Archive for the 'midlife' CategoryPage 2 of 2

What are your secrets?

Published
by
Dave
on April 27, 2006
in midlife and religion
. 5 Comments

Last Sunday�I heard a sermon by Verne Arens that got me thinking even more than usual. The gist of Verne’s message was that when we reveal our inner flaws and scars to others, we create a basis for real human interaction. Only when a person is willing to share some secret (deep or not so deep)�can one feel that one really knows that other person.

This got me to thinking about my own secrets. No, I don’t think I’m going to reveal them here. The blogosphere is too public. There are (or could be) people reading this with whom I’m just unwilling to do that kind of sharing.

But there are facts in my personal history that, for some reason or other, I haven’t necessarily chosen to reveal even to the people closest to me. Nothing dramatic. I wasn’t imprisoned for dealing drugs at an early age. I’m not secretly gay or bi-sexual. I don’t have information the CIA would like me to hold onto. Just little things. Things that might embarrass me if I recalled them.

Okay, here’s one. It’s the only one I’m letting go today, and you all get to read it: I was about seven or eight when I was in the third grade, since I was born in October and skipped the first grade. One day in third grade I wet my pants in class, just�sitting right there in my seat in school. My teacher was a mean old witch. She had made it�clear to all of us kids that we would not be allowed out to the restroom, and I really had to go, and finally I just couldn’t hold it any more. It was one of the worst moments I can remember from my childhood. I had failed utterly to control my body.

It’s the only time this has ever happened to me, but it remains, 45 years later, one of the most embarrassing moments of my life.

We all have them, these nagging little secrets. There are a lot of reasons we don’t want to give them up. They might be simply embarrassing, or take us back to a moment of embarrassment from long ago. They might cause us to be perceived as something other than the way the people closest to us see us.

Or there might actually be professional consequences. When Valerie Plame was outed as a CIA agent by Dick Cheney or Scooter Libby or whomever, with the knowledge of Karl Rove or George Bush or whomever, it ended her career.

In today’s Washington Post there’s a story about the Rev. James Moran, a priest who was sexually abused as a young man. When he tried to talk about this openly during Holy Week, when he tried to share this secret and thereby share his humanity, the Catholic Church first reprimanded him, then removed him from his position as a hospital chaplain.

That’s a real loving church, eh? That’s a great way to show Christ’s love for the shunned. Push one of your own onto the street for even remembering and talking about what happened. Keep the secret, above all else.

Baseball is killing my concentration

Published
by
Dave
on March 31, 2006
in Washington DC, baseball and midlife
. 4 Comments

It’s a beautiful Friday afternoon. There’s another hour until my German I class begins. Because our school had a strange schedule today, due to an eighth-grade career-day event, there is a Latin I class in my normally empty classroom.

These kids are restless, excited, eager for the day to be over. They’re having trouble concentrating on their work, and they’re counting the minutes until the end of the day.

I have to admit, I feel the same way.

This evening I’ll be going to the first Washington Nationals baseball game in the city in 2006. The Battle of the Beltway will kick off with an exhibition game between the Washington Nationals and the Baltimore Orioles. I have a great seat behind home plate for this game; and two days ago I received my season tickets,a 20-game mini-plan, which are also great seats behind home.

This particular game has really captured Washington’s imagination. For 34 years, the nearest baseball team was the Baltimore Orioles, 45 minutes up the road from Washington. Tom Boswell in today’s Washington Post argues that this rivalry is likely to be a friendly one, because both Orioles and Nats fans have a common enemy, the Orioles’ owner, Peter Angelos. Washington Nationals fans have a beef with Angelos because he kept baseball out of the city for so long; the Orioles’ fans have an axe to grind with him because he has mismanaged their team for so long.

Since my “plan partner” (the guy with whom I’m sharing the 20 games) only wanted two of our three seats, I will have a single seat for all 20 games of the plan. I’ll be watching a lot of baseball this summer.

It’s hard for me to explain my youthful giddiness about having season tickets to the Nats. I feel like a “real” baseball fan for the first time in the last 25 years. Last summer, the Nats were a novelty, and my family and I rediscovered the joys of baseball. This summer we have a lot of games entered on our calendars already. We’ve scheduled some aspects of our lives around baseball games.

My wife and I have two season tickets in Washington, DC: to the Nationals and to the Shakespeare Theatre. Shakespeare and baseball. Two pastimes whose appeal is subtle and rather esoteric.

There are now 100 minutes until the last bell of the day. See? I am literally counting the minutes until I can go to the ballpark.

Categories: , ,

Too many irons in the fire?

Published
by
Dave
on March 29, 2006
in baseball, language, midlife and podcasting
. 1 Comment

I don’t know whether any of the four of you who read this blog have wondered where I am, but I’m assuming perhaps so.

