Absent From the Present

I am spectacularly ungifted at gifting.  Virtually every present I have presented has staged my incompetence, my utter cluelessness, at gift-giving.  If my gift-giving had mass, it would have the density of a 98 cent furnace filter; if it had volume, it could be measured in picoliters; if it had depth, it would  rival, just barely, a cat’s water dish.  My ineptitude for giftitude is encyclopedic, epic; only a twenty-six volumed Brittanica could encompass its sweep; only a Homer or Virgil could convey its profundity.   I am surprised that I don’t appear in the DSM-V under the heading “Gifting Obtuseness Syndrome.  Gift-giving, for me, is high-wire acrobatics without a net.  I am not just singularly bad at gift-giving, I am plurally bad, thuddingly bad, require a Papal indulgence bad, Shakespearean-tragedy bad, could-uncurl-Elvis’s-lip bad. 

I once gave my best friend his own golf shoes as a birthday present, thinking myself unsurpassingly clever.  He was not amused.  Nor was the colleague to whom, on his 50^th birthday, I gave a bag of prunes and a book on the colon-cleansing virtues of enemas.  Nor was the vegetarian friend to whom I gave a gift card to Carlo’s Steak House.  I once gave my Dad a basket of Sacramento Valley-grown strawberries less than one week after he was diagnosed with diverticulosis.  I once gave my wife Kathy a charm bracelet she exclaimed over with almost-enthusiasm, then deposited lovingly in her jewelry box.  It has since not seen the light if day.  I once gave her a wicker basket she described as “interesting.”  She placed it in a dark corner in an untrafficked area of the living room.  Mysteriously, it has since migrated to the foyer closet. 

I have learned my lesson.  Now, as some gift-giving occasion approaches, I ask her, “What would you like me to surprise you with?”  She buys it, I repay her.  As for all the others in my gift-giving orbit, well, let’s just say that the introduction of gift cards has been, for me, proof-positive that a providential goodness is at work in the world.  It’s all very neat, very algorithmic, wholly pragmatic in an accounting sort of way; still, somehow, I cannot help but feel that something important, something deeper is unaccounted for, something other and more that eludes the self-comforting truthiness of “this way they can get exactly what they want” or “it’s the thought that counts.”  

Perhaps Emerson best expresses the cause of my ungifted giving: “the impediment lies in the choosing. If, at any time, it comes into my head, that a present is due from me to somebody, I am puzzled what to give, until the opportunity is gone.”  A matter of judgment, in other words.  My gift-giving has been an aftermath for which I found the before math inscrutably difficult to cipher.  And it is the before math that marks all really gifted gifters. 

They pay attention.  They notice when you make do with something not specifically designed for the task at hand.  They take in-hand the most offhanded revelations of desire; they listen to the  casual “wish-I-hads”, are alert to “I-wouldn’t-mind-one-of-thoses,” take note of “that’s cools.”  They archive those moments of expressed preference and interest, and then, when a gift-giving occasion arises, they activate and orchestrate memory, perception, and imagination.  They take the time.  They factor a dash of creativity with who you are, what you are like, what you like, what you need, what you don’t yet know you need—and from that polynomial they calculate the perfect gift.

My record for gift-giving has been unsullied by success—except for one instance, and the just-what-exactly of this instance is something I feel apprehend but do not comprehend.  In second grade, for the first time in my life, I bought someone a present: Mom, for Mother’s Day.  I thought as long and hard as my seven-year-old brain would allow about what to get her.  I mulled.  Then I remembered Mom commenting on a TV commercial for Ivory soap: “Soap that floats?  What’ll they think of next?”  That settled it.  With money I vandalized from my piggybank, I enlisted my grandmother to help me buy a bar of Ivory and, for good measure, scotchtaped a quarter to it.  When Mom opened it, she began to cry and wrapped me in her arms.  I could feel her hot tears rivulet down my cheeks and neck.  “Jerry,” she said, “this is the perfect gift.  I’m never going to use it.  I’ll always keep it.” 

And she did.  Going through her effects after she died, I found that bar of soap, quarter still attached.

Perhaps at that young age I knew something that Emerson knew, something I have since been unable to recover:  “The only gift is a portion of thyself.”  Perhaps, for one resplendent moment, fifty-seven years ago, I gave a gift that was complete because I was not missing from it. 

On Growing Old

Crystal and I are talking in my office about her paper on rap music.  I tell her I listen to rap, that I like the embattled self-consciousness in Kayne West’s “All Falls Down,” the resolute hope in Common’s “I Have a Dream,” the history lesson in Rage Against the Machine’s “People of the Sun,” and the exquisite pathos of South Park Mexican’s promise to his mother “not to do no more shit no more” in “Drunk Man Talkin’.”  Crystal’s eyes round.  “I guess I thought you’d never listen to rap,” she says.  “Because I’m an English professor?” I ask.  “No,” she says; “I mean, you know, you’re old.”

