MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE
Cooper, Rand Richards
MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE What I saw in the whirlpool Rand Richards Cooper t was as a teen-ager that I first read The Great gotiating their way in the...
...When you're thirty, that's un- ease, I've noticed, among bodies much older or younger settling...
...I thought gotta admire the guy," he whispers, "but do I really want to about the little boy, and tried to remember a world so big see that...
...Why cover up those cherubic good looks...
...After a couple of hours on the courts you'll find jokes to him...
...forty tries to reassure himself he's still on the radar, still reg- They link us to our losses...
...This is more than a matter of shared I friends, the thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, interests and conversation...
...Gatsby and Nick Carraway's oft-quoted, haunt- In the locker room, that most intimate of places, the age naing line about middle age-the thinning list of tions stick close together...
...istering...
...In his bathing you would as likely thank them as you would a tree-less suit he sat, slumped over...
...Brian had the beginnings of a beard, and I kidded him about it...
...Greek god...
...pushed a button, and I watched as they sank, inch by slow "Number one...
...clearfloor, and here were these stumpy guys who couldn't bend, ly he's been scalding his aches away...
...Jared Wicks, S .J, Finally, I thought about the old man I would one day bePontifical Gregorian University, Rome come-incredibly but surely, as sure as I sat here breathing...
...You be this warm with that much cold so close by...
...I'm reminded of lines from one roof...
...There was a loose ball on the from the shower, hunched over, his back flaming red...
...Where did you leave rolled their way out...
...At the pool there's an attendant, a college-aged girl Truly, though our element is time, I chat with-not flirtatious conversations, but also not en- We are not suited to the long perspectives tirely free of those anxious monitorings by which a man at Open at each instant in our lives...
...know we're being pulled down...
...Yes, it was outrageous to ponder all that would be taken...
...and as Larkin's poem reminds lazy laps, then climbed into the whirlpool nearby...
...that age where pieces of language float up in curious pat- Then came a marvelous reversal...
...I'm not Jewish, but the JCC has a gym, where twice a week Then there are the older men...
...A small dread rises in me whenever he takes a Age, we reassure ourselves, is a state of mind-while mass locker near mine, because that's always when I catch a culture screams it's a state of hairline (even Nick knew that), glimpse of myself in the big mirror across the room...
...comfort builds, which someone dispels with a gesture of And it is a delusion...
...but the arrival can be rough...
...He was still at inch, water welling up around them...
...He was joined by a half A few other men drifted in...
...It was obscurely thrilling to ers, and a friend of mine leans over to me, wincing...
...A couple of us helped him, and finally we located And the old people rose from their wheelchairs...
...We're only human...
...Darlene Morales, program secretary ed, much joked-about, much dreaded passage seemed not a curse but a blessing...
...wheeled in by a JCC employee...
...He was so ing pool had been raised all the way to surface level, the thin you could see every muscle and bone...
...I'd noticed before that the adjustable floor of the trainHe opened a locker, then another and another...
...than one's own...
...0 Commonweal 1 0 May 5, 2000...
...My friend Rich tells about watching a humor-again, that diplomacy...
...I thought about my parents, now in their early seventies, still hale but voyaging steadily into Gilles Routhier, old age...
...Glad you're not carrying a cup of melted butme groaning away in the JCC whirlpool, jets of heated water ter, I might get hungry...
...Their bodies are pearI go to support a stubborn basketball habit...
...And for once, this much lamentMs...
...I asked the girl what she thought...
...Parkinson's...
...And it hit me, here was age bantering with youth, across a friendly divide...
...Divine Revelation in the Developing And for this one moment, the poem of Larkiri s seemed to Formulation of the Schema De revelatione offer too pessimistic a take on our capacity for seeing life at Vatican II, 1963-1965" whole...
...blasting my distressed lower lumbars...
...You're aware of not looking...
...At forty, it's outrageous...
...Shivering, he went from locker to locker, frowning feet, the teacher pushed a button, stopping the floor...
...Cherubic," Brian repeated, smiling...
...Far overus, nothing is more human than looking away...
...Like the recent UConn basketball player Middle age is one of those places, I guess, that look pret- who works out at the gym, and whose physique is that of a ty good when you're leaving...
...We pass it off Age is a state of back...
...he said...
...The nations of age, ne- mm...
...Contact us at www.suenens.org or via e-mail: suenenstl iqu.edu writes, but to gains...
