When a guy turns 40-something
Last year my 40th birthday came and went, and just a few weeks ago my 41st birthday whizzed past, too. So far, I am happy to report that I have not gone out and bought a shiny new saxophone or an expensive sports car, or hooked up with a skinny 22-year-old model.
I remember welcoming the arrival of the year in which I officially would become a 40-something with the enthusiasm one reserves for visits to the dentist or to one’s in-laws, or to one’s dentist who also happens to be an in-law. In my mind I was okay with the arrival of the big Four-O. But as the weeks went by and the fateful day approached, I became increasingly anxious. What exactly was bugging me? I thought I had made my peace with the inexorable march toward old age (assuming I got there in one piece) and ultimately oblivion. Friends tried to console me. “Fifty is the new 40,” one said, which only made me anxious about one more thing, the big Five-O that looming in the distance. “You don’t look a day over 37,” chuckled another, which should have been funny because it’s something I might have said. Nothing made me feel better.
My wife, sensing the arrival of one of my dark moods (during which I am absolutely no fun to be around), suggested a trip out of town. So just a few minutes after the clock had struck midnight on the inevitable day, we were on an express bus to Baguio, and I was trying in vain to get some sleep. We arrived at five in the morning, and I’d forgotten how cold it could be up in this mountain city. One’s amorphous angst is easily overcome by whip-slappingly cold air.
One of the images from that day that has stayed with me: sitting in a restaurant on Session Road looking out a window at a hazy, rainswept afternoon while the smell of bangus sinigang and sizzling pusit filled my nostrils. It was a Saturday in the middle of August. For someone who hadn’t been to Baguio in years, and whose trips always coincided with summer, the wet weather felt strange, as if I had walked into a house a day too late for a party. I wondered, as we ate our hot lunch in the middle of the afternoon (we napped from mid-morning till past noon), if this — the rain, the overcast sky, the sight of people huddled under the awning just outside the window to keep dry — meant anything.
In the weeks before this year’s Taboan, the first international Philippine writers’ festival held this past February, I remarked to a colleague how anxious I was at being invited to join a panel of writer-critics. I rattled off the names of the other panelists, saying I didn’t deserve to be in their company. “Exie,” she said, “you have to accept the fact that you’re no longer a young, up-and-coming writer.” I couldn’t think up a retort, but later I thought of what I should have replied: I’m a middle-aged writer who hasn’t quite arrived.
I suppose it’s a matter of course for us to mark these moments in our lives. A plump round number is convenient — 40, 50, 60 — and we stop for a moment to take it all in, to take stock of our lives, glance backward and peer up the shadowy road ahead, wondering what lies beyond what we can see. For writers, it’s even become customary to turn such musings into a reflective poem or essay. The poet Donald Justice writes, in “Men at Forty,” lines that began resonating with me a few years ago: “Men at forty / learn to close softly / the doors to rooms / they will not be going back to.” What doors to which rooms have I closed softly, knowing I will not be returning to them?
Billy Collins mocks the practice in his poem “On Turning Ten,” in which the preternaturally self-aware persona says: “This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself, / as I walk through the universe in my sneakers. / It is time to say goodbye to imaginary friends, / time to turn the first big number.” Such introspective gloom from a boy wearing sneakers! Funnily, the voice in that poem sounded like mine, when I was a teenager.
There is no drama to this, and the turn in this road is just one of many, just as a birthday is one of many days on a calendar, no different from the rest except that it happened to be when you came into this world. It would be great if each birthday, and the round ones especially, would coincide with some momentous event in our lives, something we can’t help but celebrate, something worthy of a fireworks display. But our experience tells us that such a thought is romantic. Our lives pass by in small waves, often too small for us to notice, though occasionally a far larger one comes by and rocks our little boats. Then the water settles, and it goes on lapping us gently but inexorably forward. When we notice, we see that we have moved on; there is no going back.
Later that day we heard Mass at the Baguio cathedral then went looking for an Internet café. Early that evening I was checking my email and replying to birthday greetings. Afterwards we went to a bar and had a beer, then went back to our quaint hotel and watched a History Channel show on the Great Wall of China before going to sleep.
That was last year. This year we didn’t go out of town. We simply had lunch in a restaurant at a nearby mall, had coffee, then went to a bookstore. Then we went home to catch the Ateneo–La Salle basketball game on TV. (My team won handily.) I turned on my computer to find my Facebook page overflowing with greetings. That night I prepared for school the next day.
Again I wondered if it all meant anything. Now, more than a week later, maybe this is what I can take away from it all: I am in good health. I share a house with a woman I love and who loves me and who cares deeply about how I am doing. Just this past weekend I had lunch with my family; my parents had just celebrated their 46th wedding anniversary. My two siblings who are married brought their beautiful kids along, and we ate some really good Pinoy food. We talked about movies and TV shows we’d watched, how my youngest brother and his girlfriend were doing in their new apartment, how my older brother was putting on weight. It didn’t rain too hard that day. That night I prepared for school, work that I’ve found to be fulfilling and meaningful (when it doesn’t make me want to tear my hair out).
In other words, I live a charmed life. There, I feel better already. I have everything I need, and I think I’ll be fine. An electric guitar would be nice, though.
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Comments (especially ideas for future columns) are welcome at dogberry.exie@gmail.com. Visit my blog at http://dogberryexie.blogspot.com. Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/exieabola.
