 39 when he was killed, so the space since his passing now matches the span of his all-too-short life. In the last few months, I note, I have “passed” Dr. King; as of last autumn, I am now older than he was when he was slain.
A glorious but very chilly run this morning. Lots of frozen patches on the mountain, and no access to water in my usual spots — the pipes had frozen!
My wife and I were up in Santa Barbara last night; saw my sister, who writes about and participates in the local arts scene, dancing in this production. I freely admit to not “getting” most modern dance, though out of family loyalty, I am willing to be a loyal patron. When I was growing up, the term “middle-brow” was used to condemn those who preferred their art safe and unchallenging. But after decades around what is supposed to be avant-garde, I confess that I am a cultural philistine when it comes to music and dance. I don’t get most modern dance, and I don’t get John Cage. (I’m a bit more adventurous with visual art; I do have a passion for Rothko and Kandinsky.) Still, we had a good time.
And congrats to the Pasadena City College Lancers women’s basketball team, the only undefeated team in California.
Anyhoo…
One of my good buddies from the boxing gym had a date this weekend. He’s a year or two my junior, and he went out to dinner with an 18 year-old gal whom he met when she waited on his table at a local restaurant. He knows my views on older men dating younger women (see the various posts in that category on the sidebar), and I have not hesitated to take him to task (with good humor) for this. Ours is a relationship that can withstand some serious disagreements.
My friend said something I hear a lot from my peers who want to date women half their age: “You know, she seems very mature for her age. She’s not like other eighteen year-olds.” I hear this constantly from those who want to defend the practice of going out with much younger women; while they are often happy to concede that most women still in late adolescence ought to be off-limits, they invariably suggest that the one in whom they happen to be interested is an exception to the rule. “She’s an old soul”; “She’s very wise”; “Guys her own age don’t interest her.”
I’m not about to suggest that some young women aren’t more “grown-up” than their peers. As many, many young women who have commented on my previous posts have lamented, they find the guys in their own peer group to be immature, unchallenging, unattractive. They often report feeling alienated from peers of both sexes, claiming to have felt “more comfortable around adults” for years. In other words, they feel themselves to be exceptions to otherwise sensible rules. Their longing for someone older, whom they imagine will share their interests and offer them more opportunities to grow and learn, is understandable. What is less understandable is that so many older men rely on the young woman’s self-described exceptionalism to justify a sexual or romantic relationship with her.
Newsflash, folks: most bright, sensitive adolescents go through periods where they feel profoundly at odds with the majority of their peers. They are unmoved by the concerns of boys and girls their own age; what fascinates other kids bores these more thoughtful ones. They see their peers as vapid and shallow (they are occasionally right), and they imagine (alas, often wrongly) that older folks (often older men in particular) are more interesting, more sensitive, better-equipped for relationship. I’ve worked with enough teenagers to have met dozens and dozens of young men and women who are ardently convinced that they are exceptional, perhaps even unique. And though they are usually smarter than the average bear, their sense of their own inner maturity is frequently exaggerated. And a wise older person, be he a teacher or a prospective partner, can’t take these protestations of emotional sophistication at face value!
Of course, my buddy has his own corollary to all of this. A bit younger than I am, on the cusp of his late thirties, he is adamant that he is “younger” than his chronological age. He enjoys clubbing as much as he did a decade ago, for example. He sees his peer group (I’m a prime example he says) as increasingly made up of the “settled”. Though he talks of wanting to get married and have kids “someday”, he’s still in no hurry — and he’s eager to avoid dating women for whom enduring commitment is part of their near-term plans. His sense of himself as still young, playful, and promising leads him to his own sense of exceptionalism. Just as the gal he took out on Saturday night isn’t “typical”, he too sees himself as having little in common with his own chronological age. While other men our age don’t keep up on the latest music or the hippest clubs, for example, he’s on top of these things; it makes “sense”, he claims, for him to spend his time with much younger women.
