Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Geezers and Tweezers

When I got off the train in Lansdale, having flown all night in a clean but crowded plane, and having endured a city’s public transport through its bowels, I lumbered my luggage down the steps and emerged into the bright, clean air of Montgomery County. I trundled myself and my baggage across the platform toward the station, looking all the way for my father. He was nowhere to be seen. I stood at the curb, lost, waiting to be found.

After several long minutes, a small man emerged from the parking lot, on semi-certain steps, his scant, grayed hair catching what sunlight it could, like a tattered flag would the wind. I kept looking for my father.

But as he came closer, I realized that this indeed was my father, now in a somewhat diminished version. He no longer had the dark hair and firm gait of a man half his age; now he had been fitted with a more appropriate appearance. And my heart sank, just a little, for I, too, aged in that moment. We were growing older of a sudden, the way it happens when we look into the mirror, not in the casual way of looking past ourselves, but in that glance-snatching, gaze-holding way of seeing on the surface the evolution that has been etching underneath all the while we have not been paying attention.

Two older men made their way to my Dad’s car.

My father, now, on the doorstep of his 88th birthday, was officially a Geezer. By “Geezer,” I mean a wise and wizened, well-aged fellow, who, by years and maturity, deserved the title. Not merely “senior,” my Dad had come into something more than his own, more than age alone could confer. He’d become a Geezer.

I, on the other hand, still hoped to have Geezerhood out in front of me somewhere, like an anticipated land to which I’d want to travel, but not just yet, thank you very much. Yet, I knew I was no longer the middle-aged man who was at the top of his powers—as we are told we are or can be when we first show the signs of aging and grey at the temples and sag in the middle. I had been graying and sagging for too long now already! So what was I, then? Growing out of middle age, but not yet fully into Geezerhood, how was I to call my “in between” self?

I decided to think of myself as a “Tweezer.” Just as those who are still children, not-yet Teens have become “Tweens” or “Tweeners,” so it is, I think, that those of us men, past 50 but not yet 75 or more, are living through Tweezerhood. We are holding onto what dignity and capacity of being middle-aged we can manage, but we increasingly carry it like I did my luggage for this trip: like baggage, lugging what Youth we have left around like a burden we can still bear, but now must work to bring along. One day, we’ll simply forget where we placed it, and will walk off without it. Then, one of two things will happen. We’ll either be frantic, and anxiously search about for what no longer can be found. Or, if we are blessed with self-acceptance, we’ll feel surprisingly relieved once we’ve realized that we have let it go. Then we may hope to find ourselves to be Geezers—and not merely old men, waiting for the ultimate relief of Death and the life to come.

So I am not my father! It is not yet time for me to be my father. But he has managed, since my mother’s death nearly two years ago now, to grasp his Geezerliness. And I have made this trip, I know now, to learn from him how to survive the Tweezer Years, and prepare myself for being a Geezer—if only I shall be as blessed as my Dad.

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