As the title of this post suggests, I’m feeling that I have too many irons in the fire. This English idiom implies that I have too many projects going on at once, and one source suggests it has to do with blacksmithing. In any event, it means you’re trying to do too damn many things at one time.

That’s how I feel lately. I’ve been podcasting like crazy, keeping on with The Word Nerds week after week. We don’t have any sponsorship or advertising revenue yet, but we are hopeful that we may start making gasoline money soon. We have not missed a week since March 21, 2005, so we recently celebrated our first anniversary as a podcast. And we are happy to have a nice-sized worldwide audience.

I’m also teaching like crazy–three schools, three different administrations, three different sets of faculty meetings, and so on.

And the baseball season is about to start. There is an exhibition game in two days between the Washington Nationals, my hometown team, and the Baltimore Orioles, our rivals from the other league, 45 minutes up the road from Washington. The Orioles have a storied history, having won the World Series in 1983, and having fielded a number of successful teams until recently.

Luckily for the hapless Nationals, the Orioles have fallen on hard times, and even in spring training games, the Nats have beaten the O’s several times. After an unexpectedly strong first season in Washington, chances are pretty good that the Nats will suffer and bounce around the bottom of the division standings this year. No matter. I have good seats behind home plate.

I have a ticket for the Battle of the Beltways (Washington and Baltimore) on Friday of this week. And I got an email this morning telling me my season tickets for the Nats are on the way! They even gave me a tracking number! Life is good! Spring has sprung!

Categories: , , ,

A snow day!

Published
by
Dave
on February 14, 2006
in midlife and teaching
. 1 Comment

Since I live in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, I got the benefit of a massive snowstorm this weekend. I’m outside of Washington, and we got hit pretty hard–although nothing like New York City, which had the largest single-day snowfall on record (27 inches in Central Park).

We had heard it was going to snow all day Saturday and into Sunday morning. When nothing much had happened by 7:00 PM on Saturday, my high-school-age daughter and I pretty much gave up on getting a day off for snow.

But while we were sleeping, it snowed like crazy. At the end of it all, we measured about 14 inches on the deck of our house.

Since I’m a schoolteacher, this meant that I had the day off from work yesterday. This is a rare and unpredictable treat in the winter. My wife, who has a “real” career, had to go into Washington to work, but I got to stay home. I podcasted and ordered baseball tickets.

I’m back on the job today, and grateful for the extra day of weekend. I do wish, however, I had spent some of the day sleeping instead of working on projects.

Categories: ,

You can’t go back to college again

Published
by
Dave
on January 7, 2006
in midlife
. 12 Comments

I’ve been in Chapel Hill, NC now for about 29 hours, having come here to attend PodcasterCon2006. My brother Howard, one of the other Word Nerds, was here as well.

Howard and I were undergraduates here in the 1970s. I graduated over 30 years ago, and Howard 28 years ago. Chapel Hill is where I met my wife, and we got married while we were graduate students in Dramatic Art here.

Chapel Hill is one of those college towns you never, ever forget once you have been a student (or even a resident). It is the essence of youth and intellectual ferment. Even now, in the dead of winter with no classes in session, there’s a buzz in the atmosphere. It feels like a cool, happening, important place.

And when you’re 52 years old and in town on your own for the first time in about 25 years, it also feels like a very young place.

Last night I had checked into my hotel about halfway between Chapel Hill and Durham, and I decided to drive back into town and stroll around on Franklin Street, the main drag. This was an activity I did countless times in my late adolescence and early adulthood. I learned to be an independent person in this town, learned to spend and save my own money, drink beer, browse for books in a bookshop–in short, to define my adult personality.

This time, however, for the first time in my life, I felt out of place on Franklin Street. A few of the same businesses are still here as were here 30 years ago, and the restaurants and snackbars are the same kinds of places we freqented as young people. But last night I looked at my reflection in the store windows, and I saw an old guy. Not even a mature professor-type, but an old guy.

My undergraduate and masters-degree years faded into history long ago, but I’ve also passed the age at which I could dream of bringing my Ph.D. in German to this school to be a faculty member. That is, I’m now too old to re-enter this community in any legitimate way–except maybe, in 13-15 years, as a retiree.

At dinner tonight, Howard pointed out that our (baby-boomer) generation tends to view ourselves as stuck in age somewhere between 18 and 25 years old. I think he’s right. We somehow assume we can stay in that young-adult mode forever. But we need to let it go and allow ourselves to become “mature adults.”

I love it here in Chapel Hill, it brings back great memories. But it sure is a stark reminder of the inexorable passage of time. And at the same time, I think my pensive regret at being an older person in Chapel Hill is precisely a reflection of that baby-boomer sense of entitlement to our years of youth.

