Charles Daniel Jacobs had dropped off the radar.
Hugh Yates chartered a Gulfstream for the nuptials, and packed everyone from the Wolfjaw Ranch on board. Mookie McDonald represented the sixties admirably at the wedding, turning up in a paisley shirt with billowy sleeves, pipestem trousers, suede Beatle boots, and a psychedelic headscarf. The mother of the bride was just short of eye-popping in a vintage Ann Lowe dress she’d gotten on consignment, and as the vows were exchanged, she watered her corsage with copious tears. The groom could have stepped out of a Nora Roberts noveclass="underline" tall, dark, and handsome. He and I had a friendly conversation at the reception, before the party began its inevitable journey from tipsy conversation to drunk-ass dancing. I had no sense that Bree had told him I was the jalopy with the rusty rocker panels on which she had learned, although I was sure that someday she would—in bed after particularly good sex, likely as not. That was fine with me, because I wouldn’t have to be there for the inevitable masculine eye-roll.
The Nederland group went back to Colorado via American Airlines, because Hugh’s gift to the newlyweds was use of the Gulfstream, which would fly them to their Hawaiian honeymoon retreat. When he announced this during the toasts, Bree squealed like a nine-year-old, jumped up, and hugged him. I’m sure Charles Jacobs was the furthest thing from her mind at that moment, which was just as it should have been. But he never left mine, not completely.
As the hour grew late, I saw Mookie whispering to the leader of the band, a very decent rock-and-blues combo with a strong lead singer and a good backlog of oldies at their command. The bandleader nodded and asked if I’d like to come up and play guitar with the band for a set or two. I was tempted, but my better angels won the day and I begged off. You may never be too old to rock and roll, but skills fade as the years stack up, and the chances of making a fool of oneself in public grow better.
I didn’t exactly consider myself retired, but I hadn’t played in front of a live audience in over a year, and had only sat in on three or four recording sessions, all cases of dire emergency. I did not acquit myself well in any of them. During the playback of one, I caught the drummer grimacing, as if he’d bitten into something sour. He saw me looking at him and said the bass had fallen out of tune. It hadn’t, and we both knew it. If it’s ridiculous for a man in his fifties to be playing bedroom games with a woman young enough to be his daughter, it’s just as ridiculous for him to be playing a Strat and high-stepping to “Dirty Water.” Still, I watched those guys kick out the jams with some longing and quite a lot of nostalgia.
Someone took my hand and I looked around to see Georgia Donlin. “How much do you miss it, Jamie?”
“Not as much as I respect it,” I said, “which is why I’m sitting here. Those guys are good.”
“And you’re not anymore?”
I found myself remembering the day I had walked into my brother Con’s bedroom and heard his acoustic Gibson whispering to me. Telling me I could play “Cherry, Cherry.”
“Jamie?” She snapped her fingers in front of my eyes. “Come back, Jamie.”
“I’m good enough to amuse myself,” I said, “but my days of getting up in front of a crowd with a guitar are over.”
Turned out I was wrong about that.
In 2012, I turned fifty-six. Hugh and his longtime girlfriend took me out to dinner. On the way home I remembered a bit of old folklore—probably you’ve heard it—about how to boil a frog. You put it in cold water, then start turning up the heat. If you do it gradually, the frog is too stupid to jump out. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I decided it was an excellent metaphor for growing old.
When I was a teenager, I looked at over-fifties with pity and unease: they walked too slow, they talked too slow, they watched TV instead of going out to movies and concerts, their idea of a great party was hotpot with the neighbors and tucked into bed after the eleven o’clock news. But—like most other fifty-, sixty-, and seventysomethings who are in relative good health—I didn’t mind it so much when my turn came. Because the brain doesn’t age, although its ideas about the world may harden and there’s a greater tendency to run off at the mouth about how things were in the good old days. (I was spared that, at least, because most of my so-called good old days had been spent as a full-bore, straight-on-for-Texas drug addict.) I think for most people, life’s deceptive deliriums begin to fall away after fifty. The days speed up, the aches multiply, and your gait slows down, but there are compensations. In calmness comes appreciation, and—in my case—a determination to be as much of a do-right-daddy as possible in the time I had left. That meant ladling out soup once a week at a homeless shelter in Boulder, and working for three or four political candidates with the radical idea that Colorado should not be paved over.
I still dated the occasional lady. I still played tennis twice a week and rode my bike at least six miles a day, which kept my stomach flat and my endorphins flowing. Sure, I saw a few more lines around my mouth and eyes when I shaved, but on the whole, I thought I looked about the same as ever. That, of course, is the benign illusion of one’s later years. It took going back to Harlow in the summer of 2013 for me to understand the truth: I was just another frog in a pot. The good news was that so far the temperature had only been turned up to medium. The bad was that the process wouldn’t be stopping anytime soon. The three true ages of man are youth, middle age, and how the fuck did I get old so soon?
On June 19th of 2013, two years to the day after Bree’s marriage to George Hughes and a year after the birth of their first child, I arrived home from a less-than-stellar recording session to find an envelope gaily decorated with balloons in my mailbox. The return address was familiar: RFD #2, Methodist Road, Harlow, Maine. I opened it and found myself looking at a photograph of my brother Terry’s family with this caption: TWO ARE BETTER THAN ONE! PLEASE COME TO OUR PARTY!
I paused before opening it, noting Terry’s white hair, Annabelle’s expanding paunch, and the three young adults who were their children. The little girl who had once run giggling through the lawn sprinkler in nothing but a saggy pair of Smurfette underpants was now a good-looking young woman with a baby—my grand-niece, Cara Lynne—in her arms. One of my nephews, the skinny one, looked like Con. The husky one looked eerily like our father… and a little like me, poor guy.
I flipped the invitation open.
TIME: 12 NOON to ?
PLACE: OUR HOUSE TO START, THEN EUREKA GRANGE
FOOD: PLENTY!
BAND: THE CASTLE ROCK ALL-STARS
BYOB: DON’T YOU DARE! BEER & WINE WILL FLOW!
Below this was a note from my brother. Although only months from his sixtieth birthday, Terry wrote in the same grade-school scrawl that had caused one of his teachers to send him home with a note reading Terence MUST improve his penmanship! paperclipped to his rank card.