Reflections On Turning 52

Age. For most of human history, to be old has been a mark of honor. Today it's a source of fear, even shame. Yet my 50th birthday was strangely joyous. It began as my days usually begin: I walked to the corner cafe, drank my coffee, read my New York Times, watched the world go by for a while. (Tough life, right?) Usually, after this languid beginning, I do what writers call "work," off and on all day and way into the night (when these columns get written).

A writer's work is a kind of restless hunting, tracking a strange beast in the jungle of oneself. In my case, this looks like hours of pacing up and down, smoking lots of cigarettes, and drinking many cups of strong tea while staring out the window. (When the beast is finally found, the writer-hunter must then refrain from killing it; rather, you get very still and let the creature devour you.) But on my 50th birthday I gave myself the day off (very tough life), and walked.

And walked, and walked, and set myself the walking-task of remembering every birthday as far back as I could. I focused until I could recall at least one specific thing about each: a friend, a song, something said or left unsaid. The quiet girl who sat at the next desk in fifth grade. The fight with Ginger on the way to a Springsteen concert. Roy Orbison singing "The Eyes of Texas" at Soap Creek. Alone in the Mojave reading the poems of Seferis. Chris in a witch's wig. Mama pretending she wasn't ill when the heat got shut off on Decatur Street. Mama, when I was 7 screaming "Your birthday is a day like any other!" Our Senior Class Halloween party for the kids, and a dark-eyed, scared-eyed tiny girl, and how she came straight up to me and took my hand and wouldn't let it go for the whole party.

Once a specific bit of memory was retrieved, it became easier to see who I was that year. In this way I met long-gone Michaels I'd forgotten -- it was painful how many, and why I'd needed to forget them. I was embarrassed by some, ashamed of some, some I even feared; but some were still my pals, and of three or four I was very proud. "That 13-year-old Michael saved my life, and how did he know to do it, what did he have to go on? I like that kid." That kind of thing. I wouldn't have imagined it possible, but through searching for something specific about each day, I "saw" something of every birthday all the way back to age five. My life walked beside me, a gang of Michaels, many of them strangers to each other, but walking together, for this one day, with a grateful feeling of companionship.

When I told this to a friend she said I was forgiving myself, but I don't think so. I don't think we have the right to forgive ourselves. Forgiveness is for those we've sinned against, if they find it in their hearts, and perhaps for God, if God is interested. Rather, that walk was a look into my own eyes -- the eyes of the many I'd been and am. I suspect that looking into your own eyes, or another's, is a tougher task than forgiving. Looking, seeing, and living with -- or choosing to live without -- what you see.

When that walk was over, I recalled something my brother Aldo said to me: "Unless you practice seeing yourself you become invisible to yourself." I felt less invisible to myself that day. Lighter and darker, both. It was a good way to walk past my half-century mark.

But... well, sometimes you try to see yourself and you see something else, something you didn't expect at all. It is you and not-you -- or perhaps a you that has always been waiting within. This was the lesson (learned not for the first time, and probably not the last) of my most recent birthday, my 52nd.

On this day, too, I planned nothing. I've learned to leave birthdays planless, or almost so, letting the day unfold on its own. For a birthday is a teaching day, it has something to reveal. Too many plans constrict its ability to speak. Left to itself any day will, at some unexpected moment, find its voice, give its message. This is especially true of birthdays. For, as Thomas Hardy once observed, your birthday exists in relation to another day, a day which it is not possible to know: We pass silently, every year, over the day that will mark the anniversary of our death.