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Monday
While others today are celebrating presidential birthdays, we’ll be celebrating my wife’s, who shares February 17 with Michael Jordan. (Julia played basketball in college and so is happy with the pairing.) When we are young, of course, each birthday has its own individual importance, but after a while anniversaries start to merge together. What really is the difference between 73 and 74?
In “On the Eve of a Birthday,” Timothy Steele uses the occasion to reflect on his life. “Calendars aren’t truthful,” he observes—is he suggesting that he feels younger than his years?—and the Scotch sloshing in his glass is contributing to his jaunty buoyancy. I am reminded of the aging Eben Flood in E.A. Robinson’s “Mr. Flood’s Party.”
As the speaker looks towards the future, sometimes he sees himself stepping into a richly furnished dining room and sometimes into a spare garret. Yet when pulled down by “bad dreams” (Steele borrows from Hamlet here), he rallies and toasts the future, which will be “the best year yet.”
I think of a friend from our days in St. Mary’s City, MD, an actress who had made her way from Texas to New York (she did so as a burlesque dancer) in 1934 and who was one of the most upbeat people I have ever known. Maurine Holbert Hogaboom used to insist that each decade was better than the one before—or at least she said this about her sixties, seventies, and eighties. (She died at 96.)
In any event, the fact that time is running out is all the more reason to regard life as precious. No point in regrets about “mixed joys,“ “harum-scarum prime,” or “auguries reliable and specious.” When he talks about “constellated powers” swaying him, I think of William Ernest Henley thanking “whatever gods there be/For my unconquerable soul” in “Invictus.” The speaker toasts them all.
The wonderful thing about reaching this age—I join Julia at 74 later this year—is that we have been able to spend 53 of those years together. Nor have we needed sloshing Scotch to value what we’ve been through, the unsuccesses as well as the successes, the tragedies as well as the victories. Each passing year deepens the bond.
Happy birthday, my dear.
On the Eve of a Birthday
By Timothy Steele
As my Scotch, spared the water, blondly sloshes
About its tumbler, and gay manic flame
Is snapping in the fireplace, I grow youthful:
I realize that calendars aren’t truthful
And that for all of my grand unsuccesses
External causes are to blame.
And if at present somewhat destitute,
I plan to alter, prove myself more able,
And suavely stroll into the coming years
As into rooms with thick rugs, chandeliers,
And colorfully pyramided fruit
On linened lengths of table.
At times I fear the future won’t reward
My failures with sufficient compensation,
But dump me, aging, in a garret room
Appointed with twilit, slant-ceilinged gloom
And a lone bulb depending from a cord
Suggestive of self-strangulation.
Then, too, I have bad dreams, in one of which
A cowled, scythe-bearing figure beckons me.
Dark plains glow at his back: it seems I’ve died,
And my soul, weighed and judged, has qualified
For an extended, hyper-sultry hitch
Down in eternity.
Such fears and dreams, however, always pass.
And gazing from my window at the dark,
My drink in hand, I’m jauntily unbowed.
The sky’s tiered, windy galleries stream with cloud,
And higher still, the dazed stars thickly mass
In their long Ptolemaic arc.
What constellated powers, unkind or kind,
Sway me, what far preposterous ghosts of air?
Whoever they are, whatever our connection,
I toast them (toasting also my reflection),
Not minding that the words which come to mind
Make the toast less toast than prayer:
Here’s to the next year, to the best year yet;
To mixed joys, to my harum-scarum prime;
To auguries reliable and specious;
To times to come, such times being precious,
If only for the reason that they get
Shorter all the time.
