Middle-aged?

There may be a time limit on being at an art opening without looking much at the art. I was coming close to it, sitting on a shaded hill, fifteen feet from a table of snacks, on my second La Croix -- a vile, uncivilized beverage which served as the only non-alcoholic option. I munched on my crudites and watched the path to the barn, waiting for Veronica to appear and relieve my solitude. It is not that there are not people about, because it is an art opening behind a barn with the promise of baby goats. It would be difficult to keep locals away. They are not my people, though, by fact of being either over sixty or under fifteen.

I had been there for twenty minutes without company, fifteen minutes after Veronica said she would arrive with her partner JP, an hour after it began so we could be fashionably late.

After a few visits back to the snack table without scrutinizing the art, a woman, gray haired and scarlet lipped, gives me the wrinkled moue of a cigarette smoker, a sign of "Hadn't you better leave some brie and strawberries for the others?" (No, I hadn't. I want them, and they would otherwise be stuffed into the ungrateful maws of children, who shove their hands in everything such that I rule it inedible until new food in unpacked. Better I enjoy a little than taint the lot.)

The night prior, I went to a cafe where I have dinner every Friday Amber is working -- which is every Friday. There was reputed to be an open mic night, which are always the territory of the marginally talented. I didn't want to interfere with my writing time because people wanted to croak over it. This is why the Big Buddha invented earplugs.

The open mic was rife with the people I considered middle-aged, because they were more than a decade older than me, something on display when they each covered Jimmy Buffet or The Eagles. (There was a two song maximum, but they had taken this to mean that each person could pick the same two songs.) When a new singer plays Tom Petty, most of the cafe -- aside from the writer with earplugs, enjoying his goat cheese sandwich in the corner -- sang along, which was admittedly a good effect.

I text Amber, just off work, asking how long I should stick around the art opening alone. Amber rules another ten minutes, at which point I should order her pizza.

When I put my phone back in my pocket, Veronica comes through the doors.

This is a retrospective for someone's deceased mother. Veronica tells me to keep my critiques quiet that my snarkiness does not find the wrong ears. There is no need for caution. Why would say a word against farm equipment embedded in concrete?

I knew Veronica when I was younger, but not well. I met her for the first time when dating Coley, but I can barely remember that day. (Veronica seemed small, Coley told me we couldn't kiss because she had thrush.) Veronica is in my top ten preferred people in my life at present. She says, aside from Coley, Amber and I are the people she can be around without pressure. She is comfortable with us because we do not demand too much of her when it comes to extroversion.

Amber comes later, and I did not expect that she would come at all. On this Saturday, she had been up before seven. She would be asleep again before ten. It was only a few years ago when every weekend felt full of the possibility. She was unfettered. Now, she has a schedule and duties that almost always go longer than her assigned shift. She is perennially less rested. She admits to being more depressed, not coincidentally. I preferred when I carried the work and the depression for the two of us, but she wants to have a job, school, and bevy of pets.

Going to bed early with her on weekends reads as unnatural. Maybe it will feel differently come summer, when weekends are no longer my only days off, but I suspect it won't.

I want to have the base minimum to be happy, then a touch more. I don't want to work double shifts or get more degrees than I need to have the job I roughly do. I'm good. I put in my time being otherwise. If I am to be in a classroom, I had better be in the front with a paycheck attached.

We four sit in the shade, enjoying wine or enduring La Croix, respective. Veronica comments how there are largely old people at this art opening. JP points out that we will one day be these people, if we are not already.

Veronica is the one who says the cursed hyphenated term, the Term That Ought Not Be Spoken: middle-aged.

We are all in our late thirties, aside from Amber. "Middle-age" should not start until forty-five. We have time.

"You better not be middle-aged," I tell Amber.

She does not think this is an issue, as she has no intention of aging or dying, and certainly not at sixty.

Veronica says it does not feel as though she is middle-aged. She is healthier than in her twenties, even if she is not as trim.

I say the same. I am fitter now. Aside from a bit of mental illness, I am in the best shape of my life. In some ways, I look better, too.

"Middle-aged might not mean what it did when we were younger," Veronica offers.

I would like to believe it is a matter that the American populous is healthier. Middle-aged people going back to time immemorial thought they were younger than their parents had been at this age. (Assuming that anyone cared to speculate what "middle-aged" meant, or that the term had any relevance that distant land where people died of smallpox and measles.)

