In Praise of Middle-Age

One of the lasting cultural artifacts from Ptolemy’s 2nd century astronomy treatise the Almagest was a catalog of more than 1,000 stars, including 48 constellations in the northern hemisphere like my personal favorite Orion. Ptolemy obviously didn’t get everything quite right, it being the 2nd century and all, but it’s amazing how much of his work stuck around.

I love Orion as a constellation. In my neck of the woods it’s generally easy to find in the Fall/Winter sky, and helps me orient myself around the rest of the visible cosmos, like a Rosetta Stone unlocking the northern hemisphere night sky. (You can take the boy out of Boy Scouts...) But I’m also fascinated that for all the wealth of Greek mythology surviving to the present day, the legends and family trees and turmoil, there’s little of Orion the Hunter’s story remaining, aside from a few snippets.

The idea that one could be famous enough to make the short list of All the Constellations, but not have much legacy to leave behind — there’s something resonant there for me. I was born in 1979, so I barely make the official Generation X cutoff, but I had an older sister and absorbed much of her 80s pop culture hair metal adolescence, so I am spiritually Gen X through and through. And like all Xers, I am well-versed in being forgotten, passed over, and generally left to my own devices. Maybe Orion is a quintessential latchkey kid, free-range parented by busy beings, eternally roaming dark skies on the hunt for his next adventure.

This is the kind of stuff middle-aged men with too much reading time ponder. There’s a running joke that by the time we hit forty we have to choose our area of focus (I’m told there’s only golf, barbecuing, or World World II, and everything else is a variation on one of those three). I suppose I picked poetry, science, and mythology/folklore, which is why poems like this come out when I start getting introspective about aging.

Hunter/Gatherer
When I am fully grown
I hope to be young and ravenous
curious about the world,
less sure of my footing
catching myself staring at the sky
again, under Orion’s belt,
its buckle Alnilam
twice as far away as either side,
all soon fading from view
as seasons shift
to spring then summer.
When I am fully grown
but young I will know things like this.
And also see them with unassisted eyes
cradled by soft skin,
bare face against honeysuckle breeze,
and not creak when I greet the day.
When Orion has left early for his hunt,
I will meander and gather
chamomile and yarrow,
soft cut tulips, and Indian Blanket
and rest in the clearing by the lake
to soak in the sun.
Odysseus once caught a glimpse of him
stalking something huge and ominous
in the house of shadows,
bronze club glinting corners
no one had remembered to sweep.
Somehow the hunter’s story
is only remembered in fragments
of poems and stars,
and maybe mine will be, too,
when I am fully grown
and so young I am only a twinkle
in my children’s failing eyes.

Perhaps this is just the way of things. We age, make choices, and then try to make peace with them. We choose the reality of life at home with Penelope over the promise of eternal youth out there somewhere with bottomless Calypsos. In middle age we turn inward, but if we are lucky enough to have the privilege of raising children, we can’t look inside for too long before we are viscerally pulled back out of ourselves to look at this or that, to help, to fix a minor injustice wrapped in major emotions, or simply to listen to their story and witness them growing.

For my part, I love this. Don’t perceive me, certainly, but more than that let my story be swallowed up in theirs, in the good I can do in my city and my communities, in words that hopefully resonate with someone who needs that just right incantation. If this is a midlife crisis, let it come. Let it roll over me and crush the parts that are old, and worn out and no longer useful for the downhill part of my journey. Let me grow younger in spirit and mind, even as I attempt to hold the shell together with the assistance of clean living and modern medicine.

And let the stories be the part that lasts.