“Young Spice”
Over the holidays, I was at my sister’s place. The youngest generation was racing
about the house, screaming “not in the face” as they shot each other with foam
projectiles launched from colorful plastic rifles.
Their older cousins sat with the adults, eating hors d’oeurves, and chatting about
finding apartments, landing jobs, and otherwise filling out their futures. What a
change, I thought. These people I remember as newborns. Now they were on the
verge of adulthood and talking about things I had direct experience with. And for a
second I felt relevant. But only a second. Next I felt old, a feeling that was much less
quick to pass.
My future, unlike theirs, is not a blank page. I left college twenty years ago and have
been in the same line of work ever since. Rent I no longer pay because I have this
other thing called a mortgage. And while I do give a lot of thought to how I want to
live, I am aware that with three kids and a well-chosen spouse, I have already placed
some major bets.
I retain many fresh-seeming memories of my twenties, but there’s a good bit of stuff
that happened after that decade and before the period I think of as, well, now. So, I
cannot really be young, except in the not-true metaphorical sense.
Recently, I mentioned to a new acquaintance something that had happened to me
around the age of thirty. “And that was, like, what, two years ago,” she said with
friendly sarcasm. Naturally, I took offense.
It doesn’t happen a lot but over the summer I was definitely distracted by my age.
We had taken in a baseball player who was a pitcher in the local college all-star
summer league.
Before he arrived, I made so many jokes about my wife Cynthia fawning over the
handsome young jock in our midst. Oh, do you need a fresh towel? I had her saying, as
she flung herself about the house, starry-eyed and eager to please. Which isn’t at all
like Cynthia, but never mind.
Once I met him, however, the jokes no longer made sense. He was a total innocent.
He drank milk by the gallon. When he was going to be late, he would text my wife
sheepish messages to let her know. He played with our kids, winding up his
southpaw with a wiffle ball to the howls of my boys before releasing slow fat ones
right over the plate.
It occurred to me that he was closer in age to my children than he was to me. I once
broached conversation by asking him about the average number of pitches he threw
in a start, then instantly regretted it, realizing how dorky this sounded. He didn’t
actually call me Sir, but, I could tell, he was thinking it.
For a few weeks the pitcher slept in our basement, which also happened to be where
we watch television and keep all the children’s toys, but on the whole Cynthia and I
tried to discourage use of the downstairs while he was boarding with us. But our
boys—especially the older one, Ben—could not be kept away from the pitcher or his
things.
Ben is eight years old and, incidentally, one person I can count on not to think of me
as middle-aged. A while back, I took him to a park with some tennis courts. We
practiced together and then I told him to go hit against a wall while I worked on my
serve. But he refused, yelling, “You just want to practice by yourself so you can
become a big famous tennis player, and you won’t play with me because you don’t
want me to become a famous tennis player.”
He is wide-eyed about growing up, almost as much as he is confused by it. Recently
he asked us to buy him deodorant, Old Spice, to be exact. Where had this come from?
It turned out that Old Spice was the brand our pitcher wore. Being joykills, Cynthia
and I told Ben he didn’t need deodorant. Undeterred, he bought some on his own,
with saved-up allowance money, and began wearing it. “For the commanding man,”
the label says.
No amount of joshing would make Ben rethink his decision. Instead he answered his
critics by marching around the house with his elbows high in the air and his
underarms exposed, saying, “Smell my wrath.”
It’s a line usually associated with another kind of body odor. I know some very good
parents who would have taken corrective action at this point, but not me. Fart
humor, like childhood itself, is timeless, which must explain my weakness for it.