None of us are where we would ideally want to be. Veronica should be the director of some library where they pay her enough, which is possibly not a library that exists. I should be the favorite English teacher and drama director at a liberal boarding school in the woods, adored for my quirky novels. Amber should be... I am not sure. Paid to be a student of whenever she wishes. Maybe a professor of the sciences. You would think, given that she is my wife, I would have a better handle on her best of all possible worlds. (When I ask her, she says, "I'm good here. Maybe with a house and more pets. An entire village of pets under my control. And a tortoise. And you teaching at a college, so I can take free classes.") As for JP, I have no idea what he wants.

Few people end up wholly where they intended, or luck into something better. I have a better than average middle class, nearly middle-age existence. I want for little. I can buy groceries without having to check my bank balance. A thousand-dollar expenditure is obnoxious, but it is not fatal. I have gone on vacations with my wife without suffering for the experience.

I have not giving up on thinking the best of me is still to come, but I am not sure how much more sleeve I have in which to hide it. I am one of the better writers you know. The trouble is, as I whine, not enough of you know me.

Middle-age means that I am at the top of a hill or getting there. From its peak, I don't know what I can see. I am aware of the path behind me, of the routes I wish I had taken and didn't from fear or bad advice. I don't know what will happen next.

We watch these people who we will one day be, barring premature fatal misfortune. I pick out the man likeliest to be my senior citizen avatar, tall, in a forest green shirt and khaki pants, his hands in his pockets, leading with his hips as he smiles in conversation with another man. His hair is white and thin, but he seems mischievous, which is enough to make him familiar. Even at this remove. I can tell he doesn't think he is old, unlike many of the other old people, who have resigned themselves to their fates or leaned into that skid. To them, we are young, and I am willing to take that judgment while I can. I am still cheered when my therapist, a woman in her sixties, calls me young. Maybe I am, by comparison, which is not nothing.

I have all but given up on a electromechanical transhuman messiah to ameliorate my mortal frame such that I can treat this closer to a quarter life crisis.

I don't know what it would mean to feel middle-aged. A lack of money for most of my life removed from me the signifiers of middle-age-ness. I do not have or want the overpriced convertible to seduce those college pixies who could make me feel young again, as I do not feel old yet. I do not have the in-ground pool. I do not want the 2.5 kiddos. All that I have that suggest my age is a steady, mildly soul-crushing job. I am young in habit. The acquisition of digital monsters goads most of my exercise. I did finally get myself bike shorts, which seems like the sort of thing a middle-aged guy would do. I have the good taste to hide them under exercise pants. I don't eat especially well, unless "rarely eating red meat" might be said to be a health strategy. I do not, though, eat especially poorly, as I did in my early twenties, when I was trying independence for the first time and had ice cream every night. I don't drink or smoke, which in act and effect might make me seem younger.

Veronica talks about how old thirty seemed when she was a teenager. Now, her kids listen to nineties music and think specific people in their forties and fifties are cool. Veronica hypothesizes the internet deserves the credit, as all eras happen at once for them. They can look at a movie from the nineteen twenties and it seems almost as relevant as something in twenty nineteen. Her kids are unstuck in time, so we cannot be old. Even some of the leading men now -- Johnny Depp, Robert Downy Junior, and Keanu Reeves -- are in their fifties. To them, these people are still relevant and big draws to the box office. Their stories are not only about fatherhood, or grandfatherhood. So, there is hope. To me, at their age, these men would have seemed antique.

My friends have some gray hairs and wrinkles by their eyes when they smile. I look at the nubile coeds bouncing about my college town and I want to grade their essays. They seem like children to me, albeit ones who can hold a conversation. I do not talk with them because I am older, and it would be creepy.

I have lost friends to suicide and overdose. These are tragedies, but still the deaths of the young. My friends are not dying of heart disease.

This day is pleasant, warm enough, the pollen making me itchy, but I wouldn't trade it for another.

We watch baby goats, speculating that they are all the progeny of one magnificently bearded goat with enormous, pendulous testicles. One of the goats tries to chew off Veronica's dress. I have acquired from Amber a manner with animals that most respond to immediately, particularly these tame goats, who are in seconds keen to have their heads scratched even though I am not feeding them.

I don't know that I have ever felt my age, when I was young or now. I was too old when I was young, too young now that I am... whatever we are calling this. Too young when I was middle. I don't see a reason to feel my age now. I am fashionably on-time.

Soon in Xenology: Sanity. Writing. Summer.

last watched: Angel: the Series
reading: Fast Times at Ridgemont High
listening: Damien Rice