Categories: , ,

Time off is wearing me out

Published
by
Dave
on January 1, 2006
in midlife and winter
. 6 Comments

Tomorrow, Monday the 2nd of January, is my last day off from teaching before returning from winter break.

I am oh-so-very ready to return. Not because I look forward to rising at 5:15 AM, or even to having responsibilities to students and administrators in three different schools. Rather, I am looking forward to having some structure to my day.

The last ten days of Christmas break have been days of sloth for me. True, I completely produced two half-hour podcasts and recorded five others. But I’ve also spent the whole time sitting on my bottom, causing the discs in my lower back to compress further. I should have exercised–instead, I took too many naps. My wife and daughter and I all have acid indigestion this evening from all the junk food we’ve eaten the last several days. And above all, my motivation level has dropped to zero or below.

There are plenty of things I should have done during the break. I have checkbook registers to balance, bills to pay, midterm exams to write, tax records to prepare, and general cleaning, filing and straightening to do. Yet I’ve watched old movies on TV and slept very late every day.

Ah well. I should let it go. I think the worst thing about the break, really, is the guilt I feel now for not being “productive.”

I gotcha season to be jolly, right here!

Published
by
Dave
on December 23, 2005
in midlife and religion
. 7 Comments

It’s the night before the night before Christmas. Several thoughts have danced in my mind the past couple days:

  • It goes without saying, maybe; but it must be awfully hard to be non-Christian in late December in most of the Northern Hemisphere. Everything revolves around this holiday we now refer to as “Christmas.” Late December (starting, of course, about October 15) seems to be all about Christmas. (Although I must say, I can’t find anywhere in my New Testament where it claims that our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was born in a European forest four days after the winter solstice.) On behalf of sensitive Christians everywhere, I apologize to all of you non-Christians for the European-American culture shoving this holiday down your throats.
  • The whole “Christmas giving” thing is just about the exchange of value. I’ve realized this this year, finally, for the first time. “How much are you spending on me?” This is a question I’ve heard, in some form or other, from siblings, spouse and others. My God, why don’t we just give each other the money? Or better still, stop pursuing this whole business of “shopping for your Christmas list” and all the associated guilt trips. Or maybe best of all, just mandate that everybody has to go out and spend, say, at least half of one percent of their annual salary on retail crap before the end of the year. We’d still incur painful credit card debt in January, but at least we’d have less of a sense of panic about the actual shopping.
  • Expectations are so high for this holiday that people get crazy. The only murder that I was ever aware of happening near me was Christmas Eve 1991. Two brothers living across the street from me in Nashville got into an argument, and one shot the other dead late at night–thankfully missing Santa and the reindeer. There’s just too much damn pressure. Why don’t we just run Thanksgiving again, shall we? Eat a lot and watch television, and either skip the gifts or just go together to the mall and spend our required percentage to keep the retailers (and office-party performers like me) in business.
  • If I don’t hear another radio “Christmas song” this weekend, I won’t be sorry. I do love Vince Guaraldi and his trio, but the music from the Charlie Brown Christmas TV special is about all I can endure at this point.
  • Finally, the ultimate insult to the “non-believers” appeared in the evening news today, the day before what the Germans refer to as Holy Evening: it was announced that the FBI has been spying on mosques since 2002. Peace on earth, goodwill toward (non-Muslim) men, I guess.

I’m eager for this holiday to be over with and to get back to my routine. I do, however, appreciate the 10 days off from school here in mid-winter.

Categories: ,

What’s 29 years of marriage like?

Published
by
Dave
on December 19, 2005
in marriage and midlife
. 3 Comments

Yesterday, December 18, was my wife’s and my wedding anniversary. We got married on that date in 1976.

We didn’t do a whole lot of special stuff yesterday. We gave the money for the altar flowers in the church we attend; later in the day we went to her boss’s holiday party at his house, and afterwards went to the Shakespeare Theatre in DC, where we have season tickets. A kind of boring, middle-aged, middle-class day, I guess.

But I thought all day long about how and why we’re still married after 29 years. That really is a long time. We’ve been married to each other far more than half of our lives–that is, we’ve been together longer than we’ve not been together.

How do you stay together for 29 years? Well, I think, for one thing, I must have been very, very lucky at age 23 to have met the Love of My Life. I mean that: pure, dumb luck. I really think I was too young to have any reasonable idea of what we were doing. We just knew that getting married was a good thing to do.

Physical attraction is actually quite important, but it’s just the starting place. Being hot for each other when you’re young establishes the way you see each other for the rest of your lives. We are still very attracted to each other, but we both look like middle-aged people now.

It also helps to have parents who modelled being together. Both my wife’s parents (who are both now deceased) and my parents (who are both living and well) stayed with their one spouse all their adult lives. For the two of us, that was an important model to try to emulate.

