Wasting my Fiftieth Year
I have come lately to suspect that I have largely wasted my fiftieth year. Here could commence a tedious recitation of the ways this might be so. We are in a pandemic and I have found it paralyzing. My intellect stalls in even routine work; my body is a wreck from months of accumulated stress; my vocabulary is thin because I talk to few and rarely; and my will to make any of these matters otherwise abandoned me some months ago. These, I expect, are just the stuff of life as we must live it now, at least for those like me – those already bent by temperament to melancholy or to worry. I tried resistance for a time, tried capitulation too. But what has come to aid me in a way I will try here to recount is fixing on my age. It came to me last week in some pleasant mental rearrangement, a sudden turning of the mental winds. To relate my insight now will be to talk as my grandmother would, to start at the beginning but veer off wide and far before I at last arrive at the thought that is my present therapy.
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Unable to spend my time in the useful ways I used to do – writing, reading, thinking, doing manual labor out of doors – some time ago, I turned to more quixotic pursuits. This explains how I came to be down in the Ten Acre Patch sawing old fence boards by hand.
The Ten Acre Patch is a little used twelve-acre valley that lies on the farthest northeast corner of our farm. (Once he learned its proper measurement, my husband tried briefly to get us all to call it the Twelve Acre Patch, but we are a people committed more to our past than to accuracy.) I had gone to the Patch to find some different, less familiar place to be. I have many hides and haunts upon the farm where I retreat to be outside – a walnut grove beside the creek where the changing of the trees through seasons is enough to occupy my idled mind; a flat atop our hill from which I can survey the lake and, depending on the time of day, spy cranes or deer; a dip beneath a vast old oak beside the piles of rock my people built when they cleared the land for pasture. None of these would do that day because I had a purpose: I was there to saw up boards for scrap, then to paint on each a trouble that I have. Once I had assembled the troubles, I would set them all alight and make a woe fire so I could turn each trouble into ash. For this, the Ten Acre Patch appeared most impractical and so best. One wants a chore like this to be remarked by place and not just by the work, I thought, and good to loose the troubles into words where the farm around is at its loneliest and wild.
I hasten here to say I am not an especially superstitious sort. If troubles could be really burnt and thereby made to yield, I think we human beings would have sorted that out by now – perhaps the way we have our other garbage. We’d by now have civic pyres placed for common use wherever people dwell, or we’d have trouble collectors come to tote our burdens off and burn them for us. Yet even as I don’t believe that troubles really yield to flame, I incline to think that some futile acts are still worth doing. There can be a clarifying relief in enacting longings we lack power to fulfill. It is sometimes a good to simply know just what it is you want, and torching troubles registers the wish for their destruction more potently than the wish alone will do. This, at least, is how I conceived the woe fire. Yet as often happens with too much I try to do, it did not take long to spy the gap that yawns wide between conception of a task and its material execution.
Sawing boards by hand in winter is both tedious and tiring, the work made worse when a truck tailgate is one’s only sawhorse, worse still when one forgets to bring good gloves. On setting out, I was all energy, but this soon ebbed with the endless scratching of my saw. I also hadn’t thought to count my troubles first or to think about how fine a parsing I would like to make. After all, if one will count one’s troubles one wants to have some system, a taxonomy and sense of scale.
It quickly comes to bother me to recognize how many troubles are related and represent a choice that I must make: summarize them into one or keep them separate, each with its own board? I could make one for my family’s health or I could paint a board for each of our afflictions. Should I burn my husband’s fractured spine, my father’s crumbled ankles, and mother’s broken wrist, or paint them all as one? And what of more elusive woes that work on me? How big a trouble should a trouble be to warrant being burnt? Does my intractable inertia count? I think I’d like it to, because I’d dearly love to burn it. But with boards all sawn to near size, the boards become unseemly if my inertia sits on one and a global pandemic on another. These troubles should not be alike in scale – because they manifestly aren’t – but on my boards they would be. Perhaps I could adjust for this with a third board for self-pity? These were the innervating thoughts that came to me belatedly, round about the time my wood scraps numbered thirty. It occurred to me that should I parse the troubles fine, I might keep sawing all my days and without cease. And then I also thought perhaps I should settle on but one – paint THE WORLD and grab the lighter fluid. Not one to solve a problem when I can dwell on it, I paused all work to lay in the truck bed and stare long at the sky. I was swiftly joined in this by my stray dog.
