October 30, 2008

Thoughts On Turning 39

Posted by Kevin | Print This Article

So next week, I turn 39. I have never really been a “birthday” person, at least not since I reached the age of “drinking legally, living alone, and paying confiscatory taxes.” No, those birthdays slip away each year hardly without notice.

Except for one — I always thought 30 would be a meaningful birthday, but it wasn’t. 31, however — now that meant something. It meant the beginning of something (i.e., I am now in my thirties) that was also somehow the end of something (my twenties are now long gone).

And now, a mere scant eight years later, I find myself confronted with 39, an age that I never thought amounted to anything other than unbelievable (when people say they’re 39, people think they’re really 40). It has preyed on my mind for — well, to be honest, a number of months now. It is an age that feels like the end of something but not, quite yet, the beginning of something else.

That beginning, I suppose, will come later. A year from now.

Donald Justice, who is — well, I was going to say “my favorite poet” but that would imply that I know lots of other poets, and I’m afraid I don’t. Donald Justice was a poet I discovered back in college and have held, if somewhat secretively, close — a poet unusually practical, pragmatic, and simplistically profound. He didn’t write a poem about turning 39, to my knowledge. However, he did write a poem about that age that comes one year later, and for some reason, though I cling to the twelve months I have remaining, I’ve found myself returning to this poem several times over the last few weeks.

I wish I had something profound to say myself about age, generations, birthdays, or even the small act of living long enough to turn 39. But I don’t. So here is what Donald Justice had to say about “Men at Forty.”

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it
Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father’s tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

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