I’ve given him my standard stump speech about the fact that women our age will challenge him to grow, while starry-eyed gals barely out of adolescence will be more likely to believe his bull. Like most men I challenge on this one, he protests indignantly that he’s up for any challenge, and that a “really exceptional eighteen year-old” can push him just as hard as a woman twice that age. I’m quite confident he genuinely believes what he’s saying. But the fact that he’s being sincere doesn’t mean he isn’t deceiving himself. And his self-deception keeps him from facing the fact that chronological age imposes obligations on us all: the call to transform and grow is not optional, it is not given merely to the few.
One of the things that bothers me so much about those who defend older-men/younger women relationships is that these folks insist on seeing themselves as unusual exceptions to some fairly hard and fast rules about the trajectory of our lives. A man in his late thirties flattering himself with the conceit that he’s still a youngster, or a frustrated, curious, young woman in her late teens who feels like a wise old soul, both are confident that they are unique, or nearly so. Their sense of being different means that conventional wisdom — which, for reasons I’ve gone over again and again, warns against older men dating women in their late teens and early twenties — ought not apply to them.
It’s a free country for those who are of age, of course, and my friend is allowed to date a girl born the year Ronald Reagan left the presidency if he chooses. I’m going to be his buddy either way; I don’t make my affection conditional on the politics or lifestyle choices of my family or friends. But I’ve heard protests like his — and those of the gal he’s dating — more than once. And from what I’ve seen over and over, what spending time together will eventually teach them both is that they are each less exceptional than they had imagined. Whether they come to that realization with or without concomitant heartache remains to be seen. But while she who cannot remember the first Gulf War has reason to be foolish, he who is old enough to remember the Iran Hostage Crisis has no such excuse.
In last Wednesday’s post about the virtues of studying abroad, I mentioned my own experiences as a professor and co-director of Pasadena City College’s Florence semester program in the autumn of 2000. In passing, I noted that we had a serious incident take place in which one of our students was very nearly killed in a fall from a sixth-floor balcony. He remains a pariplegic six years later, and the litigation surrounding the tragedy was only recently resolved.
For a variety of reasons (not the least of which is the continued possibility of litigation), I can’t discuss the fall and its aftermath in too much detail. I can say that the young man who fell so far and was hurt so badly was a bright, popular, athletic, hard-working student who had made many friends among his fellow Pasadenans in Florence. I can also say that the incident taught me a lot about college-age folks, and about the responsibility of someone who is leading a study abroad program.
With a few exceptions, most of our 45 students on the semester-long trip to Florence were of traditional age; almost all were between 18-21. They were all legal adults, if barely so. And before leaving on the trip, my co-director (a fellow PCC prof in the sciences) and I made it clear that we had no intention of acting as chaperones. If these students had been underage, we would have had a host of legal and moral responsibilities; given that they were old enough to sign contracts (and drink alcohol under Italian law), we figured that we were in no way in loco parentis. We saw our role as guides; we led tours of the city and gave lectures. We saw our role as friendly mentors, and were both more than willing to lend an ear to those who were homesick or quarreling with their roommates. But for the most part, we tried to treat our students as “junior scholars and peers”.
My co-director and I often went out to dinner with groups of students. We joined them for dancing. I formed a small running club, and we went running in and around the Cascine four or five mornings a week. A couple of students even came along when I got what turned out to be my last tattoo, from the renowned Giulio Tommaselli in the Via Della Mosca. (One gal even got her first ink there, so inspired was she.) In other words, I felt very much as if the students and I were good friends. I was 33 at the time, a dozen to fifteen years older, not yet old enough to be seen as a father figure. I thought of myself as a knowledgeable older brother, and it seemed a good arrangement.
And then came Rocky’s fall in mid-October. I was awakened by a phone call early on a Saturday morning from a frantic student; she was calling from the hospital where Rocky was in surgery and fighting for his life. I threw on some clothes, called a taxi, and was at the ER within twenty minutes.
And what I learned over the next few days changed my teaching forever. About eight students had been partying with Rocky at the time of his fall. When I reached the hospital, they were ashen, weeping, bewildered. And what struck me, in this moment of crisis, was that they all looked so very, very young. It was as if the shock and fear of the incident had caused them all to regress to early adolescence. They clung to me, clearly expecting that no matter what, I would do something to make things better.
