When I was a teenager, I looked at over-fifties with pity and unease: they walked too slow, they talked too slow, they watched TV instead of going out to movies and concerts, their idea of a great party was hotpot with the neighbors and tucked into bed after the eleven o’clock news. But—like most other fifty-, sixty-, and seventysomethings who are in relative good health—I didn’t mind it so much when my turn came. Because the brain doesn’t age, although its ideas about the world may harden and there’s a greater tendency to run off at the mouth about how things were in the good old days. (I was spared that, at least, because most of my so-called good old days had been spent as a full-bore, straight-on-for-Texas drug addict.) I think for most people, life’s deceptive deliriums begin to fall away after fifty. The days speed up, the aches multiply, and your gait slows down, but there are compensations. In calmness comes appreciation, and—in my case—a determination to be as much of a do-right-daddy as possible in the time I had left. That meant ladling out soup once a week at a homeless shelter in Boulder, and working for three or four political candidates with the radical idea that Colorado should not be paved over.
I still dated the occasional lady. I still played tennis twice a week and rode my bike at least six miles a day, which kept my stomach flat and my endorphins flowing. Sure, I saw a few more lines around my mouth and eyes when I shaved, but on the whole, I thought I looked about the same as ever. That, of course, is the benign illusion of one’s later years. It took going back to Harlow in the summer of 2013 for me to understand the truth: I was just another frog in a pot. The good news was that so far the temperature had only been turned up to medium. The bad was that the process wouldn’t be stopping anytime soon. The three true ages of man are youth, middle age, and how the fuck did I get old so soon?
• • •
On June 19th of 2013, two years to the day after Bree’s marriage to George Hughes and a year after the birth of their first child, I arrived home from a less-than-stellar recording session to find an envelope gaily decorated with balloons in my mailbox. The return address was familiar: RFD #2, Methodist Road, Harlow, Maine. I opened it and found myself looking at a photograph of my brother Terry’s family with this caption: TWO ARE BETTER THAN ONE! PLEASE COME TO OUR PARTY!
I paused before opening it, noting Terry’s white hair, Annabelle’s expanding paunch, and the three young adults who were their children. The little girl who had once run giggling through the lawn sprinkler in nothing but a saggy pair of Smurfette underpants was now a good-looking young woman with a baby—my grand-niece, Cara Lynne—in her arms. One of my nephews, the skinny one, looked like Con. The husky one looked eerily like our father . . . and a little like me, poor guy.
I flipped the invitation open.
HELP US CELEBRATE TWO BIG DAYS
ON AUGUST 31, 2013!
THE 35TH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY OF
TERENCE AND ANNABELLE!
THE 1ST BIRTHDAY OF CARA LYNNE!
TIME: 12 NOON to ?
PLACE: OUR HOUSE TO START, THEN EUREKA GRANGE
FOOD: PLENTY!
BAND: THE CASTLE ROCK ALL-STARS
BYOB: DON’T YOU DARE! BEER & WINE WILL FLOW!
Below this was a note from my brother. Although only months from his sixtieth birthday, Terry wrote in the same grade-school scrawl that had caused one of his teachers to send him home with a note reading Terence MUST improve his penmanship! paperclipped to his rank card.
Hey Jamie! Please come to the party, okay? No excuses accepted when you’ve got 2 mos to arrange your schedule. If Connie can come from Hawaii you can manage the trip from Colo! We miss you, little bro!
I dropped the invitation into the wicker basket on the back of the kitchen door. I called this the Sometime Basket, because it was full of correspondence that I vaguely believed I’d answer sometime . . . which actually meant never, as you probably know. I told myself I had no desire to go back to Harlow, and this may have been true, but the pull of family was still there. Springsteen might have had something when he wrote that line about nothing feeling better than blood on blood.
I had a cleaning lady named Darlene who came by once a week to vacuum and dust and change the bed (a chore I still felt guilty about delegating, having been taught to do myself, back in the day). She was a morose old thing, and I made it my business to be out when she was in. On one of Darlene’s days, I came back to find she had fished the invitation out of the Sometime Basket and propped it open on the kitchen table. She had never done such a thing before, and I took it as an omen. That night I sat down at my computer, sighed, and sent Terry a three-word email: Count me in.
• • •
That was quite a Labor Day weekend. I enjoyed the hell out of myself, and could hardly believe I’d come close to saying no . . . or saying nothing, which probably would have severed my already frayed family ties for good.
It was hot in New England, and the descent into Portland Jetport on Friday afternoon was unusually bumpy in the unstable air. The drive north to Castle County was slow, but not because of traffic. I had to look at every old landmark—the farms, the rock walls, Brownie’s Store, now closed and dark—and marvel over them. It was as if my childhood were still here, barely visible under a piece of plastic that had become scratched and dusty and semi-opaque with the passage of time.
It was past six in the evening when I got to the home place, where an addition had been built on, nearly doubling its original size. There was a red Mazda in the driveway that screamed airport rental (like my Mitsubishi Eclipse), and a Morton Fuel Oil truck parked on the lawn. The truck was garlanded with enough crepe paper and flowers to make it look like a parade float. A big sign propped against the front wheels read THE SCORE IS TERRY AND ANNABELLE 35, CARA LYNNE 1! BOTH WINNERS!! YOU FOUND THE PARTY! COME ON IN! I parked, walked up the steps, raised my fist to knock, thought what the hell, I grew up here, and just strolled in.
For a moment I felt as if I had flipped back in time to the years when I could tell my age with a single number. My family was crowded around the dining room table just as they had been in the sixties, all talking at once, laughing and squabbling, passing pork chops, mashed potatoes, and a platter covered with a damp dishtowel: corn on the cob, kept warm just as my mother used to do it.
At first I didn’t recognize the distinguished gray-haired man at the living room end of the table, and I certainly didn’t know the dark-haired hunk of handsome sitting next to him. Then the professor-emeritus type caught sight of me and rose to his feet, his face lighting up, and I realized it was my brother Con.
“JAMIE!” he shouted, and buttonhooked around the table, almost knocking Annabelle out of her chair. He grabbed me in a bearhug and covered my face with kisses. I laughed and pounded him on the back. Then Terry was there as well, grabbing both of us, and the three brothers did a kind of clumsy mitzvah tantz, making the floor shake. I saw that Con was crying, and I felt a little bit like crying myself.
“Stop it, you guys!” Terry said, although he was still jumping himself. “We’ll wind up in the basement!”
For awhile we went on jumping. It seemed to me that we had to. And that was all right. That was good.
• • •
Con introduced the hunk, who was probably twenty years his junior, as “my good friend from the University of Hawaii Botany Department.” I shook hands with him, wondering if they had bothered to take two rooms at the Castle Rock Inn. In this day and age, probably not. I can’t remember when I first realized that Con was gay; probably while he was in grad school and I was still playing “Land of 1000 Dances” with the Cumberlands at the University of Maine. I’m sure our parents knew much earlier. They didn’t make a big deal of it, and so none of us did, either. Children learn much more by mute example than by spoken rules, or so it seems to me.