50

This is it… 3 am Eastern Standard time, which is 8 am here.

Huh.

Well, I’m having neither the "it’s only a number" (i.e. it doesn’t matter) nor any miserable "oh no I’m old" feelings.

Best articulated as:

Boy, am I fifty.

(I do remember telling my mother, when she turned fifty and was clearly a bit intimidated by it, "Hey, you’re just halfway!". Actually a rather weird sentiment – halfway to what? – but I think she found it a bit comforting…)

***

So, I’m actually in a good mood – even a very good mood; gearing up for, after my birthday luncheon with ten friends, three days straight of working on the article before traveling to present it. However, although I’m cheerful, a remembered fantasy keeps crossing my mind in the past few days; it’s admittedly rather pathetic, but I think it deserves a place here, and should have today’s date.

I think this is from the late 1980s –or possibly the early 1990s; this was a repeatedly imagined and elaborated scene, like a sort of video clip, of a future which, of course, never happened.

A part of the fantasy was that it happened ten years later from whenever I was imagining it: so, if it was the late 1980s, some time in the late 1990s – and I think this first crossed my mind on a sad birthday, when I was not in good health. It was the image of me, ten years older, healthy, happy, on another birthday, surrounded by friends – and a lover, whose outlines are of course rather blurred (Reid was long dead by then, and it was impossible to imagine Larry, Paul F., or any others in this role, I suppose).

The center of all this is simply what I say as I look around at them all – something like: Excuse me everybody, I need to say something. (Everybody around the table quiets down.) You know, ten years ago I was alone, with no job and no future, very sick, and I thought I’d be dead soon – a lot of us were sick then; I know I thought I’d never be happy again, and that I’d never – (and here I would look at the lover, not saying anything, but everybody understood) – and then I’d say, sort of tearfully but laughing a bit, So: I guess I just want to say – here’s to hope. And everybody would laugh, and drink, and say: Hope, yes, here’s to hope.

That fantasy sequence no longer has the pull on me that it once did; it feels like somebody else’s fantasy, not my own. But I do feel a definite – not pity, but – compassion – for the younger man who so desperately needed to make up that scene in his head, and imagine that it might play itself out, at some birthday, some day.