I called my co-director, and she came to the hospital as fast as she could. I made the awful phone call home to California, waking the young man’s grandparents up from a sound sleep with the news that their grandson was fighting for his life. (The doctors gave him a 10% chance of survival). And once we knew that there was nothing more we could do for Rocky, we took the kids off for breakfast. They huddled together, weeping, but after protesting that they weren’t hungry, they all wolfed down huge amounts of food.
Over the next day, as word of the accident spread through our little community in Florence, the students gathered in apartments to pray and to talk and to wait for news. And again and again, I was struck by how small, fragile, and young they all seemed! I could feel that though they were only a dozen years my junior, they desperately needed me to be the competent, reliable grown-up. They needed a Daddy figure, most of them, because they needed to fall apart. And though they were brave and very good to each other, it was still evident to me that they weren’t all fully adult. They were in that strange transition time that is college, so full of maturity and sophistication on the one hand and so terribly fragile and uncertain on the other. Thousands of miles from home, away from their families, facing the possible death of a companion and a friend, that fragility became abundantly evident.
We made sure the kids ate. We gave them time to talk. We talked to their worried parents for them. We bought them coffee, and, I’m not ashamed to say, we bought them cigarettes. (For those who were already smokers, I figured now was the time to use abundant quantities of nicotine. I smoked more in the week after Rocky’s accident than in any other seven-day period in my life.) My co-director and I went from “older buddies” to “Mom and Dad” overnight.
Rocky’s family flew over. Rocky survived, and the student insurance company footed the astronomical bill for a private air ambulance to carry him and his family from Italy back to Los Angeles. We finished up the semester, and in the final few weeks we had in Florence, we got back to partying and dancing and going out together. But I was more careful to keep strict boundaries in place with my students. The gap between 33 and 18 was wider now, and the distinction between peer and professor was infinitely clearer to me. Frankly, one of the great silver linings of this tragedy was, I suppose, that it taught me not to confuse legal and physical adulthood with genuine maturity; it taught me to better honor my role as a mentor and a professor. And it taught me that in a time of crisis, I am well-suited to the role of Daddy, when I’m surrounded by folks who suddenly need a father figure on whom they can rely.
I’m at home, working on a book proposal and watching coverage of women’s college soccer. (UCLA, alas, fell short against Anson Dorrance’s perennially mighty Tarheels.)
Lauren has finished the first Help Us Help Ourselves carnival; do visit and learn.
Lynn has a marvelous, long, but very worthy post on “Premarital Sex and the Wesleyan Quadrilateral.” Best post I’ve read in a month.
And I want to note the passing of my great-aunt, Dorothea Roeding Bishop. “Auntie Dot”, as we called her, died on Wednesday in Carmel Valley. She was 97 years old.
My grandmother’s older sister, Dot grew up in San Francisco and lived for many years on Russian Hill. She and my grandmother moved to Carmel Valley thirty years ago. She was a gentle, elegant woman with an extraordinary artistic talent. She had a natural skill with a paint brush, and an equally impressive knack for decorating. Like her great-nephew, she was devoted to animals and gave generously to various rescue and wildlife conservation organizations. She and her late husband had one son, my cousin Tom who makes his home with his family in Charlottesville, Virginia.
My Auntie Dot had been in poor health for many years. She had struggled with the onset of dementia and various other ailments that afflict the very old, and we are grateful that she is now fully at rest.
I write today both out of gratitude for her great kindness and gentleness and out of a sense of sadness that with her passing, we’ve now lost the last member of my family born before the First World War. Born in 1909, Dot remembered the roaring ’20s vividly; I have pictures of her with her perfectly bobbed hair when she was a student at Miss Burke’s school in the City. With her death, there is no one left alive in my family who remembers well the world of silent movies, the Coolidge Administration, and when it was that the California Golden Bears won their first Rose Bowl. This is the nature of things, after all. When my mother was a little girl, there were still family relatives alive who remembered the Civil War; when Dot was a child, she knew family members who had come to California for the Gold Rush. The historian in me thinks about these things with wonder, and with sadness.
When I die, perhaps some great-niece will say of me that I was old enough to, say, know veterans of the Spanish-American War, or to remember Watergate, or — barely — to recall when men walked on the moon for the first time.
