Letters to the Editor
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Middle age crisis?
I'm 58. My children are adults. The house is empty. I have two motorcycles in the garage (I've ridden for years) I play competitive tennis 5 times a week and enter all the USTA tournaments in a 100 mile area where I compete against young men half my age. Three years ago my first novel was published, and from where I sit, the best is yet to come. I wouldn't give a nickle to be 20 again. It wasn't always so. After surviving Vietnam, I guess you could say I started coasting. Just being alive was enough. But then one afternoon in a fishing boat, at the age of 37, like a punch to the stomach, it occured to me that I was at the halfway point of my life (if the life expectancy tables could be trusted at the time)and a kind of panic set in. I was MIDDLE-AGE!, weasn't I? Dear God, what a revelation. I realized I had, up to that point, been taking it all for granted. I've never looked back. Old age is a very real thing at 58, but by god I don't have to accept it sitting on my ass. I will fight it every step of the way, but always with the knowledge that the celebration of one's life should not be left to the eulogies, but lived each and every day. Now, that said, I'm going to take a nice long motorcycle ride and when I return I have a tennis match scheduled for later in the day. My advice is "Live it or lose it."
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The older I grow...
...the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom- H.L. Mencken
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Everybody has to write this sort of thing for him or herself sometime...
...So this is okay...
But it's pompous to compare yourself to Dante, in writing, in public. And it is less than a revelation to agree with the conventional wisdom about Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Better just to distill this into a haiku or a joke.
A priest, a rabbi,
And a guy with bad knees walk
Into the sunset
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I'm really tired of smart atheists who think they're smarter than me because they're atheists.
"Critics of religion from Ludwig Feuerbach to Christopher Hitchens have dismissed faith as a childish consolation, a fairy tale humans tell themselves to ward off primordial fears. Of course they're right."
I'm unable to objectively evaluate this piece because I've grown so tired of this superior, smug attitude that many atheists have toward people of faith.
I'm a thinker as well as a person of faith, and I don't have those smug superior thoughts about you non-believers. It would be silly to try to prove any major points in this space, but suffice it to say that there are tons of reflective, sagacious people (certainly more reflective and sagacious than Christopher Hitchens)who are people of faith. They didn't reach their conclusions about their beliefs because they're motivated by a fear of death. You're dismissing some really great thinkers and spiritual sages with that paragraph (St. Augustine, Gandhi, MLK, Francis Collins (head of the Human Genome Project who wrote about his faith on Salon recently), etc. -- I can't do a list like this justice right now).
Stop trying to dismiss us like this. It's down right insulting. I read Salon because I feel like this website is fairly tolerant and open to various viewpoints (with the exception of Debra Dickerson!), and frankly I'm surprised and disappointed that one of your most talented writers holds this view. It makes me think much less of you, Salon.
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Start living...
Oy! You are 53 and complaining? You are in the best time of your life! Go out there and enjoy it. I just turned 50 and have never really thought about age. I just keep living. I'm in grad school now working on a MS in Global Affairs, and plan to travel to the Middle East this summer to visit with friends and see what sort of stories I can fall into (I am a writer/editor/photographer). I got married very young, divorced after 11 years and raised my kids alone. They are both graduated from college, on their own and doing very well and have been great role models. While raising them I went to college (undergraduate) and waited on tables at a local bistro. I became a contractor after building my own house and started my own business. I started to write after being hit by a car one rainy night (my knee got damaged and after two years I broke down and had the surgery - best thing I ever did - but the doctor told me I could not climb ladders anymore). I was 40 years old and suddenly out of a job! That was 10 years ago. In the last ten years I went from writing for a local bi-weekly newspaper and taking pictures for them to editing a regional publication and doing freelance writing for some larger publications about my experiences working in Iraq – where I traveled to on my own. I am back in school because my work in Iraq left me with more questions than answers and I didn't want to continue to write and sound like the screaming meemies in your and other publications who write about things from the safety of their secure lives that they have not experienced personally and do not understand.
I always told my kids that when they went to college it would be time for me to focus on myself. I have seen too many parents focusing entirely on their kids without making "the plan" for when they leave and then looking like lost puppies once those kids are out the door. I drove to all the track meets and ball games, chaperoned the parties, maintained a presence at their HS on a weekly basis and put off parts of my life so I could be there for them. It was hard and frustrating but I loved every minute of it. But I always knew that once they left home I had better have "a life" waiting or I would be a moanin’ and a groanin’ like you.
Yeah, the un-operated-on knee hurts once in while. And my hands, already overused from years of house painting hurt after too many hours of shooting with my camera or writing notes during my classes. And the pain in my shoulders can be unbearable at times from the weight of the cameras strung around my neck. Heck, I take an Ibuprofen and keep on going. I am not crying about where I’ve been that I can‘t access anymore but rather looking at where I am and where I am going next. My biggest worry is that I won’t have enough time to do all the things that I want to do and see all the things that I want to see.
I don’t know Gary… you’re not a very good role model. Life is just beginning for you - especially if your son is out the door. Once the kids go there is no coming back for them. Or you. They are free and are entering into the great adventure of their lives – and so are you. Let go of these past glories of carrying the ball down the field and these “important losses” you have suffered through (OMG, you are the sort of man a woman dreads to meet, caught up in a present that is lived in the past - we have ALL suffered and had immense losses) and create new glories and myths. These memories might be some sort of a comfort to you in your current fear state where, held falsely secure in the arms of the long-gone past, you are preventing yourself from stepping out into your future. But remember this, from death comes life. And instead of writing this sort of “oh, woe is me, I am so old” creature feature stories, begin planting the seeds of a new and even greater life than you’ve ever had. And then write new stories to feed people like you…so they can see all the possibilities waiting for them regardless of their age. This is the one of the many responsibilities of the writer…to create new avenues of thought in people’s minds, to fortify the spirit, to create new stories for them to live by.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some studying to do for my International Law midterm…