Forty-Four
Birthdays, catastrophic lower-body injuries, LeBron James, the Roman Empire, the anguish of having lived, and triumphant sporting achievements.
A month before I turned forty-four—
—I fell off the back porch.
It was a Tuesday evening, and I was running late for my weekly pick-up hockey game, which was, that particular night, my last weekly pick-up game. After twelve years playing with the same gang of fifty-something grinders, the game was folding, the organizer was retiring. It was all rather bittersweet: one last skate, one last parking lot beer, and we’d go our separate ways.
In the summer months, I dry my equipment outside — my gloves and helmet and shin-pads have absorbed a decade of sweat and smell like a decayed corpse — and as I skirted the edge of the wraparound porch, my Birkenstock slipped, I lost my balance, I went over the edge and landed on the side of my foot, which twisted unnaturally, and suddenly, without quite knowing how, I was totally horizontal, flailing, spinning, colliding with the paving stones below.
The wind was knocked out of me. Hot bands of pain stretched up my leg. My foot was engulfed in fiery radio static. A deafening shriek filled my ears—high-pitched, throbbing. Had I hit my head? Was I concussed? Was I screaming in pain?
No—I’d fallen on my keys and set off the car alarm.
I am forty-four, now—
—and I can see it in my face. In the mirror, in pictures. My eyes are getting narrower, the wrinkles around them creeping further. The topography of my forehead is permanently creased—even when I’m sleeping, I look like I’m puzzled by something, like I’m about to ask a question. My face is permanently rumpled, like a T-shirt that has spent weeks at the bottom of a laundry basket. My hair is going grey in my beard and at the temples (though not quite as quickly as my wife would prefer).
Greyness I can deal with, but the thinning patches at the edge of my hairline are starting to worry me. When I go to the barber and he combs my hair back, it looks like he’s combing my forehead back, too. When I make the bed in the morning, I can’t help but notice all the little lost hairs on my pillow. One by one, they’re abandoning ship, committing suicide; they don’t like where things are going.
I may not be old, but I’m certainly not young. And that’s the great fear, isn’t it?—to no longer be young. To be left behind: by culture, by your own body, by the infinite possibilities which were once (but are no longer) available to you.
It’s time to once again visit—
—the website that informs you about all the Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age.
But it turns out that forty-four is a rather insignificant age—historically, at least. The only notable thing accomplished by a forty-four-year-old was the crossing of the Delaware by George Washington in 1776.
Earlier this year, as we drove down to Florida, I crossed the Delaware River, too—a whole year earlier than Washington did.
So I guess I’ve got that going for me.
I was writhing on the ground—
—as the car alarm bellowed, trying to find my car keys, which were, of course, trapped in the deepest part of my coat pocket, seemingly between the layers fabric, in some secret second pocket within the pocket. I could feel them in there, but couldn’t actually pull them out.
The alarm continued to blare, and my foot was blaring, too. I have weak ankles, I roll them often, but I could tell this was a bad one: I’d felt that rubber-band snap, that wet pop, like when you tear off a Turkey leg at Thanksgiving. I finally managed to get hold of my keys, clicked off the alarm, and lay there spitting vulgarities into the sky. I thought of the humiliating email I’d have to compose: “Sorry, I won’t make our last game, I fell off the porch.”
Luckily for me, there was a doctor in the house. Literally. A friend of ours, a family doctor, had stopped by for dinner, and was, at that very moment, chatting with my wife in the living room. I waited for them to come rushing out of the house — if the alarm hadn’t gotten their attention, surely my furious swearing did — but, as I stared up into the trees, waiting, waiting, it became clear that they maybe they hadn’t heard. It occurred to me, then, that if they found out what had just happened, they wouldn’t let me leave. They’d make me elevate my foot, ice it, wrap it—all those things you’re supposed to do when you suffer a catastrophic lower-body injury. I would definitely miss hockey. And I really didn’t want to miss hockey.
So I picked myself up off the ground, and, balancing on one foot, hopscotched over to where my equipment was hung. I packed it up, heaved the bag over my shoulder, and made my way, gingerly, haltingly, up the driveway.
One problem: to get to the car, I would have to pass in front of the living room window. The girls would have a direct line of sight, they would see me hobbling, suspicions would be raised. So I steeled myself, willed my buzzing foot back into existence, tried to remember how a foot is supposed to move when all the ligaments are still attached. I had to make it ten feet without looking like I was limping.