On the other side of the Jordan, there’s a gentle new arrival with an exquisite sense of taste. Things will be looking spiffier soon.
UPDATE for the family: A short obit here.
In a comment below this post, Joe Smith writes:
A friend of mine, who is a serious mack daddy pickup artist, assures me that THE most desirable age for a man is 38.
Yeah, right. Does this oracle of wisdom, this mack daddy, happen to be near 38?
Anyhow, folks, have at it. My experience has been that what I find attractive has shifted as I age. But this is clearly not the case for everyone. So is there a "peak age" for desirability, particularly if we define desirability in terms that go beyond the merely physical?
Also, folks: at what age do you think you were at your all-around most desirable? At 39, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been — and if happiness is a key component of attractiveness, I’d have to say now. Though my body might be better now than ever, my features are not what they were in the mid-90s. I peaked at 29, in late 1996 or early 1997. Quite possibly the second weekend in March.
I am in the eleventh year of an ongoing decline.
A very rare fifth post on this Thursday, and perhaps my last until Monday — it looks like a busy weekend. Our first retreat with this year’s All Saints confirmation class runs Saturday through Sunday, and that will keep me very occupied. At what point will I tire of spending the night on a floor in a sleeping bag, listening to the sounds of snoring boys? When will I tire of trying to be a vegan while we pump the kids full of hot dogs and pizza? At the least, I think I need to buy an air mattress and pack some snacks; after all these years, my back muscles are getting a little less resilient.
On the subject of men and aging, a friend of mine told me a wonderful story yesterday. With his permission, I repeat it. My buddy "Sean" is 39, just as I am, and single. He goes to a Starbucks a few miles from here almost every day, and in recent weeks had been smitten with a very attractive, outgoing young barista there. She’s a Citrus College student and is about 19. For his (our) age, Sean is a handsome fellow; we originally met at the gym.
In any event, Sean and his young barista had been getting friendlier and friendlier, and Sean had been thinking of asking her out. (He didn’t tell me this beforehand, knowing my strong feelings about older men/younger women relationships.) In any event, on Tuesday afternoon, the pretty barista asked Sean a question after taking his order.
Barista: "Uh, can I ask you a personal question?" (Sean told me he was "stoked" when he heard this, thinking she might be getting ready to make the first move.)
Sean: "Sure."
Barista: "Are you single?"
Sean (now sure the gal is interested, and getting very excited): "Yes, sure am!"
Barista: "Well, I know this is weird, but you seem really great and I really want to introduce you to my mother. She’s really awesome, and I think you two would be perfect together."
Sean confessed this to me, and was more rueful and chagrined than devastated. I gave him a very hard time, of course, laced with compassion and humor. Until Tuesday, it hadn’t been driven home to him how younger women (mostly) see guys our age. But he’s starting to get that we are not as we were, and that’s not only not a bad thing, it’s pretty awesome. Sean says the barista gave him her mother’s number, and he’s considering calling. (She’s prepared her mom for the possible call.) I hope he does at least give it a chance, and I’m hoping that this little episode has ended his fantasy of eternal youth once and for all!
In any event, I’ve heard similar stories before (why do I think this scenario was in some sitcom, once?), but never from someone so close to me. And since like many 39 year-olds I’ve been ruminating a lot on getting older lately (and writing a lot about age-disparate relationships), this anecdote came along at just the right time.
The first week of school has come to an end. This morning, we boxed and Pilate-ed, and now I type with the phone to my ear as I wait — and wait — and wait — for an actual person from British Airways to speak with me.
Let me note that Lauren, long of Feministe, is back to blogging at Faux Real.
We watched the final set of the gripping Agassi-Baghdatis match last night. The endless remarks about Agassi’s age (36) grew tiresome. I’m three years older than Andre, and bristle at the commentary that suggests that he is some sort of wonder senior! Of course, this is all relative. I remember my father grumbling years ago when commenters marveled at Jimmy Connors’ great success in his last US Open appearance. "You’d think he was 80, not in his late thirties", my Dad complained.
