Fitty

I turned 50 years old yesterday.
Fifty.
"Fitty".
Half a century.
Officially not-young.
Old fart.
Closer to death than birth.
Supposed to be wise by now.
Full of remorse for choices made and not made.
Feeling like I should be more grateful because I'm not dead, imprisoned, infirm or insane.

For most of the day I just wanted to bang two heads together, 3-Stooges style, and I wasn't particular who they belonged to. My family knew enough to soft-pedal the whole celebration thing. After all, I didn't have much to do with being born on this particular day, and lots of hoopla about it feels like one of those "participation trophies" my kids get for playing on a sports team.

So we went to dinner and I remained melancholy. Afterwards I figured the best thing would be to "get outside of myself" so I decided to go to a National Peace Witness prayer service and peace vigil being held at a nearby church that I had read about. However, I dicked around and got there after the prayer service had already ended. A group of about 25 people were standing at the corner of Scott Boulevard and Medlock Road holding candles that kept blowing out in the sharp wind gusts that kept whipping up, milling about in the dark while holding a basically unreadable sign pointed toward the direction of a stop light.

After mulling around at the back of this earnest but ultimately pitiful group for a couple of minutes I sidled away and slipped into the church itself. Nobody else was around so I had about 15 minutes by myself to hold my own peace vigil. I reflected on Lao Tzu's dictum that:

“If there is to be peace in the world,
There must be peace in the nations.

If there is to be peace in the nations,
There must be peace in the cities.

If there is to be peace in the cities,
There must be peace between neighbors.

If there is to be peace between neighbors,
There must be peace in the home.

If there is to be peace in the home,
There must be peace in the heart.”

How could I feel peace amid the personal turmoil of my narcissistic ego? I began crying. I went through despair, shame, self-loathing, sadness, sorrow, remorse, grief.....to anger. I found myself staying with the word "appalled". I'm appalled at this world. I was thinking of the deplorable condition in Gaza and reflecting that I could just as well be thinking of Iraq, Kenya, Darfur, and on and on, and how I do so very little about any of man's deplorable inhumanity to man. This makes me complicit, which appalls me further. I sat wishing I could devote the rest of my life to peace, but I know that dedication would ultimately prove to be idle words.

Then people started wandering back into the church and I turned myself invisible and floated unseen across the room and through the walls to re-assume form on the sidewalk outside, then into my car to get juice for the kids from the store.

Throughout the day I'd left messages with various friends checking in my complex and essentially negative feelings. A few returned my calls: nobody judged my feelings, everybody offered support in the ways they knew how, and I felt comforted. I came home, climbed into bed and watched the 1957 French film "A Man Escaped", the "true tale of a French prisoner and his single-minded determination to escape from a Nazi prison cell in occupied France during World War II." I guess there's something highly symbolic about me deciding on my 50th birthday to watch a film about a prison break told a language I don't understand and brought into the world at almost exactly the same time I was. I'll leave it to my biographers to decipher the meaning in that.

Happy birthday to me.
I live in a tree.
I guess I'll keep going.
There's nowhere to flee.