September 26: "The First Night," Son's Birthday, Shuffling Off

There is something about being near a young person that makes you feel older, especially if that young person is your own offspring.

I am the father of a daughter and son.  My daughter is 23 going on 24.  My son turned 16 today.  And I am ancient.

Billy Collins contemplates mortality . . . 

The First Night

by: Billy Collins

The worst thing about death must be
the first night.
—Juan Ramón Jiménez

Before I opened you, Jiménez,
it never occurred to me that day and night
would continue to circle each other in the ring of death,

but now you have me wondering
if there will also be a sun and a moon
and will the dead gather to watch them rise and set

then repair, each soul alone,
to some ghastly equivalent of a bed.
Or will the first night be the only night,

a long darkness for which we have no other name?
How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death,
How impossible to write it down.

This is where language will stop,
the horse we have ridden all our lives
rearing up at the edge of a dizzying cliff.

The word that was in the beginning
and the word that was made flesh—
those and all the other words will cease.

Even now, reading you on this trellised porch,
how can I describe a sun that will shine after death?
But it is enough to frighten me

into paying more attention to the world’s day-moon,
to sunlight bright on water
or fragmented in a grove of trees,

and to look more closely here at these small leaves,
these sentinel thorns,
whose employment it is to guard the rose.

My son is amazing.  Smart and funny, he can always make me laugh.  Like any teenager, he can also drive me up a wall sometimes.  It goes with the territory.  He's had his share a struggles in his young life and has overcome a lot.  Please note that I'm not saying my son is perfect.  (I hate those Christmas letters that paint portraits of children as reincarnations of Saint Francis of Assisi or the Virgin Mary.)  I'm just saying the kid is pretty awesome.

We celebrated my son's birthday rather quietly today, per his request.  He hung out with a friend after school, and then he came to a poetry reading at a local kombucha establishment.  My daughter showed up to give him a present at the reading, and one of my best friends gave him a present, too.  He didn't want anyone to sing him "Happy Birthday," and he didn't want to blow out candles on a cake.  Remember, he is 16 and gets embarrassed by the smallest of attentions.  I can't have the car radio on when dropping him off at school, lest classmates hear my humiliating taste in 1980s music.

I remember those awkward teenage years.  In fact, even though I graduated from high school a very long time ago (according to my son), I still carry around my 16-year-old self.  Writer Willa Cather once said, "By the time you are eighteen, you have all the material you will ever need to write."  I don't think we ever totally exorcise those damaging teenage years.  Perhaps that's what Cather's getting at.  

As I said at the beginning of this post, kids have a way of reminding you that you're old.  It's doesn't take much.  A Duran Duran song.  A gray hair.  An invitation to a 40th class reunion.  My son always says the same thing, "Man, you're fucking old."

Saint Marty isn't quite ready to shuffle of this mortal coil just yet.