I’ve been a sports fan as long as I can remember. When I was a child in the Seventies and an adolescent in the early 1980s, my sports heroes were men much older than myself: Rick Barry (basketball), Bjorn Borg (tennis), Niki Lauda (auto racing), Joe Montana. I remember the shock I felt when Boris Becker won Wimbledon in 1985; Becker was a few months younger than myself, and he was the first athlete younger than me to win a major triumph in a sport about which I cared. (I remained a devoted fan of his for years).
Each year, the number of athletes still playing who are older than I am diminishes. (I’ve become a big Roger Clemens fan in recent years, and I loved watching Martina Navratilova prolong her doubles career for so long.) The superstars whom I admire are increasingly much younger than myself, a reality which I find surprisingly hard to adjust to. As a kid, I longed to throw like Terry Bradshaw or shoot like Dr. J. Despite my lack of any discernible athletic talent, I could fantasize about what I might become when I was older. Those fantasies were gone before I even entered high school, but I could still look up to college and professional athletes as heroes. It’s hard to have as a hero a lad young enough to be your son. That’s not to say I can’t admire younger men and women, just that the adoration I had for athletes in my youth has vanished. Sometimes, in fits of nostalgia, I miss my boyhood heroes.
Tomorrow, after my spiritual, calisthenic, and family obligations are completed, I shall park myself in front of the television and watch hour after hour of college football. My beloved California Golden Bears have higher hopes at the start of this season than at any point in my lifetime — and that has me very excited indeed. I have a copy of the Cal football media guide, and I note that most of the players on the team were born between 1985-1987. When they were born, I was already at Cal, and the age that they are now… ‘Tis an odd feeling.
Last week, I posted about hazing and women’s sports teams; a longer version of that post is now up at Inside Higher Education. Some folks there don’t buy my insistence that while the degrading sort of hazing we saw at Northwestern and elsewhere is indefensible, certain kinds of challenging initiation rituals can be enormously positive in the lives of college students. Anyhow, put your comments over there.
Today is my 39th birthday. I think it was Jack Benny who always joked about being 39 over and over again; perhaps I ought to say "Today I turn 39 for the first time!" I won’t do much to celebrate today; I got up at 4:30AM to go to boxing class and I’ll be on campus until almost 9:00 tonight, teaching four classes over the course of the day. But I know that at the end of it all, I’ll be heading home to my beloved wife and beloved chinchilla, and all will be well.
Turning 39 also marks the beginning of my fortieth year of life (as my family reminded me this weekend several times.) Today I can say that I am enormously grateful to be enjoying the process of getting older! Yes, I am keenly aware that my body has changed a great deal in my thirties. I’ve gained weight (though I was a bit too skinny anyway a decade ago). I’ve got loads of wrinkles, with more and more appearing almost monthly. I do lots of running outdoors in wind and sun, and even the best protection can’t protect my face against the elements. My skin is starting to look, well, weathered. (I go to the dermatologist regularly, and she burns tiny basal cell cancers off my face, chest, and back on every visit.) I’ve also noticed that my eyesight is going; I wonder if I’m going to need bifocals soon.
Looking through the roster of professors in the social sciences division here at Pasadena City College, I notice that almost half of our full-time faculty have less seniority than I. Until recently, I was the "baby" of the department — but now I have a number of colleagues who are considerably younger than myself. I find myself turning into one of the "old fogies" who sits in division meetings and talk about administrators and professors long since retired, all while newer hires listen with patient smiles on their faces.
It goes without saying that I am now much older than my students. When I came here, I was 26 — young, passionate, insecure, idealistic. I was hungry to make a difference, but also hungry for validation from those who were only just my juniors. Today, I am old enough to be the father of most of "my kids." That changes how I see them, of course! In just the last year or two, strongly paternal feelings have crept into my teaching and mentoring — feelings that certainly didn’t exist a decade or so ago. Back then, I wanted to be the "young, hot, cool" professor. I milked that image for all it was worth for a long time! Now, I’m not so young, not so hot, and far less interested in being cool.
