February 24, 2015

Once upon a time I thought retirement would feel guilt-free. There'd be no need to rush around, no more striving and grasping after things. Now, while I have never been much of a person for things, I find that the need for rushing and grasping persists. At the same time I just arose from a 45 minute nap with Gus on the couch. I would seem to be the definition of mixed feelings.

This is nothing new, particularly with regard to work. Should I care to connect the dots, I'm sure I could draw a link between my father's attitude toward me as lazy kid unappreciative of how good he had it in comparison to Jack's rather hard scrabble upbringing during The Depression and the feeling I had growing up during the 1950's and 60's that I was fundamentally incompetent somehow and that because of this softness would never quite be a man. Am I alone in having these feelings? I can't imagine that's the case. If there is one thing the persistently deferred choices of my generation reveals, it is ambivalence about what it means to grow up.

Yet even as I assert this as being beyond dispute, I have to say that I find this notion facile and lame. In fact, it is that I am a grown-up that is indisputable. Furthermore, I have come to the conclusion that the state itself is best seen through the prism of frustrated desire: to be a grown-up can be understood through the realization that there is something in this world that is your heart's desire that you know you can never have. For better or worse, the ability to go on despite this ache of need and loss defines manhood for me.

So am I a grown-up? Oh, you bet, and it is not just the faces of women that swim to the surface that prove this is so. It is in all the other unsatisfied dreams of dwelling places and occupations that would taunt me if I let them do so. But I go on despite -- perhaps because of? -- them, if only to prove to myself and yes, to the hectoring voices of all in my father's generation that I know how to do so, that in fact, I know what it means to be a man.

And so we come, not quite as a postscript, to the place of Parkinson's Disease in all of this. What does this twist of fate that took me out of the work force mean in light of these struggles? I'm not sure that it means enough simply to say that it put me into a different workplace, one that allows me to satisfy some of those heretofore unrealized dreams. While I can't say where this is going, I have the feeling that Parkinson's may help me to understand things that go rather deeper than that before it is done with me, mortal things that I would just as soon not contemplate before I absolutely have to. For now, at least, I think I will have to settle for using it as balm against the occasional impulse toward rushing and grasping that overtakes me. As such, it may serve as one more sign that I have learned to live with the burden of unsatisfied dreams.