*     *     *

The Roman poet Virgil says, “The best days are the first to flee.”  Tom Stoppard says, “Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.”  Edgar, in King Lear, says, “A man must endure his going hence even as his coming hither.  Ripeness is all.”  Brigitte Bardot may have had Edgar in mind when she said, “It’s sad to grow old, but nice to ripen.”  Yeats described himself as “a tattered coat upon a stick.” Kerouac may have had Yeats in mind when he described “the forlorn rags of growing old.” William Faulkner defines time as “the mausoleum of all hope and desire.”  Martin Amis may have had Faulkner in mind when he describes time going “about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.”  The Beatles, worried about sustenance, physical and emotional, wondered “will you still need me, will you still feed me” when they turned sixty-four. Emerson asserts, “The years teach much which the days never knew.”  Thoreau declares, “None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.”  Longfellow believes that “Age is opportunity, no less/ Than youth, though in another dress.”  So does Oliver Wendell Holmes: “To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than being forty years old.”  But a party-pooping Philip Roth character maintains that “Old age isn’t a battle; it’s a massacre.”

*     *     *

Autumn of our years, evening of our lives, the remains of the day, the Geritol generation, the empty-nesters, senior citizens, the leisure years, the twilight years, the sunset years, the golden years—what metaphor for being old that isn’t words hollowed out, grinning gourds, encandled to dispel the rueful nearness of kingdom come they only imperfectly conceal?

*     *     *

My dad said, “It’s OK to be old; it’s not OK to be an anachronism.  You can’t stop getting old, but that doesn’t mean you should stop learning.”  Dad had little patience for metaphors. 

*     *     *

The life cycle of a rose begins with a compacted and sheathed green bud stage, followed by the partially-open bud phase, which tantalizingly reveals the petals’ color.  In the full-bud stage, the color is completely visible, though the petals are not yet fully exposed.  The petals fully unfurl in the open rose stage.  The rose has bloomed.  When the petals fall off, the rose enters the rose hip phase.  A nutrient-strong bud remains, which is harvested to cultivate other roses and to regenerate a new rose from the old. 

Which of the five phases is the essence of the rose?  Each, in its own moment; all, in their progressive unfolding.  A becoming and a consummation.  The life cycle of a rose, of any plant, of any being, is a plotted narrative, coherent and continuous, whose theme is the what it is.

*     *     *

 From the perspective of the long duration, we are all, no matter how many times we have witnessed this whirling planet’s yearly pilgrimage around the sun, incomparably old, stretching back though veiled eons to the point of our emergence.  We are time’s chronicler. It records itself in us, on us.  We are fossils. We are still emerging.

*     *     *

I sometimes wonder if going gentle into that good night is preferable to raging against the dying of the light.  Seems like it could be a waste of good rage. 

*     *     *

I did not attend my 45^th high school class reunion.  I haven’t attended a reunion since the twentieth in 1986, where I found, two decades out, that too many of my classmates had never really graduated from high school. 

*     *     *

Getting old is reaching the point where one’s sense of self, one’s interiority, one measure of worth, no longer seeks validation in others, is no longer performative, no longer ritualized and staged to solicit social recognition.  The who we are, the what we are, is objectively established through long experience.  We have learned what to pay attention to and what to winnow from attention; what needs to be chosen, rejected, overcome, changed.  We have witnessed connections, disconnections, transformations.  We do not need a self granted and affirmed by others.  We are selved, and still selving.

*     *     *

My Dad told me a story when I was a kid about a young boy, the son of a farmer, whose father gave him the present of a newly born calf to raise.  Every day the boy lifted the calf in his arms.  By the time he was a teenager, Dad said, he was lifting a full-grown cow.

 

When I turned forty-five, I decided that each year, on my birthday, I would add an eight of a mile to my daily runs.  At fifty-five, the dull throb of aching ankles, knees, and hips—a persistent and discomforting body language, a grammar of pain—forced me to cut back.  At sixty, I stopped running and bought a treadmill.  As they say in the technology business, the power scaling stopped.  Still, I walk, briskly.

*     *     *

I sometimes miss my young body, its agility and strength, its loping looseness, its seemingly inexhaustible energy.  Decline is hard.  Our bodies betray us, or seem to.  They age chronologically but our minds do not.  In our minds, the carnival of youth still clamors.  Our minds loiter in the past, in the what-I-could-do, and, with resistless seduction, whisper the should-still-be-able-to. That whisper is a high-proof intoxicant and offers a spiky buzz, but its hangover is disappointment.  The body, however, knows this and will not be seduced.  It is one acquainted with the night.  It knows things and does not speak in a whisper.

In Paul Simon’s song “The Boxer,” we are told the fighter “carries the reminders/of ev’ry glove that laid him down/or cut him till he cried out/In his anger and his shame/”I am leaving, I am leaving”/but the fighter still remains.”  We carry the reminders of hurts and guilts and cruelties, the anger and the shame, but we also carry the joys and pleasures, the curiosities and achievements, the loves and the friendships.  Beautiful things are still beautiful.  We are limited beings, and that is humbling, but it is also ennobling because it dignifies our striving.  So we remain, the almost-turned page, until we leave.   I’d like to think I’ll be grateful.  I’d like to hope I was unpercentiled and did not give myself away, piece by piece, until I was a silhouette of the man I was.  I’d like to hope that I honored the past but was not eclipsed by a longing for it.  I’d like to hope that I’ll have the grace to let go of what I held so closely.  Then, I’d be gone.