I’m much more patient now. Though I confess I can still get a little snappy with students (if you text-message in my class, my wrath will not be entirely concealed), I’m far less mercurial and volcanic than I was in my earlier teaching days. Rude, lazy, and unimaginative students (one always has a few) make me less angry than they used to. I don’t take their failures and their poor manners as personal affronts any more. It’s not that I’ve ceased to care about their lives, however. Indeed, I find that as I grow older, I am far more able to care than I ever was.
Frankly, in my first few years of teaching, the question I always asked myself was "What do they think of me?" (Thank God "rate my professors" didn’t exist back in the early to mid-90s!) Today, the question I ask myself is "What more can I do to help them learn?" I’ve become less focused on my delivery, as it were, and far more focused on my students’ reception of what it is that I’m saying. I’m not as loud as I was a decade ago, and I’m far less likely to climb on tables (something I did with great regularity in the 1990s). Back then, I was as much a performer as a teacher; my eagerness for attention frequently trumping my commitment to cover the syllabus effectively.
Getting older is not without its tribulations. Watching my parents struggle with health crises (something my family is dealing with now) has been tremendously painful. In my family, my generation is now "sandwiched" between small children who cry out for our care and our parents who, increasingly, are leaning upon us for many different kinds of support. That’s bittersweet, and indeed, often more bitter than sweet.
But all things considered, I’m thrilled to be the age I am. The phrase "I feel comfortable in my skin" is overused, but I can’t help but say it a lot these days because it’s so right. As I’ve shared on this blog, in my youth (which lasted well into my twenties) I didn’t love my flesh. I struggled with a serious eating disorder and exercise addiction; I was a self-mutilator who landed in the hospital many a time; I went through three brief and unhappy marriages and three painful divorces in remarkable succession. Yes, a religious conversion did turn my life around. So too did finding the woman who is now my wife. And heck, thousands of dollars worth of therapy didn’t hurt! I worked hard for the peace I have now. But that peace is also a function of the aging process.
Yes, the wrinkles have come. Yes, the pounds have come. Yes, the eyesight has weakened and the muscles take longer to recover from a brutal run. But, but, but — with all of these things has also come peace and self-acceptance and an infinitely greater capacity to love myself and, as a result, to love others more boldly and effectively. I love standing on the precipice of 40, learning, as men my age should,
to close softly
The doors to rooms (I) will not be
Coming back to.
(Donald Justice, Men at Forty)
I’ve closed so many doors these past few years. And so many others have opened up as a consequence.
Now, I’m not accusing anyone of anything.
But read this from conservative family pundit Jennifer Roback Morse’s column today on Townhall:
The average age of first menstruation is now 12.5, down from 16.2 in the nineteenth century. But the age at first marriage is 25.2 We aren’t ready for economic independence until our late twenties.
That means that we may have a gap of 10 to 15 years between the time we are biologically ready and the time we are economically ready. All those raging hormones are trying to get us to reproduce. That gap between the age at first menses and the age at first marriage creates, shall we say, a certain tension in society.
Yesterday in my women’s history class, we began making our way through Joan Brumberg’s The Body Project. I’ve been using the book for years and years, and it’s a huge hit with my students each semester.
It is Brumberg who first drew my attention to statistics about menarche, marriage, and the loss of virginity. She points out that a century ago, girls menstruated for the first time at an average age of 16 and got married at an average age of around 21. Today, girls menstruate at an average age of just under 12 and get married for the first time at just over 25.
Here’s where it gets interesting. A century ago, the time between the onset of puberty and marriage was but five years; today it’s close to fifteen. If a contemporary young woman is trying to "wait" until marriage to lose her virginity, she is waiting — in a very real sense — three times as long as women did in her great-great grandmother’s era!
I mean, it’s not a universally made point — actually, not many of us make it ever, and I can’t find it anywhere in anything else Roback Morse has written before.
Just a co-inky-dink?
Whaddya think?
Coretta Scott King and Wendy Wasserstein have left us, much too young in both cases. Readers can easily find many obits and tributes on the ‘net.
