A Day in the Life of Chaos

Last night I was sitting with my son.  With fourteen years of age under his belt he was responsibly doing his homework while I at forty-four I was playing a video game.  I was hacking my way across Oblivion when I felt his finger touch the skin behind my ear.  I imagined I must have had some ugly black piece of crud, perhaps a remnant of nuzzling with the dog.  "I don't like that."  He said. "What is it?" I asked him. I wondered, did I have a cancerous spot or something?  He pushed his finger against my skin again pulling it flat. "It's a wrinkle.  I don't want my pop to grow old."  He said hugging me.  "I have gotten used to the age spots you used to not have yet now do but I don't like this wrinkle." He noticed the distress on my face and added in a consoling way, "I guess you are only in your forties Pop, you are not that old." When you are a child everything seems new.  The girls you know have skin still

Something happens starting in your forties and moving on.  Up to this point we live our lives independently.  We spend years separating ourselves from our parents and learning how to function on our own.  Sure, parents are always there to help out with advice or to fix something but we are mostly focused on establishing our own lives and families. We have our own children now and they have so many needs.  We have jobs and mortgages to pay.  When something breaks we have to fix it, when its time to eat, we have to make it.  While all this is going on at some point in life our parents start to need us more.  It can happen very slowly and often we don't even perceive the change yet it happens. As I look around at my friends who share my age I can see it happening.  These days I see it quite brilliantly in the life of my father who is now in his 60's and has a mother in her 90's.   I see it in the life of my dear friend Peggy whose father in law spent his final days with them

As we grow old we can't help but notice the effects on our bodies.  Age is not kind.  The young body is viewed as the ideal, the old body is the result of living life.  It is like an old car.  It is no longer shiny and beautiful, it doesn't run as well but while taking longer, it still gets you there.  It is almost as if we are a product.  When we are born we are wrapped in the cellophane of our mother's womb.  We enter the world free from blemish, our minds have yet to be written and our bodies yet to be scarred.  Like an annual growing from a seed we seem so free from declination.  Our flower has yet to bloom and our seeds have yet to fall.  When we do flower, in our minds we reach perfection.  As a father I remember the day when my son scarred himself for the first time.  The beautiful product once protected by plastic was no longer new.  The problem with aging is that for many of us, our bodies change yet our minds never do.  While we collect life experience and wisdo

Growing older is a stage in life.  It doesn't matter if you are young or old, the constant is always the progression of age.  Coupled with this, is the feeling of being left behind. It happens to us usually when we are associated with a group.  We seldom hearken back to a moment in time, rather a period of life when our minds and emotions were satisfied.  When we shared a commonality with others in an experience.  Youth provides fertile ground for this.  It is a unique stage of life when we are surrounded by a group experiencing exactly the same thing.  We see them day to day and often feel the same frustrations, the same pain.  It is a time when others share our age and we gaze out through the window of life from the same perspective.  I think for this reason when we age we often look back at our youthful years with nostalgia like none others.  They were a time of innocence when our lives were still largely unwritten.   Life presented few constraints over possibility. For this

My father always seemed old.  Okay, maybe older is a better word.  He never seemed ancient and he certainly has never been like "old guy."  Old guy is a guy in my office that is slightly 10 years older than me but has seemed old since probably the day he was born.  I swear to God his mother gave birth to him and he came out in a tie gripping about those nasty kids.  He drives a Cadillac, need I say more? My father never even seemed older in the way that young people view those 10 years their senior.  Like they some how came from a world alien in from their own.  A world with completely different culture, values and rituals when it comes to growing up. No, my father just seemed like a father.  He mostly stood in an adult world but still had or toe or two in the world of a child. As I cross through the midpoint of my life I often look at myself in terms of my father.  I consider my age and the stage in life of my son.  I think about how when I was at that point, my father s

At some point in my life I crossed the line.  When it was, how it happened, I don't know.  The line was as blurry as my memory of breakfast last month.   Every generation has experienced this feeling because music is effectively a time stamp on our minds.  For whatever reason the teenage years are the most susceptible to this impression. I don't think there is a human alive that can't close their eyes and think of a song that was once playing on the radio or archived on an LP or a cassette tape.  Of course both of these terms alone are a generational divide.  Even before our very eyes the CD is giving way to the .mp3. Perhaps it is a result of a fundamental resistance to change but each successive generation has also despised some new music just as the one before it did.  From Duke Ellington to swing.  From swing to Elvis and the Beatles overtaken by the psychedelic and rock.  The latent violence and sexuality of rap and the screaming beat of punk each seemed to reach

"Beauty isn't only skin deep." Oh we all know that but who really believes it? In a world where our icons are the beautiful and whom are about as far from reality as I am from flying into space, it makes me wonder what the true definition of beauty is. Men are particularly challenged when we try to define it. We are taught from the beginning of our lives that beauty and the sex symbol go hand in hand. Beauty is defined by an actress in a pornographic movie or a model in a Victoria Secrets catalog. It is the 20 something in a tight dress swaying her hips as she walks down the street drawing our eyes and with them our desires. Reality of course reminds us of our inherent fear by paying homage to our middle-aged bodies. This fear speaks like an oracle to the Greeks and shames us into never trying to make a real contact. In truth the vast majority of us were never able to make contact even pre-middle age. We prefer to speculate with our friends or in our minds

So when did I grow old? All around me there are signs but I can't see them? I can't feel them. I think anyone that has a child feels it the most. One day they say something and immediately their mind turns on itself and asks the question, were those words from my mouth or my parents? Last night I was playing a video game on my son's Xbox. I was engaged with some alien civilization but that's not what is important. Over and over again, my son's friends kept sending messages asking me to join their party. Sadly, I am quite certain they assumed it was Noah playing and not his 42 year old father. I seriously doubt a 12 year old wanted to "party" with me. Despite this cruel reality, I felt oddly offended. I mean wasn't it within the realm of possibility in their little minds that the player could actually be Noah's father? Come on kids, I grew up in the era when video games were invented. Doesn't that count for something? Of course