almost okay

Dear Lyzako,

I spent the first half of the first day of my fifty-first year in bed, sleeping off the celebratory drinking of the night before. The rest of my Sunday was spent yawning, eating leftover cake and napping, until finally I dozed in the glow of the waning April sun, curled up in the fetal position on the couch with warm, hazy sunshine bouncing off the hardwood floor and my twenty-five-year-old stereo tuned to Canadian radio - some jazz program playing twenty-five-year-old music.

From there to bed at nine and a night of fitful sleep.

This morning I'm right as rain, ready for the work week and the next fifty goddamned years.

I'm told that turning fifty is a life marker that calls for a thorough self-examination, a checklist of accomplishments and goals met against which we are to measure our failures and shortcomings. It's a time that often produces a 'mid-life crisis' in males, causing them to rush out and buy expensive toys like sports cars and fishing boats, or get hair transplants so they can fish for younger women. A few of us even get a little eye lift to help shave off some years.

I care nothing for cars whatsoever, haven't touched a fishing rod since I was fifteen, and even if I did enjoy the feel of rack-and-pinion steering and a tight gearbox, at this point in my life I could no more afford a new Porsche than I could afford a trip to the moon. As to the plastic surgery... I have always been fearful of doctors and don't trust them to do the simplest things, which happens to include adding hair to my growing bald spot and slicing skin from my face to reduce the effects of aging.

Since those options aren't available to me, I'm wondering what form my 'mid-life crisis' will take, if any? Simple depression, perhaps, with a deepening sense of failure as the years continue to roll by and I remain unable to take over the world as I'd planned to do when I was younger? That happens to everyone, right?

I'm just hoping that I can avoid the whole episode altogether, simply transition between 'early' life and 'mid'- life as though a mere day has passed, thereby avoiding that spectacular backwards glance to the past.

I have to say that my birthday soiree didn't exactly get me started on the right foot. I opted to fix dinner for a handful of my closer friends rather than go out as they'd originally planned. Jerk chicken on the grill, cilantro-lime rice and fried plantain were on the menu, along with a twelve-pack of Red Stripe and a fridge full of Blue as backup. I also made some fresh tomato salsa and a bowl of guacamole.

It got close to sixty here on Saturday, the warmest day of the year so far, but the sun sank quickly and the air temperatures added an hour to the cooking of the chicken, during which time I imbibed liberally and ate very little. I had primed the drinking pump early in the afternoon at BW3 with two tall Blue after a quick trip to Western Market to pick up a red onion and extra jerk sauce.

Once I was back home, I fried up the plantains, fired up the grill and started searing chicken flesh, all the while swilling Red Stripe. The chicken took a lot longer than anticipated - wasn't ready until nearly nine pm in fact, so I filled in the time prior to dinner by dragging out an old scrapbook and a couple of yearbooks from high school to entertain my guests and turn their minds away from their hungry, grumbling bellies. We continued to drink.

I must confess that I hadn't looked at the books myself in years, and was surprised at how many laughs the photos of me produced around the table. 'Look how skinny you were back then!' 'Ha ha! And look at those pants!' 'Where'd you get that tie?' 'She really wore that dress? Is she Amish?'

'Hey, I lost my virginity to that girl!' I protested. 'She was a cheerleader! See this one... there she is in her cheerleader uniform!'

After the books had been put away and I'd fed the crew, I made a trip to the basement in search of a Tom Jones LP as they laughed and conversed at the kitchen table. Unfortunately, I never made it past the futon, where I lay down with the intention of only taking a quick nap after being suddenly overcome with fatigue and drunkenness. I didn't wake up until they were gone.

They'd washed the dishes, put the food away, and I vaguely remember hearing goodbyes unless I dreamed them.

Hm, what's the point I was going for? Oh yeah, the yearbooks. They were still on the table when I woke up yesterday and I couldn't resist thumbing through them myself. I looked at the pictures of young faces, not just my own, but those of many of my classmates, most of whom I will never see again. I tried to imagine them as they are today, knowing how my mug has changed from the skinny, pimply teen with bangs to what I am now. I remembered seeing one friend at my twenty-fifth reunion a while back and not even recognizing her because she was absolutely obese.

Then I remembered an old yearbook I'd picked up at a flea market last year, from a Grand Rapids area high school, the graduating class of 1927. It, like the two that I have, showed teen-aged students in a variety of athletic and academic endeavors, along with posed shots of each student of each class from freshman to senior.

Unlike mine, however, someone had made careful notes in blue pen in the Grand Rapids High yearbook. Next to the photos of each senior, that book's owner had written the whereabouts of the person depicted in the photograph some forty-odd years later (I'm guessing the information was garnered from a class reunion of their own). In the case of a classmate who had died, the word 'deceased' was written below the photo in an elegant cursive hand, sometimes including the date of death.

There seemed to be more photos labeled 'deceased' than there were ones with addresses.

Since my yearbooks are going to turn into that one in just a couple of decades (I can easily imagine one classmate, Donna M. making very careful notes in hers at some point in the future, neatly penning 'dead' next to my photo with a sad tear in her eye), can you really blame me for wanting to look backwards instead of forwards?

Can you?

Warm Regards,
Marty Sherman

PS: Yours truly was also voted 'Most Likely To Succeed'!