I have written of my stray dog before, some months ago when, from our now much longer close acquaintance, I see I barely knew him. His name is Dog because that’s what the neighbor called him and it stuck, the way a name most fitting does. Dog has now followed me across the farm and home again each day for months. If I am on the farm, he is wherever I might go. (He is here now, nosing through some buckbrush while I type.) If I am home, he waits for me outside, nesting in a pile of leaves, stationed on the porch, or napping beside my truck so he can wake and join me if I leave. He is my guardian, too. When I emerge from the house, he makes haste to herd away the neighbor’s cattle where they gather across the road, lest one unaccountably irritate or menace me.
I am here compelled to emphasize Dog’s steady presence, his faithful daily constancy, in order to explain – I won’t say justify – the way I talk to him sometimes. Most of our verbal interaction is just the prosaic stuff of dogs and people. I compliment his fine looks, his good character, and demand he leave those cows alone. But I also sometimes go a little farther, as I did that day while leaving off the sawing of my trouble boards. When he joined me in the truck bed for my rest, I idly scratched his head and this worked on me the way Dog often does. My gnarled thoughts about taxonomies of trouble gave way to restive impatience with my situation. The contentment of this dog, I find, will do this, will work some force that makes my inner life that bit too much to take. As I picked fresh burrs from his dense coat, I said, “Dog, I’m fifty years old and I’m in a pasture sawing boards so I can paint them with troubles just so I can burn them.” This is when the waste of my year arrived in force.
When one has achieved fifty, one has a chance to frame all manner of one’s doings with one’s age, and fifty in particular lends a special jolt to what you do. At fifty – or so I have found it – one sits betwixt and between, the end of child rearing largely come but the end of one’s parents an end one can foresee if it is not yet already suffered. One is presumed competent, an adult, but also, so it seems, a bit too boring, fixed too firmly into place. At fifty, one is neither starting out nor finishing off. One should be mature, but not yet truly old. One is still bit resilient, but also somewhat stiff. All this in between, for me at least, means I have no natural place where I alight. I sometimes talk to Dog, but also wash the dishes.
When I was young, I thought that by the age of fifty my rough edges would have sanded down, that the tedium of things like chores would be a plight I’d just accept, as if resignation to dull duty were a gift the years alone would give me. I am fifty years old and washing dishes again, I now say daily. I find this well catches the prosaic tasks nigh unending at this age. At fifty, one has washed so many dishes and yet will have so many more to come. It’s a kind of good to mark the spot, to own the Sisyphus of pots and pans you are. There will come a day for one’s last dish, but it isn’t yet, you get to say. And of course there’s a bit of churlish in the dishes, in their ubiquity and repetition. Append all that with fifty and the tired, heavy self grows lighter in self-satire. One wants at fifty, after all, not to be undone by mundane dishes. Nor yet to be someone who simply takes all troubles in one’s stride. In youth, I had assumed that fifty held the kind of wise that makes one staid, and am relieved it isn’t so. One sometimes wants to break a dish instead of wash it. One still gets up to things and better still can often do so freely. At ten, no one lets you start fires. At fifty, one can go slightly mad in ways no one can stop.
It is fifty’s very in-between-ness that makes one neither comic nor quite tragic. Instead, I think and say to Dog, I believe I’m tragicomic. I am fifty years old and explaining myself to a dog. That is the magic bolt of fifty. Any sentence one can utter of oneself is much improved when prefaced with one’s age. The age contains whole worlds of psychic revelation and relief. How, I think, have I been fifty for so many months and missed this?
Since that day, I have made all manner of frustration yield to this, to my inner narration of my life in the register of fifty. I am fifty years old and… I have discovered that appending this up front transforms most anything that follows. I have tried a bit to explain this to myself, to assess the source and nature of the transformation, but not too hard. Some tools are nicer to use than understand. Even so, I suspect it owes to something like the reason artists took up painting dogs playing poker – which is to say the incongruity. Dogs don’t really play poker so seeing them do it sets the world a little on a pleasing tilt. We like to witness things that do not really happen, creatures showing powers we don’t think they ought to have. I expect that being fifty may be like this in some almost totalizing way – it is the age of incongruity. I have turned my age into a torch made some troubles yield.
