When my father turned 48 years old, I had just turned three. Now that I’m turning 48, the idea of raising a three-year-old at this time in my life is both laughable and daunting, and the idea of my Dad having to do it makes me understand my childhood a little more, makes me feel a little closer to him. Fortunately, I had this realization a couple of years ago, and the closeness that resulted was something that grew between us before he left.
“Now that I’m turning 48…” the words echo, and the number feels oddly out of place. Alan Ilagan, 48… doesn’t seem possible. It’s not that I’m bothered by it – aging never really bothered me, despite the pressure that it puts on the average gay man – it’s more that I haven’t assigned myself an age in my head since I was a teenager, when every year mattered, when every number amounted to an accomplishment.
“Just get through the goddamn day…” is a line from Tom Ford’s ‘A Single Man’, as good a film as any with which to celebrate a middle-aged man’s uneventful birthday. Perhaps ‘celebrate’ is too strong a word this year, or this summer.
We’ve had to reschedule our Boston birthday plans while we recuperate fully from our bout with COVID, which will work out better anyway – I was hoping to make it there on my birthday for at least one special dinner, but rescheduling will allow for the full stretch of time I’d planned on being there. And really, at this point, after 47 of these silly things, what does the actual day matter anyway? Suzie tells me she always works on her birthday, making me feel like a spoiled brat for feeling the least bit pathetic by not making a bigger deal of the day. We’ve all gained a little perspective in the last year, though part of me yearns for the days when my biggest complaint could be missing out on a birthday dinner. Maybe the world needed to tear down my enchantments, to show me something worthy of such complaint. Still, I want to go back to simpler times. Simpler concerns.
Birthdays are opportune moments to reconnect to something more simple. Only those truly close to me would believe I strive for that – so much of the image I’ve made for myself is about being extra and over-the-top and fabulously hoity-toity… and for much of my life it’s served to protect me in its shiny, sparkling way. Razzle dazzle them, they said, and they’ll beg you for more.
Is a birthday supposed to celebrate surviving another year, or marking the moment when you can start it all over again? Does it honor the past or the future? There’s something awful about it being both.
“Sometimes awful things have their own kind of beauty.” – ‘A Single Man’
Here we are, then, at the mark of my 48th year, as unremarkable as any other August day, with less than a month to go before summer ends her empty reign. This August will always be haunted for me – and I want it to be done. If that means burying a birthday without fanfare or celebration, maybe that’s the lesson to be learned.
“Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face – the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man – all present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us – we have died – what is there to be afraid of?
It answers them: But that happened so gradually, so easily. I’m afraid of being rushed.” ~ A Single Man’