I’ve long been a fan of Wasserstein, and remember the birth of her now seven year-old daughter, Lucy Jane, as the occasion of a bitter fight with a dear friend. As is well-known, Wasserstein spent many years in her forties in fertility treatments, anxious to have a child. In his obituary in today’s Times (rather annoyingly titled "Witty Voice of Feminist Self-Doubt"), Mike Boehm writes of her as a woman whose need to nurture led her on an eight-year journey through fertility treatments that culminated in motherhood at the age of 48. Somehow, that description bothers me a bit, and I can’t figure out why. Is it vaguely condescending? Would I mind it as much if the obit was written by a woman? I’ll mull it over. Is it the verb "need?"
Anyhow, when Wasserstein’s account of her journey to motherhood appeared in the New Yorker back in the summer of 1998, I got into a huge fight with a buddy about the ethics of becoming a single mom at Wasserstein’s age. I enthusiastically supported Wasserstein, while my friend accused her — and other older women like her, who conceive children artificially and while single — of profound selfishness. It was strange how heated the argument quickly became, and my friend and I realized that the story of how Lucy Jane came to be exposed a basic fault line in our worldviews. At the time, I was in the midst of my conversion process; my friend was a much more conservative Christian than I. While I was genuinely moved by Wasserstein’s steadfast refusal to let either aging or singleness deter her from her dream of motherhood, my buddy saw her actions as evidence of narcissism and upper-middle class privilege. My friend — at the time a recently divorced father — said bitterly: "Women like Wasserstein think men are expendable. We’re more than sperm donors, you know."
I’m not a bio-ethicist. My recollection of the fertility techniques Wasserstein actually used is vague. I thought I had her book "Shiksa Goddess" somewhere (it has the original New Yorker essay about Lucy in it), but apparently it got misplaced in my last move, or lent to a student, or it walked off into the ephemera. But even now, as an evangelical Christian, I am — at least in principle –untroubled by the notion of a woman in her late forties conceiving, bearing, and raising a child without the help of the child’s biological father. Yes, certain fertility techniques that involve the destruction of embryos bother me enormously, but I can hold that discomfort in tension with my firm belief that the role of science in allowing women to bear children at an older age is a good and positive one.
So many men in my family were only ready for fatherhood in their forties or fifties! The older fathers I know are, for the most part, infinitely more patient and more involved in their children’s lives than those guys who had children in their twenties. I can only imagine how disastrous it would have been had I had children in my early marriages when I was still lost — like so many of my brothers — in an angry, inarticulate, self-absorbed and quite extended adolescence! I’m fifteen months from 40, and only now do I find myself longing for children; only now do I sense within myself the reservoirs of patience and selflessness that I know good parenthood will require. Of course, as a man, I have relatively little to worry about in terms of fertility. (Yes, I know about sterility and tight bike shorts, thanks.)
And I know so many women in my life whose journey has also been a long one! Some chose motherhood young, while others — for countless reasons — chose to wait. And like many folks my age, I have lots of friends struggling with the anxiety and heartbreak of infertility. It’s true that biology is not kind to aging women who long to bear their own children, but it’s also true that one of the chief tasks of science and medicine is to alleviate the cruelties and the injustices of the natural world. Social conservatives urge women to have babies young, and some — like my friend seven years ago — make nasty jabs about forty-somethings who will go through hell for the chance to become mothers. They call it "unnatural", forgetting that our resistance to countless diseases is the product of innumerable "unnatural" modern medical treatments. Nature calls for a quarter of women to die of complications from childbirth; nature calls for 40% of children to die before reaching adolescence; nature tells us that women can’t have babies at 48.
As a man who longs to be a father, I don’t feel myself rendered superfluous by artificial insemination. The way in which Lucy Jane Wasserstein came into the world was not a reflection on men’s collective shortcomings. Wasserstein — as her plays and writings make clear — genuinely liked men. Many women who choose as she did also like men. But love and marriage are but one path to parenthood. To put it in Christian terms, the agape love of parent for child need not be connected to the eros love of parent for parent. Wasserstein went through hell to have Lucy Jane, and then endured considerable criticism after her child’s birth. But her commitment to creating new life and raising her daughter reflected a vital feminist principle: the insistence that women’s lives are not governed by inexorable and unalterable biological processes, and that marriage to a man — for all the joy it may bring to some — is not the only road to motherhood and happiness.
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