Time For Reflection Onset Of Midlife Is Reason Enough For Men To Pause And Consider What It All Means

Sixteen, when I was growing up, was the age at which you were allowed to drive and, therefore, the age to shoot for. The keys to the car were the keys to life itself, everything else being only a preliminary. Impatient in my 11th year, I subtracted 11 from 16 I was always quick with numbers and concluded all was hopeless. “Five years! I might as well forget it.”

But it came soon enough, as most things do, and it wasn’t long before I was watching for other road markers that would tell me I was finally getting somewhere. At 18 I was eligible for the draft, something that gave me considerable pause but also a sense of confirmation. At 21 I could throw away the fake ID’s and swagger into any bar I cared to.

“Make it a Michelob, Lou,” I could say without fear of being booked. The driver’s license attested to more than simply my age: If a seat at The Shamrock and a Chevy out front didn’t certify you as a man, I didn’t know what would.

It was a long ways back. Middle age never entered my head. My father was middle-aged, getting up every morning to put on a coat and tie and head off to a job from which he took a paycheck but no satisfaction.

Now my father is elderly and retired, and I am middle-aged. If his middle age was not mine - I don’t wear a tie much, I like what I do and have several fewer mouths to feed - it only suggests that I was the beneficiary of better roads.

Not that there haven’t been patches of rough pavement and a turn or two that caught me unawares. But I seem to be making good time. In fact, I’m a little startled at the accumulation of miles - and startled even more to see that I am headed in the same general direction as my father and every other man. That is the realization of midlife.

Steven Harvey, whose odometer reads about like mine, has reflected on the meanings of midlife for men and brought together others who have done so.

“In a Dark Wood: Personal Essays by Men on Middle Age” (University of Georgia Press, $35 hardback/$15.95 paperback) addresses eloquently the different meanings that midlife has for men, from intimations of mortality to the disillusionment with causes to the enjoyment of sex when love and lust are in balance.

Men are given to reticence about themselves, as Harvey writes, “and as they move into positions of authority, this masculine silence deepens. With age they have more to hide and less to say, especially about their weaknesses.”

The men in “In a Dark Wood” are the kind most people never know: They are reflective, funny, susceptible to sentiment and able to find in their lives a shape and content discernible only in middle age. No two of them are alike.

The metaphors for midlife are many, most of them smelling faintly of mold. The game is going into late innings, the hourglass has emptied the bulk of its sand into the bottom, the sun has advanced into the western sky.

But the subject need not be grim, and it’s not for these writers. “I am 50,” Joseph Epstein writes, “and, realist that I am, I must now conclude that my life is at least a third over.”

For others, midlife is knowing that the passions of a generation ago not only are spent but are not the passions that burn in one’s children.

Gerald Early writes of how he was affected by Malcolm X in the 1960s, when his sense of his being black, of being African, defined every aspect of his existence. It was when he first felt he was a man. Now, in middle age, he has a more rounded view of what he thought he knew then, and he tries to explain this to his daughters:

“My youngest usually says, ‘Are you finished now, Daddy?’

“They know the moral is something to the effect that it is good to be black and that it is something for which we must all stand up. ‘Yeah,’ my youngest says, ‘it’s good to be black, but it’s better not to have to spend all your time thinking about how good it is to be black.’ “

For Early, as for all these writers, middle age entails gain as well as inevitable loss. If the gains are seldom the kind that could satisfy the expectations of the young, the losses are the kind only the middle age could know.

John Stone, poet and professor of cardiology at Emory University, ruminates on why he has been sleepwalking and knows it has something to do with the death of his wife of 33 years. His night wanderings, he tells himself, “are attempts to do what can’t be done in the light - to say things left unsaid that still need to be said; to try somehow to touch, to reckon with the ghost in every darkness.”

Even in that, there is a recognition that middle age is for life yet to be lived, for looking ahead as well as back. If not, then you know the final exit must be next. “Fifty,” Epstein writes, “is an age old enough for one to have suffered serious disappointment, yet young enough not to be completely out of hope.” Who would be with two-thirds of the game left to be played?