The Lear Years

I am too old to raise an infant daughter, but I do not regret, in any station of my psyche, her presence. She was a surprise, a jolt, a double take over the pink-tinged double stripes announcing her emergence from the void. She's a beauty, a keeper. She will be my Cordelia as I enter the Lear years, though I hope my two older daughters do not duplicate the proud king's other offspring. I hope to be doted on by all three, to whom I'll gladly give, in equal portions, all.

But, though I'm not certain if she'll "keep (me) young" as some say happens in such instances, I can testify that she doesn't make me feel young; I feel my 51 years more acutely when I hold her, coo into her face. I have never been quick with numbers, but one needn't be a math maven to know that as she's graduating high school I'll be 69; I'll be 73 as she's moving the tassel on her college mortarboard and beaming as she traverses the stage. I'll indeed be in my Lear Years for most of her adolescence and young adulthood. Then I'll die, while she is still young.

I run; I lift weights. I'm quite strong. I'm a type-two diabetic, but control the condition with diet and exercise. A lot of people on both sides of my family lived into their 80s, but they were mostly females; I don't know much about male mortality on either side, partly because there simply weren't that many males and, besides, I've lost contact with the extended families.

Dying's one thing, preparing quite another. It is strange to want to live less for yourself than for certain others, but that is the primary existential feature of parenting. When I catch myself being a little reckless, driving the freeway aggressively or walking a street most folks would consider dicey, or when the turbulence on a trans-Atlantic flight becomes extreme, what blazes through my mind is not an image of my doom but rather a tableau of my children in mourning, my daughters processing my loss.

I considered myself young for too long. I know I speak for many when I say that becoming not young, though it is a gradual process, can feel sudden in its effect.

A respected writer referred to me in a blurb on the back of my first book as "the best of the new poets." He was being too kind, indulging in the sort of inflated rhetoric that characterizes almost all blurbs, but I didn't stop considering myself a "new poet" for many years after. I don't mean I consciously thought of myself that way, but rather that it was an unconscious assumption into my 40s that I was a "young" poet, a young man.

As a young man I worried about being a coward, which meant of course that I was a coward, and the coward's classic defense is to tempt fate, ostentatiously but in a calculated fashion. My teenage daughter will matter-of-factly announce, "Tata, I'm scared," after viewing something troubling on TV before going to bed. She is frank and unequivocal about the effect of The Blair Witch Project or a UFO documentary on her psyche. She is unashamed of her fear, and I envy her that, and am proud to have encouraged such a lack.

The main difference between my young self and my present one is that I am now at least a little comfortable with my cowardice, thought not as comfortable as my daughter is with her fear. Fear and cowardice are fundamentally different. Fear becomes cowardice only when lying about one's fear is a strong compulsion, when acting and speaking other than how one feels seems necessary. It's a guy thing. Machismo is the lie that transforms fear into cowardice, even or especially for the man who manages to act bravely.

As I age, my gendered identity becomes more ironic. I'm not...