Time, by Lewis

Is there any cliché about time that has yet gone unwritten or unspoken?  I don’t feel comfortable making generalizations about the subject of time.  I can only speak my own truths about time, if I can figure out what they are.

People spend a lot of money trying to mitigate the effects of time on their bodies.  They are usually rich, perhaps even as rich as their plastic surgeons.  I don’t know what a facelift costs.  I’m sure that it depends upon a number of factors—the number of wrinkles per square inch of skin, the number of square inches of skin per linear inch of one’s face, the elapsed time since the previous facelift, the degree of satisfaction from the previous facelift, the amount of time spent in the sun showing off one’s facelift, and the percentage of body fat.

Also, I’m sure that, once one has had a facelift, there is tremendous pressure to make some adjustments to the birth date that appears on various personal documents.  It must be extremely embarrassing to be pulled over for a traffic violation only to have the officer look at you, then your driver’s license, and ask you step out of the car, put your hands on the roof, and receive a pat down on suspicion of having a stolen ID.

What must a facelift do to one’s relationship with a twin who cannot afford to follow suit?  Would they then introduce him or her as a parent or much older sibling?  And what of the spouse who now must endure the clucks and chuckles from those who assume that he or she has “robbed the cradle”?  Upon death—still, I’m afraid an inevitability—would it not feel unnatural to gaze upon the 90-year-old corpse with skin stretched drum-tight across its chops and exclaim, “Oh, how natural he/she looks?”  And, of course, the worst message such shenanigans sends is that all the rest of us, the ones who choose to age naturally, are growing uglier by the day. 

But I’m not buying it.  I think of aging skin as a beauty mark.  Nobody who’s into classic cars would think of putting 2013 parts on a 1957 Chevrolet.  Sure, we might hammer out the dents, straighten out the frame, fix the rust, replace the worn-out springs, and spray a new coat of paint on her, but we would never try to make her look like this year’s model.  I’m a 1946 model of a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant gay male who prefers to nuzzle the bumpers of others like me and who doesn’t give a fig for brand-new sporty SUV’s with programmable liftgates, reverse-view cameras, and touch screens.  I’ve been around the block with beloved partners of both sexes, fathered two children, had a 30-year career that provided a comfortable life, and I want to look the part.  I don’t want to pose for “before” and “after” pictures where the “before” photo looks like an old picture of me after being sucker punched in the mouth.  George Bernard Shaw is quoted as saying, “Youth is wasted on the young.”  Yeah, and today youthfulness is wasted on the old.

But the bitter old men of Congress have found a way to exact their revenge.  They have saddled our youth with endless wars that ravage their bodies in horrible ways but mollify themselves by providing medical care that allows them to survive to live a full life in a condition that no octogenarian would envy.  We load the young up with student loan debt that makes the home loan of my generation seem like chump change.  We trap them in $9 an hour jobs with no hope of advancement so that they are actually making less money at 35 than they were at 25.  And, worst of all, we are handing off to them a world who atmosphere has been poisoned to the point that their children almost surely will face a lifetime of struggle for ever-dwindling resources.  We have made sure that, for them, growing old is the most coveted luxury of all.

For those of us who have lived free of ecological and demographic constraints on how we live our lives—how many children we have; how big a house we build or live in; how many vacation trips we take to how distant a destination; how we get to work, to church, or the store; how we feel entitled to anything we can afford—it is time to reimagine our lives in a new way.  What truly makes us happy?  Where does happiness happen?  What kind of happiness do we want for those who come after?  What is true?  How much time is left before it’s too late?  We are threatened not by growing old but by growing apart from what we know in our hearts is true and that time is not on the side of the young and we are responsible.

© 19 May 2013 

About the Author 

  

I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and had two children while working as an engineer for the Ford Motor Company. I was married to a wonderful woman for 26 happy years and suddenly realized that life was passing me by. I figured that I should make a change, as our offspring were basically on their own and I wasn't getting any younger. Luckily, a very attractive and personable man just happened to be crossing my path at that time, so the change-over was both fortuitous and smooth.

Soon after, I retired and we moved to Denver, my husband's home town. He passed away after 13 blissful years together in October of 2012. I am left to find a new path to fulfillment. One possibility is through writing. Thank goodness, the SAGE Creative Writing Group was there to light the way.