“LX”
I’ve been struggling with a simple truth visited on me in early October. I’ve known for decades that it was coming and when it was coming and, for eight weeks or so I have been dimly aware that, as expected, it did come. Still, it came much sooner than anticipated.
My simple truth is just a plain statement of fact, succinctly expressed in five words comprising six syllables or, if I employ a contraction, four words of five syllables. I choose the latter for it is with the utterance of my simple truth that I struggle, hence the appeal of brevity.
It has been suggested by friends, loved ones and professionals that writing about my emotional difficulties, this simple truth for instance, may help me cope with them in a healthy and productive way. For one thing they advise me, and it makes sense, writing is gentler than speaking; it’s less likely to escalate into shouting. It’s a quieter acknowledgment of a difficult truth, making it seem more like a whisper, only a suggestion, a whimsy perhaps. Writing about troubling issues is, I’m told, like employing a psychological softener, it’s a process that allows for dealing with a problem in stages; as I become more comfortable with a single element I can then more readily deal with another until, lo and behold, I’ve confronted the whole thing. Some have even suggested that my simple truth, so difficult now to even talk about, may, if I deal in a forthright way with it, one day become a personal mantra, a place from which I can launch my emotional self in a new and positive direction, free of the baggage that clings to my simple truth at this juncture. Hard to believe but nothing ventured, nothing gained, so here goes, one step at a time.
The first of the four words that comprise my simple truth is “I’m.” This, ironically, is a contraction, not unlike the emotional response I experience now when I speak or try to speak my simple truth, or hear others, those unaware of my sensitivities or aware but spiteful, affirm it for me. “I’m” is short for I am and I am is, like when Christ said it, a powerful and clearly stated and unequivocal declaration. There is only one way to construe I am. It doesn’t mean I might, or I may be, it doesn’t mean I could be under the right circumstances. And neither does it mean that anyone or anything other than myself is am. You are not am; she is not am; my enemy is not am; neither is my friend am. I am, only me. It’s pointless for me to try and make it less direct. I am and nothing can change or minimize it. There, I think I’ve pretty much confronted “I’m” and am reconciled to being thus.
The second of the four words of my simple truth is `sixty’. This is tough, tougher than “I’m.” Frankly I’m surprised that I managed to type it on the first try. When I was a wise, worldly, cocky and unbelievably obnoxious teenager and even as a young man in my early twenties, I was completely fed up with old people and their high and mighty standards and lofty expectations. And the old people I was fed up with were generally in their forties. The few folks I knew who were older, like my grandparents, who I guess I thought were in their late forties and my great-grandmother, who I supposed was in her fifties, were miraculous exceptions to the natural order of things and, frankly, much easier to deal with than my parents and other old people like them. Fifty was about the upper limit, I think. I just couldn’t imagine anyone being sixty. As the years went by I guess I considered the possibility, however unlikely, that I would reach forty but I honestly thought I’d be dead by then, or have been killed, probably by an old person whom I’d tested once too often, or may have by then taken my own life, having despaired over how old I’d become. This is but an indication of how much trauma attaches itself to the second of the four words of my simple truth. Still, I have written the word and I have written my thoughts and I do feel some modest relief.
The third word of my simple truth is “years.” Coming, as it does in my simple truth close on the heels of “sixty,” it’s hard to deny we are talking about a long stretch of time here, not seconds, not minutes, not hours, not days or weeks, not even months, but years. The exponential nature of this sequence of quantifiers is frightening. Consider, when I was sixty seconds old, back before the practice was adopted of immediately passing the gooey newborn to the mother so she and her partner could coo over it, I was cradled to the bosom (my eventual proclivity must have had its beginnings here) of a nurse, an old nurse in her forties, as I recall, on her way to the nursery where I would soon constitute a deposit. When I was sixty minutes old I was bundled up and attached to, not the surrogate, but rather the assigned bosom of the young woman who was my mother. When I was sixty hours old I was still there and in the same surroundings and with the same attachments. When I was sixty days old my attachment had not abated but I was at home. When I was sixty weeks old I was, if not attached, then tottering toward attachment. When I was sixty months old I was in the first grade, unattached and insecure and not thinking as hard as I might have been about the next increment, sixty years, in the sequence, a juncture beyond which I have again tottered. I can’t help thinking, now that I have dealt with this third element of my simple truth, of the acceleration of events as I rocket toward the end game. I’m not sure this is still therapeutic.
The last word in my simple truth is the most difficult. It is “old.” Back when I was ten I was ten years old but the `old’ didn’t register. When I was twenty I was twenty years old but again the `old’ went unnoticed. When I was thirty years old I remember thinking that I was moving up on that time, my forties, when `old’ would in fact carry some heft. When I did reach forty years old I was astonished to find that I was not pre-occupied with death but actually felt pretty good. When I was fifty years old some buddies from my time in the service, fellows I hadn’t seen since the sixties, came to visit. I walked down the ramp onto the ferry, right by all three of them and their wives and, grasping the hand of one of their sons, exclaiming “Jeez Scottie, you haven’t changed a bit.” When it was revealed to me that the three old men I’d passed on the way down the ramp were, in fact, Dave, Larry & Max, I couldn’t believe they’d come to such a decrepit end.
So, there. I have reduced my simple truth to writing and, if not yet to a mantra, I can at least utter it without choking. “I’m sixty years old.” I actually don’t feel all that bad but I would rather not see my old service buddies again.
– Phil Crossman
Vinalhaven