...University Heights, OH 44118 Phone: 216-3974991 Fax: 216-397-1771 I was, literally, middle-aged, half way, in all likelihood, Professor Doris Donnelly, program director from mystery to mystery...
...She made a face...
...Now he put them on and ran happily off withLevity takes aim against gravity, but let's face it, we all out a word...
...One moment you feel young, the next...
...Is that a state of waistline, a state of jowl...
...but wasn't it at least as outrageous that John Carroll University it had been given in the first place...
...Hume sat behind the front desk, a Don to the Reception of Vatican II" Knotts character, eternally beleaguered, now certainly long dead...
...suits...
...Now one by one the wheelchair people "Looking for your clothes...
...I said to him...
...water drained off...
...Sitting there in the whirlpool, I felt myself moved almost in Theology & Church Life to tears...
...Here it was, after all, the long perspective opening before me-past, present, and future, time's holy trinity...
...I felt linked not merely to losses, as Larkin for the Summer 2001...
...So too did a little boy-a tiny, dozen others, a convoy of wheelchair riders, all in bathing scrawny boy, all of maybe four or five, in a wet bathing suit...
...That's us all right, the wavers, the no-longer- lobster that exact same color in a restaurant," a guy my age bendables...
...It was as if, in the space of a few minutes, I'd had the is pleased to announce awardees for whole of life laid out before me, from the scrawny little boy The Margaret F. Grace whose speech was just finding itself, to the scrawny old man Summer Research Grants for the Year 2000 speech had deserted...
...One tends to feel ill at talking about turning thirty...
...It was so fundamentally diplomatic...
...The man head, skylights gave on the black of frigid winter, a scrim of with the colostomy bag walks by on his way from the show- frosty snow along the edges...
...At a depth of about three terns...
...I thought about the boy I myself had once been, UniversiteLaval, Quebec, and the YMCA I'd gone to for swim lessons, a dank dim "Cardinal Suenens' Major Contribution place where a Mr...
...as granting privacy, but really it's a reluctance to see oneself The JCC is a family place...
...and I We invite applications for awards didn't turn away...
...really me next to Achilles, sucking up my gut like William Last year I joined the local Jewish Community Center...
...his right hand, curled in at the likely, even...
...Commonweal 9 May 5, 2000 Who doesn't feel a shudder, confronting Time the Vandal...
...Everyone laughs, grateful...
...Even the man I had seen in the locker room was standing now, braced against one side of The Cardinal Suenens Program the pool...
...That's the rub, of course: Taking my towel, I went out to the pool and swam a few facing it...
...It looked like a miracle, the way they simply floated free, drifting, paddling, standing...
...See...
...He lives in Hartford, Connecticut...
...A stroke...
...When I asked if he Off to my left, the locker room door opened, interruptneeded a push, he shook his head, slurring incomprehen- ing my thoughts, and the man in the wheelchair appeared, sible words, and peered out with resigned frustration...
...I'm the same weight I was ten years right there on a bench, a tiny sweatshirt and pair of nylon ago, guys my age joke-there's just been a slight redistribution!sweatpants...
...You know, I saw a waving at it...
...Rand Richards Cooper, a frequent contributor, is the author of "Hi, me Tarzau...But enough about me...
...But now it's not...
...MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE What I saw in the whirlpool Rand Richards Cooper t was as a teen-ager that I first read The Great gotiating their way in the world...
...Shatner...
...A subtle disthe mind-body war whose chief spoil is the delusion of grace...
...At forty I play in shaped and slack, and scarred from surgeries...
...At the control panel their teacher them...
...and strange that your clothes could get up and walk away One evening recently I entered the locker room to find it from where you left them, and men loomed so huge that empty save for an elderly man in a wheelchair...
...There's also a shared physical thinning hair...
...wrist, tremored...
...I asked...
...As I came in the other day she was sitting with Brian, a guy in his twenties I've played with in pickup hoop 'Y - ~k, games...
...So we his clothes-they'd been there all along, not in a locker but affect a rueful bravado...
...It's all about aging, this impulse not to look...
...One of the old men comes tape of one of our games...
...How strange to go back and find that he was familiarity, a personal comfort zone...
...one man wears what is gently called the "Veterans League," soldiering on in a colostomy bag...
...Mothers push strollers, grand- in those other bodies-the robust and the frail, those pitiparents follow behind-all the generations together under less glimpses of past and future...
...not so a Philip Larkin poem: young...
...broadly...
...The Last to Go and Big as Life...
Vol. 127 • May 2000 • No. 9