It probably also helped to have kids. We had our first child after we’d been married eight years, so that means just after the fabled “seven-year itch,” when you look at each other and really wonder whether you made a real mistake a long time ago. Our second child, still living at home with us, provides us with another source of pride and frustration–a “project” in which we are both engaged every day.

But I think the most important thing is always to be willing to give up something. Each of us has given up a lot for the sake of staying together. We both set out to be actors, but we gave that up when we realized we would have to be separated a lot. We opted to stay together rather than to pursue careers that might have been much more professionally fulfilling than what we have done for a living instead. My wife agreed to go with me from one town to another to support my career; and when I was denied tenure and lost a job as an assistant professor, I decided to stay here in the DC area in our happy home, rather than try to find a university job somewhere else.

I think if one always insists on having what one really thinks one should have, one has no chance of staying with a life partner for the long term. But I also think that’s probably the worst thing one could do. At the end of your life, your fans or loyal readers or listeners or viewers won’t put up with your deafness or bad habits or forgetfulness. But a life partner will.

Categories: ,

John Spencer, a guy I met 28 years ago

Published
by
Dave
on December 17, 2005
in midlife and performing
. 1 Comment

When you’re sitting at midlife, or at some point after midlife, you look back a lot to when you were young. People have been doing this forever. I’ve been doing it a lot this week.

From about the age of 16 or so up until–well, up until the present, really–I wanted to be an actor of some kind. I didn’t just major in Dramatic Art at UNC Chapel Hill, I went for a B.F.A. in acting. After that I got an M.F.A. at the same school, then went with my new wife to New York City to be an actor.

The classic “between shows” job for New York actor is to wait tables in a restaurant. In the summer of 1977 I fulfilled this stereotype for about two and a half weeks by taking a waiting job at a place called La Pomme. This was a chi-chi little place in the east 60s that had an upscale clientele and served quasi-”natural” cuisine.

I only got assigned to lunch shifts, so I made little money. The real tip money was made by the dinner waiters. In my two weeks at La Pomme, I did wait on John Lennon once, and later on Bill Murray (just starting on Saturday Night Live). But I didn’t make enough in tips to make it worth staying.

Once I did get assigned to a dinner shift. Another young struggling actor was working that dinner shift as well, a guy from New Jersey named John Spencer.

We didn’t hang out or become buddies, really, but I do recall that John had a lot of confidence and a smiling demeanor. He smiled a lot, in fact. I recall that he was always nice and friendly to me at a time when I felt that other New York actors were out to beat me out of the next role. John had spent the previous summer as a bit player at the Barter Theater in Abingdon, Virginia (my wife’s hometown), and was now “between gigs,” so he was in the same position as I.

One evening I was supposed to meet my wife in the west 40s for some reason I can’t recall, and John lived in Manhattan Plaza, the high-rise apartment buildings for performers on West 43rd Street. So we shared a cab to the West Side after work. Later on I ran into John at a party thrown by some UNC buddies at Manhattan Plaza who had known him at Barter Theater, I think.

One of the treats of watching The West Wing for me the past few years has been to see the very good work by this actor with whom I was once acquainted. I knew John in the 1970s just enough to get a superficial impression. I never had any clue about his demons or secrets–I didn’t know until I read in Parade magazine, for example, that he was a recovering alcoholic (although in his early 30s I guess he did seem like a guy who liked to party). I knew he worked on L.A. Law in the 1980s, and I always perceived that as his “big break,” but I learn today from his obituary that he had been on The Patty Duke Show, a fluffy sitcom from 1963 in which Patty Duke played two roles.

The news of John’s death from a heart attack yesterday is making me feel very old. I guess it doesn’t surprise me. That character Leo McGarry on The West Wing had been looking pretty rundown for quite some time. The plot development which had Leo suffering a heart attack at Camp David was no surprise at all. Still, it is unsettling to see life imitate art–except John isn’t recovering from his heart attack like Leo did from his.

The news of John’s death comes two days after my father attended the funeral of one of his closest friends, Carl Kreps. Carl, who was a pastor in North Carolina, like my father, also had been in bad health for some time. My dad took it pretty hard. The year 2005 was a year of funerals for my dad. He lost an old friend back in the spring; his neighbor and friend, Conrad Williams, died in July; and his brother Paul died much too young and unexpectedly in August. And now Carl Kreps is gone, reminding my dad and me that we are all, basically, terminal patients.

I don’t know, really, what message or lesson to take from these two deaths this week. I guess I should make sure I keep myself in better shape. I live a much too sedentary life sitting at this computer and driving my car to the schools where I teach.

And I should always try to appreciate friends and acquaintances–even passing acquaintances like John Spencer.

Categories: , ,