This, I have read, is a common trait of the elderly: a refusal to concede defeat. They won’t get hearing aids, or use walkers, or give up their driver’s licences. They don’t want to acknowledge that their bodies have betrayed them, they refuse to believe that they’re past the age of accumulation and are facing a terrible new era of having things taken away from them.
I have taken a second look—
—at the route we took down to Florida, and I can confirm that at no point did we actually drive across the Delaware River, we just kinda went parallel to it, so my brief sense of superiority over America’s most famous Founding Father was, like most prideful feelings at this age, totally misplaced.
My birthday gift to myself—
—was to spare myself the anxiety of meeting my monthly deadline for this essay, and just take it easy, chill out, get to it whenever. I have gotten to it, now, and find myself wishing that I’d just finished the damn thing two weeks ago, like I promised myself I would.
The deals you make with yourself are the easiest to break, and also hurt the most.
Here is a list—
—of the oldest active player in each of the North American professional sports leagues. All of these guys are considered seasoned veterans, survivors, old-guard patriarchs — people can hardly believe they’re still playing — and all of them are years younger than I am.
Major League Baseball: Rich Hill, age 42.
National Hockey League: Craig Anderson, age 41.
National Football League: Aaron Rodgers, age 39.
National Basketball Association: LeBron James, age 38.
No Life But Your Own
Every year around my birthday, I read a book by the prolific Argentine writer Cesar Aira, who is probably the greatest living writer you’ve never heard of. On a recent trip to Toronto, I stopped at Type Books and was excited to find a translation of his latest work, a short novel called Fulgentius.
It’s the story of a Roman general (which means, yes, I am often thinking of the Roman Empire) who traipses through the Central European countryside with his army of legionaries, raping and pillaging, and, along the way, recruiting local actors to stage performances of a play he wrote when he was a precocious little kid. In one moment, Fulgentius is a cold and formidable figure, casually ordering his soldiers to crucify the country folk and raze their villages, and the next he’s an anxious and insecure artist, fretting over casting, agonizing over the reactions of the audience. He’s both a highly-accomplished soldier and striving artist—and in each of these roles feels himself to be an imposter. He does the first thing well, and resents it; he is incapable, by circumstance and self-doubt, of fully committing to the second thing, and resents himself for it. Which I don’t relate to at all.
Towards the end of the book, having annihilated his enemies and completed his campaign, Fulgentius writes a letter to his wife, who is back home in Rome:
Few have been so lucky. To complain would be shameful, far be it from me. Why then do I feel dissatisfied and constantly strive to justify myself in my own eyes? Why this vague feeling that I have failed? Am I not being unfair to myself and those around me and above all to those who are truly suffering? It is true that this melancholy introspection reveals a delicate sensibility, but I reveal it only here in this letter, for nobody's eyes but yours. Outwardly I remain the admired and feared commander of the mighty Lupine Legion, not a crack in my façade. And yet when I commune with myself, I am battered by the swell of the void, the anguish of having lived in vain. I'm not expressing myself well but I don't know if there's a better way. The cause of the anguish is simply having lived, not having lived well or badly. That's it. I lived. That's what I regret. But there was nothing else I could do. If there were other lives, none of them was mine.
This is the secret, I think, to happiness. To know that the ultimate cause of your anguish is simply that you are alive, and that there is nothing else you can do but keep on living, because, fair or not, it’s the only life you have.
Epilogue
I managed to stagger past the living room window without arousing suspicion, and drove myself to the rink. By the time I arrived, the pain in my foot had diminished to smoldering embers, and though it was swollen and turning vaguely purplish, I managed to jam it into my skate, which I tied up as tight as I could. I told the other guys in the dressing room about falling off the porch, and joked that they shouldn’t expect me to score my usual five goals, which they found very funny, since, after a decade of playing with me, they knew to expect approximately zero goals.
But then—
Out on the ice, with my foot comfortably encased, my ankle locked in place, I found myself skating better than I had in months, maybe years. I flew down the wing. I skirted past the defence. I scored a goal. And another, and another. Five goals in total, just like I promised I wouldn’t. My last game of hockey turned out to be one of the best games of hockey I’ve ever played.
I am forty-four. Not old, not young, filled with vague feelings that I have failed, but still surprised, every once in a while, by the things I am able to accomplish at this historically inconsequential age.
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Not old- not young.......but at a point in life where we begin to understand that every moment is gift! I was more worried about your damaged ankle- hoping all is well!
Happy Birthday. The next stage of aging-denial is continually telling yourself that you’re still middle aged!