Finding Fifty

When I turned fifty in 1995, the summer was murderously hot and dry, the Williams River reduced to a trickle. The lawn was a parched ochre, threatening to ignite at any careless drop of a match. Sad vestiges of lettuce and spinach shriveled, basil went to seed. I had invited a large, unruly crowd of revelers to celebrate my first half century with me. My mother, then eighty-eight, flew in from California. It was her last brush with unassisted living. Among the guests, we included a cousin, a contemporary of hers, and the two of them sat around yelling at each other over the dance music. Cousin Bernard asked me if I knew a deceased relative who was, in fact, my father. Old people can be amusing sometimes when you look at them from the other shore of awareness before you, too, cross to the blurry bank. This all took place under a tent that we had rented out of an excess of caution even though we were deep in a drought apparently beyond the reach of prayers for rain. Be careful what you wish for. Sure enough, on August 2nd, about an hour before the guests were expected, it began to pour in great horizontal sheets that pounded the sides of the tent, making the Victorian garden party of my dreams a moldy nightmare. We all had to cozy up in the inside-outside space and wait out the half a hundred year flood.

Our two twentysomething sons were there, of course. Here they are now.

They were born into different households, five months apart, but grew up in our blended family, trying to make sense out of the hands they were dealt. Somebody else’s mother showing up unannounced one day with another boy, a doppelgänger singing a strange song. Somebody else’s father sitting formidably at the head of the table. It remains a marvel that they worked that out, not getting marooned in a Suez of rage and jealousy. Instead allowing the full moon and the high tide to free them when the time was right, so that now the two of them, with four children and a grandchild between them, are themselves turning fifty. Visiting them both in the upper midwest after a year of quarantine, I dreamt one night that the whole world was suffused with a golden light. There was no woodsy ground and no sapphire sky. Only sunlight approaching from all directions and gathering at a point on the horizon that I knew was the future. I was reaching for it with a mixture of joy and trepidation, knowing that the sunlight would ultimately dissipate, that the future not go on forever. I couldn’t grab ahold of it and I couldn’t stop it from fading. The saga of the generations, unfolding like Genesis with much begetting and many tears, is all I have to offer these two fifty year old men.

I am up to my eyebrows in gratitude for the richness of the life I’ve been given, not a result of any particular merit or effort on my part, for all my howling at the moon. I have worried and I have regretted and I have judged. And where did that get me while I watched from the bleachers as softballs settled lovingly into the left fielder’s glove or flew overhead into the woods for the dogs to retrieve? And where did that get me as the two of them constructed their own views of the world out of bits and scraps of life that did not shoot up out of the cracks in the sidewalk on upper Broadway? My prayer now at seventy-five is that acceptance, the whispering newborn of gratitude, descends on me and allows me to receive whatever comes, the way our sons in the end received one another, rain or shine. What a party that would be.