In the Mirror, the Past Looks Back
For years now, I’ve had the experience of glancing at myself and seeing parts of my father’s body where mine should be. Slipping on a pair of gloves, I look down and see not the hand of a man in his prime, as I used to think I was, but that of my father, whose hands were adorned with age spots long before they became tendons held together by blue veins.
Why, I wonder, is he wearing my ring on his hand? Oh, it’s mine. My ring, my hand. When did that happen, I find myself asking?
Or, shaving, I glance in the bathroom mirror to make sure my hand doesn’t slip and sever my carotid artery. I promised my wife when we married that I would never do anything to put myself at risk. That included activities like hang-gliding and bungee jumping over alligator-infested rivers. Low on the list was being careful while shaving. It seemed like a quaint promise at the time. Who knew how fast it would rise on the probability scale?
Then there’s hair. Since we inherit our balding patterns from our maternal grandfathers, I was never going to see my father’s full shock of hair on my head. What I didn’t expect was to peer into the mirror as I smoothed the “eyelashes” growing on my scalp—I would hardly call them hair—and see my grandfather’s balding pate atop my father’s aged face. My grandfather’s been gone since I was eleven, some 63 years ago, so it was a shock to see his oiled, silver strands combed back across my skull, framing my father’s face.
The last time I remember seeing that grandfather was when he took me to the cavernous warehouse of the import-export company where he worked. It was filled with candy and toys, and he invited me to choose anything I wanted for my upcoming eleventh birthday. I could have picked any of a dozen boxed toys that took my fancy—a huge Meccano set, an electric train, a telescope on a tripod as big as I was—but I could never have imagined asking for anything so elaborate. My grandfather made clear his preference that I select something athletic. I didn’t really want the soccer ball I eventually pointed at. I felt like a fraud, and as we walked out between the towering shelves stuffed with shining toys I would never own and tried to conceal it beneath one arm.
The soccer ball lived for years in my bedroom closet, a reminder, whenever I looked at it, that I hadn’t been determined enough to ask for what I really wanted. Of course, whether I really knew what I wanted is another matter. Perhaps, it’s just one example of how the stories we manufacture about our past seem to define us.
But this is off topic. My intention was not to write about the past, or even about how the past gets reflected in the present. What I want to discuss is how the past we never anticipated discovering in ourselves appears when we least expect it.
I thought I had a grasp on what it means to get old. After all, I have watched it happen to my parents, in particular, to my father. At first, he aged almost imperceptibly, and then very fast. In his last few years, he aged at such an excruciatingly slow pace that when debility finally ended his journey, it came as both a relief and a surprise. Watching him, I imagined my own trajectory to include physical changes like wrinkles and baldness and age spots.
Perhaps my balance would go. There might be glasses and loss of hearing and chronic itching. Maybe I would even find it increasingly difficult to locate exactly the right word to express a particular idea. But one thing I didn’t anticipate has happened, too. Suddenly, surprisingly, amazingly.
All our lives we train to become better. We measure our height against the wall from the moment we can stand. I remember distinctly weighing 90 pounds, and being impatient to get to 100. I was the prototypical ninety-pound weakling. My parents sent me to a gym where the owner, a retired policeman, routinely measured biceps and chests.
Measurements were noted on a wall chart so that we could track our progress. And progress we did. What a sense of achievement I had as my weight increased and my chest measurement inched upward! The number 27 inches comes to mind, but that was a long time ago.
We learn how to count and then to count in 10s and then in 100s. We move from simple arithmetic to algebra to trigonometry. We crawl, then walk, then run and, if we’re lucky, we learn to jump rope and perhaps do gymnastics. The point is that we are constantly striving to become bigger, brighter, stronger, more competent, and more self-sufficient as we increase our mastery over one discipline after another.
We’ve heard about the theoretical plateau, that hypothetical place where we stop advancing and instead hold steady for a while before whatever follows next. We pay it lip service, saying that we expect it to happen, but that can hardly be true. We can’t understand the reality of decline, any more than an infant can understand adulthood. And how many teenagers would choose to have children, if they understood the challenges involved in raising a child?
Some things can’t be denied. It turns out that strength, speed and endurance are no match for gravity and time. If we’re lucky enough, we reach a point where we have to admit that maintaining the status quo has become an adequate goal, and that, soon thereafter, the plateau will start to decline. I know that now. I learned it last week.
It was the mirror again. This time it wasn’t anything as mundane as my father’s ears or his fingers or his twinkly eyes. It was something far more elemental. As I raised my arm to smooth the back of my head, I saw not the full, ripe, swell of my bicep, which I could have sworn was there the previous week. Instead, I saw my father’s bicep. It reminded me of that old soccer ball when I last saw it a half-century ago, the leather loosening and stretching as the substance that gave it form and shape began to deflate.
I’m one of the fortunate ones, for whom this recognition remained hidden from me until my seventy-fourth year. Perhaps that says more about my denial of the obvious than anything else. If I insist, I can retain the delusion that I will continue to increase the weight I press and lower the time it takes to do so. But that deflated soccer ball is proof that despite the spirit’s willingness, the flesh may no longer be up to the task of constant improvement.
The advantage of doors closing is that they leave us space to focus on other things. I remind myself daily that we are constantly setting an example for someone else. Becoming a kinder, gentler husband is a goal with moving goalposts. Being the type of father I would wish my adult children become to theirs. The grandfather intentionally focused on creating memories for grandchildren.
I want to be a subtler chef. A writer whose words inspire. A painter with a looser, more instinctive brush. A greener-thumbed gardener. I may not get to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, which was once on my bucket list. But the Grand Canyon still beckons. And hiking the John Muir Trail—or parts of it—is still a possibility.
There’s another lesson, one my grandfather didn’t live long enough to learn. We don’t have a choice. The only way to keep going is to keep improving, for as long as we have breath. It’s who we are and what we do. What being human is all about.
At least, that’s what I will continue to do—and to believe—until such time as the reality of what I can’t yet imagine shows me otherwise.