Prime Years

DFW Diarist

I arrived at Dallas-Fort Worth airport this morning before the security check had opened. This was a first for me in decades of odd-hours travel. It seemed that I should get a prize. But that was the prize, I guess, for the self-accelerating economies I imposed on this short-notice trip to Minnesota. I’d booked a budget-carrier flight leaving at 6:19 a.m., necessitating a connecting flight after a two-hour layover in Atlanta. This in turn demanded a 3:36 a.m. DART train, because hiring a ride would have negated much of the savings. And that required me to rouse my oldest child to give me a ride to the station because the buses weren’t running yet and starting the travel day with a two-mile walk in the 85-degree Dallas wee hours was a bridge too far. I made it to my gate a comical hour before my boarding group was called, suggesting that the 4:46 would have just barely worked. But if I deceive myself that I am not too old for a six-hour budget flight leaving at DFW’s Midriff Hour, I at least know that I am not young enough to cut it that close. It has been a year of unanticipated expenses, which is why I am on this flight at all, and in this interrogation-room seat to do it. But I am agape at my folly, having gone to this much trouble to save less than $200.

It would not always have been so. I pack light and still cherish the discipline of getting three nights or less of necessities under the seat ahead of me. I’m among my kind here in that sense. And yet as I rode the airport train, ignoring my phone whose only real interest is the people, all asleep, who live on it, avoiding the other travelers, and looking this way and that to find a line of sight that did not throw my paunch back in my face, it hit me with undeniable force that I am in fact Too Old For This Shit.

I turned forty-seven this month. It’s an awkward prime number, not a landmark or milestone or even neatly divisible or multiplicable into meaningful increments. At forty, it is said, a man has the face he deserves. I find the saying unkind even in my mediocre case, having always had a horror of the crudely edited horse that appears whenever I see myself in profile. But the insults of too little sleep and skin care upon it are comparatively minor. At forty-two one’s drinking age has reached drinking age, and each even year doubles or triples some consequential point of youth, offering a clean vantage back and forward. At forty-five one is halfway to ninety, a nice round number at or after which it is no tragedy to lay one’s burden down, if God has seen fit to prolong it that far. Forty-seven is a nullity, a no-man’s-land. I let it pass with a minimum of ceremony.

I said until recently that I could still do everything I did at twenty, it just took longer to recover. Now I am not so sure. Perhaps it is this seat. What am I doing here? A question for every age. In this case I am shuttling between obligations. Do I fulfill these out of love? Yes, though anything one does comes from love of one kind or another. Am I good at fulfilling them? No, not by a long shot. Here, though, I plead force majeure. You spend your twenties and thirties unknowingly self-insuring against the years to come, and before your forties are out, you start to learn whether you can cover the losses. That’s how you end up on a flight like this one, not disguising its contempt for the human body, which is your own contempt for yourself, wondering what you’ve done to your left knee. Knowing that if this is finally the time it does not resolve itself, you’ll just have to get it seen to some other time, after the current crush of duties has been handled.

There are consolations. I have not, since childhood, experienced solitude with such glee as I have this last year. Ineffective and ephemeral as my work has usually been, I attained enough professional regard to have been granted a generous and delightful sabbatical (which involved a lot of travel more pleasant than this). I write as quickly and eagerly as ever, both as a columnist and as a critic-without-portfolio here. A friend recently expressed admiration at how fast I write, but I had to acknowledge it as something of a coping mechanism, taking shelter in words as one on a shrinking iceberg floating ever further out to sea. But there are worse ways to cope. Strangers don’t send you nice emails after a particularly good round of golf. I accept compliments more graciously now and I value them, rather than deflecting them into the ground. Though that is perhaps less the sober self-awareness of middle age than becoming acculturated to Texas, where self-deprecation is less customary than in the upper midwest of my youth.

More generally, one is invited at a certain point into a wary truce with one’s flaws and limitations, and it is usually advisable to negotiate it. Vanity still holds up its rude mirrors, but there is genuine relief in being firmly and irrefutably Not Young. I sat at dinner recently with some church youth and warned them that it passes quickly. “One day you have aura, you’re mogging this and mogging that, and all of a sudden, bam, you’re a chopped unc.” They laughed so hard at this that I felt a faint embarrassment at how much I enjoyed it, though it was less embarrassing than discovering the wounding of irrelevance and futility in my vocation that had preceded it. It no longer feels daring and romantic to have optimized myself to answer questions no one asked, but there is a sharp margin of freedom in it after all.

I’m not preaching on Sunday but I did spend some time with the readings in Bible study this week. I’ve been ordained for seventeen years—another awkward prime number—but preaching regularly for twenty-one, or seven times through the lectionary cycle. This offers its own index for the passage of time. And this week, we get a rapid-fire string of Jesus’s parables from Matthew, the “kingdom parables” of mustard seeds, yeast, pearls and the like. I’ve never stopped loving these parables (one of my favorite posts here is about preaching on parables), no doubt because their parsimony allows them to change with me. “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field,” Jesus tells his listeners. Someone found it, hid it, and went with joy to sell all he had to buy the field.

As a young man, younger than the Jesus who spoke those words, I thrilled to the sternness and severity of commitment demanded in them. Sell all you have, give it all up for the treasure, the pearl of great price, the small or hidden thing whose value shames all your lesser desires. I wanted this for myself—a life of pure service at the margins, face to face with Christ in his lost sheep, hand to hand with the Devil in the wilderness—even as I knew I was not likely to attain it. Then I married, moved to the suburbs, had kids, even bought a house. I spiritualized the parables and made peace with my defections. I did not reproach myself. What would have been the point?

But this week I heard it differently yet again. In this indigestible increment of calendar time, fittingly divisible only by one—the great universal—and by itself—the stubborn, stupid particular—I am vouchsafed the possibility that all of this trudging from one requirement to another is exactly what it means to “sell all he owned” in pursuit of a hidden treasure. If I was ever supposed to have a moment of “asking Jesus into my heart” and giving my life to him, as evangelicalism sometimes puts it, or to hear the words of Jesus in a sermon and impulsively sell all I owned to go live in the desert like St. Anthony, I missed it. Faith is the work of an instant, it’s true. But it is proved on the long walk that can’t be decomposed into halves and quarters. You may not choose when, whether, or even where you arrive. There is only the disposition of assets along the way. But that’s ok. That’s what they were for. The kingdom of heaven is like a budget flight that you felt the need to take. The birds of the air make their nests, even in its seats, even in the hollow of its aching knee. It aches because you gave it something to do.