On Turning Fifty
for Don
Picture this:
You are speeding up Sessions Road,
on your way over the mountain,
going east, at 7:30 in the morning,
just as the light is beginning to form
its full bloom out of the mist,
and You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet
comes on the radio,
just as you catch a young man,
whirling in his front yard,
inside a cloud of bubbles,
he has just made,
as he's waiting for the school bus.
You see that he's special instantly,
that his hands hug the air
in a gesture of absolute surrender,
that his face is a study in rapture.
And his rapture is contagious.
So here we are now, in this moment: celebrating a birthday
as, like dominoes, we fall one after the other into fifty,
an inevitability which the dictionary defines as five times ten,
last in a series of 50 -- which could be seen as something coming to an end,
or better yet, a completion,
which leaves room for another beginning.
It's one in a series of 50 equal parts.
Fifty's a little scary, isn't it? Compared to the rest?
Alphabetically, it comes after fifth wheel
which sadly conjures up a person or thing not needed (anymore?)
and it's followed by fifty-fifty, which gives us hope
in its half-and-half suggestion of equal shares.
May your fiftieth then be the halfway mark,
with fifty more to come, the balancing point,
fulcrum of years light and buoyant as bubbles
floating along in a cloud around you.
The only other bubble story I know goes like this:
An old Clinton girl moved with her family to Hong Kong
long ago, and to amuse themselves, one sultry afternoon,
she and her brother blew bubbles on the balcony of their hotel.
After awhile they began to hear a buzz growing louder
under them and when they stood up they
saw that a huge crowd had gathered on the street,
mesmerized by these miracles of flying surface tension,
none of them had ever seen before.
That was near the turn of the other century.
Bubbles are, after all, slippery:
a thin film of liquid enclosing air,
or an air space invading a liquid.
Which is it?
Which one of them leads the dance?
Bubbles lack firmness, permanence, substance, or reality.
The only place they're permanent is in a spirit level,
which I guess brings us back again to fifty.
Emily Dickinson said:
For each ecstatic instant
we must an anguish pay
in keen and quivering ratio
to the ecstasy.
But I say the reverse is true:
for each anguish,
we've already paid,
let us find an ecstatic instant
where we may.
They're all around us
especially at the spirit level.
Don, may you have, in your second fifty,
may we all have,
an eye for these kinds of things.
May you cruise through the countryside
in the certainty that
B-B-B-Baby, You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet.
|