NO GOING BACK...

So, I went to see that new Clint Eastwood movie, "Gran Torino" on Friday. A really good movie; Eastwood was his usual brilliant self, chewing up the scenery with septugenarian abandon, the story was good and the whole thing was so hysterically un-PC that you couldn't help laugh, from embarrassment if nothing else. And while I appreciate Mr. Eastwood casting actual Hmong people living in the U.S. as his supporting cast, I wish one or two of them had been better actors. Still, a fun time at the multiplex and I recommend the movie wholeheartedly.

Unfortunately "Gran Torino" is not what this column is about. At least, not specifically. What I'm getting at, in my usual meandering fashion is that while I was sitting there enjoying the movie, I couldn't help but notice that I was the youngest person in the place. "Look at this," I thought. "It must be the Early Bird Special showing or something. I'll bet if everyone pulled out their AARP cards all at once, the wind would knock the screen down!" Then, I realized something else. No one was looking at me funny. No one was wondering why this "kid" was sitting in a movie so obviously geared to the senior crowd. As far as they were concerned, I Was One Of Them.

Now, I'm fifty-one. I acknowledge that. I own it. I am well aware that there is probably more road behind me in this life than in front of me. Not much more I hope, but more. Still, when you get down to how old I actually feel...how old I think of myself down deep in my heart of hearts, I probably think of myself as around thirty-five or forty. Not young I realize, but certainly, comfortably "middle-aged". A thirty-five year old can still date women in their twenties, a forty year old can still play a pick-up game of basketball and not embarrass himself. A fifty-one year old, especially a fifty-0ne year old couch potato who's idea of an athletic event is a brisk walk to the mailbox can do neither of those things...at least not well.

In my play "Last Charge of the Light Brigade", the lead character Sam Kincaid (who looks and acts an awful lot like the author) makes the statement, "I believe you're as young as you feel. And I try to feel a young person at least once a day!". A comment said with tongue in cheek to be sure, but not without some truth. I spend a lot of time with young people. My kids, my students (I teach high school, remember?) and many of the people I do theatre with are younger if not much younger than I am and I relate to a lot of what they have going on. Oh, I'm surely past most of the sturm and drang of their love lives and the teen angst of trying to fit in and find a place in the world, but I still understand it, a lot better than I do 401K's and high blood pressure and prostate exams and AARP cards. My dad, who is eighty-one (and probably thinks of himself as a spry sixty-one) likes to say, "Just because there's snow on the roof, don't mean there's not a fire in the hearth!". That's good for him, but I say "Hey, where in the hell did all that damn snow come from anyway?"

I do have gray hair. Well, what hair I still have is turning gray, anyway. I have gray at the temples like Reed Richards in the Fantastic Four (what I like to call my whitewalls) and I have a gray beard. An almost totally gray beard. I dyed it brown back in my forties, mainly because I was dating a much younger woman and didn't want to remind her of her father, but these days I wear it proudly because I think of it as "premature" gray. It's not...I can admit that in an intellectual sense if not an emotional one...but since the hair on top of my head is still brown, I can allow myself the half truth. Of course, the quickly receding hairline doesn't help, and neither does that fact that as the hair stops growning on my head it starts growing in my ears and out of my nose and my eyebrows... well, you get the point, everywhere else.

Youth is wasted on the young. It's true. If I had half the energy to pursue the things I now understand I want, I'd be king of the world. If I only understood back then that I was not immortal and that time does goes by frighteningly fast, then maybe I would have gotten my ass up and gotten something done with my life sooner. That's the other thing about getting older. Your eyesight gets dim, but your hindsight gets razor sharp.

I guess the important thing is to take advantage of what time you have when you have it. If I want to accomplish something with my life, then I should do it and not sit around whining about how life has passed me by. I'm still young enough to get up every morning and push through to the truth of my life and the honesty of who I am. I may not be Merlin or Benjamin Button and be able to live my life backwards, but I can live my life forwards with purpose and dignity and not waste any more time bitching about the time I've already wasted.

I'm fifty-one years old. When my dad turned fifty, I gave him a birthday card that read, "So now that you're fifty, you have to give up half your sex life. Which half are you gonna give up? Talking about it or thinking about it?" Of course the point is, you don't have to give up any of it. You just have to reach out and take it and ride the pony for all that it's worth.

Which I'm gonna do. Right after I fill out this AARP card application. And have some warm milk. And maybe a nap...