You're Only As Old As You Feel - Wrong! Hang Up Your Spurs Before Your Horse Dies

Bob Muzelle sat before his coffee and donut at a local Washington diner - his assignation with retirement in Petworth, far from the corridors of power.  He needed a few minutes alone, away from the hubbub of the Inauguration and the first week of the new Administration of Donald Trump. He, like most of his colleagues, was not just shocked by the result of the election but existentially wounded.

Life seemed a shadow of its former heady, upbeat, marvelous self.  Bob could not come to grips with the resounding defeat of the Democratic Party, the hullabaloo surrounding the new man's radical right wing agenda, and with the fact that he, Bob, finally and absolutely after decades of the good fight was out of steam.

Progressivism was not just a political choice for Bob, but a matter of destiny.  From his first year at Yale under the tutelage of the Reverend Berkeley Mitter - veteran of Freedom Rides and the Pettis Bridge; colleague of Martin and Ralph, in the first rank of protesters on the Mall, champion of women, gays, and black men everywhere - Bob was committed to the fight for equality and social justice. 

He evolved with the times.  When the soup of nuclear disarmament became cold, he turned to peace in general, demonstrated in front of the Pentagon, rallied against American adventurism, and spoke loudly and enthusiastically for internationalism and peaceful convention.  When that too dropped off the radar, he turned to women's rights and was seen at every conference, seminar, and protest showing the flag, marching in solidarity and unity.  

When women had broken through the glass ceiling but still felt abused, he joined the avant garde of MeToo, protested against male supremacy and systemic misogyny.  In short there was no liberal cause beyond him.  He was a progressive's progressive.

Now, the defeat of his party and the ascendency of the arch-villain Trump should not alone have sent him to the showers.  It was the realization that he was an old man, far past his pull-by date, increasingly supernumerary and insignificant - a has-been, a nobody, a cipher.  How could this have happened, Bob wondered?  Weren't the years of commitment and passion worth something in and of themselves? Something inherent and indelible? 

The Trump victory and the sweeping away of every last treasure of progressive intent was an epiphanic moment. Suddenly lines of Villon, Dickenson, and Eliot popped into his head

   We are the hollow men
    We are the stuffed men
    Leaning together
    Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
    Our dried voices, when
    We whisper together
    Are quiet and meaningless
    As wind in dry grass
    Or rats' feet over broken glass
    In our dry cellar
   
    Shape without form, shade without color,
    Paralyzed force, gesture without motion...

 

Bob had a longtime friend and Yale classmate who was his antithesis - 'a moral wastrel' Bob's minister had called men like him who had abjured serious pursuit and led a life of uncommitted leisure.  Randy was indeed an Epicurean - a bon vivant, boulevardier, man about town.  He was squire to beautiful women and moved with elision and grace through a charmed life of ease.  Despite the world's ills, his educational pedigree, and wily intelligence, Randy played while Bob huddled and plotted with black men.  

Bob tried to nudge his friend, shake some sense into him, stir up some decent sentiment, but Randy could only talk about his Palestinian lover, the Belgian restaurant on Lake Tanganyika, and the apres-ski party at Gstaad.  How could such a man - an intelligent, reasonable, understanding person be so....so, soulless, so uncaring about the less fortunate?

Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich had led a controlled, disciplined, unattached life - happily his own, unencumbered and if without passion at least with a sense of order.  Then, a death sentence came unexpected, and as he passed through phases of anger, denial, and finally resignation, he at last came to his senses.  The past meant nothing at all, only the dark, unknowable future was real. 

Francois Villon in his Ballade des Pendus wrote mercilessly about the ignominy of death and its erasure of the past

La pluie nous a bués et lavés,
Et le soleil desséchés et noircis.
Pies, corbeaux nous ont les yeux cavés,
Et arraché la barbe et les sourcils.
Jamais nul temps nous ne sommes assis
Puis çà, puis là, comme le vent varie,
A son plaisir sans cesser nous charrie,
Plus becquetés d’oiseaux que dés à coudre.

'Crying in my beer', said Bob out loud over his coffee, ashamed at himself but still ginning up some enthusiasm for the four years of opposition to the tyrant, years more as long as he was able in the foulest inner city ghettos, hand in hand with bitches, cunts, and...

'Stop it!', he yelled as Villon and Eliot got further mixed up with images of loud black women. 

This confusion was not the way his life was supposed to end.  He was to be feted and remembered; but here he was in Petworth, one more bit of K Street detritus blown to the four winds.  'I must call Randy', he mumbled, pulling out his phone and punching in his coordinates, but that vaporous, forever insignificant man could only offer cold comfort if that.  

Why hadn't he noticed? The nosebleed seat at the Fifth Women's Conference On Gender Equality, left off the bus headed for a George Floyd memorial, and uninvited to speak at the Global Commune For Climate Action were all signs of the inevitable.  And why had he accepted Seat Z-189 and not complained about being left off the bus and the docket?

Funny what epiphany will do to you.  Bob hobbled his way to the door of the diner, a stooped old man. 'Shall I wear my trousers rolled?', said Eliot in The Hollow Men, a line which finally made sense. 

And there on Pennsylvania Avenue was Randy Moss, his epicurean friend, a man his age but with a beautiful young woman on his arm, and the epiphany was complete.  Better late than never, thought Bob, but what do I do with the information?

And so the old adage about hanging them up before the horse dies came banging away loud and clear - a lesson learned too late. Shuffleboard and Ma Jong in a Tampa retirement home.