"Another Nudge"

ANOTHER NUDGE

July 2008

I attended another wedding today, and I got an odd sensation from it. Not because there was a Best Woman instead of a Best Man. Not because there was a Bridesman instead of a fourth Bridesmaid next to the Maid of Honor. Not because it was a drawn-out Catholic affair, with the customary formality leavened by bits of stand-up humor from the priest. Not because the Father of the Bride is an old buddy of mine, jammed into a stiff black suit and anxious to have it—the wedding of his fourth of six children--all over with. Not because my dermatologist provided the music by playing the guitar and singing beautifully. Not because of the Chinese food served at the reception. Not because I renewed an acquaintance with a woman with whom I’d been a reporter, a woman who now lives and works as a writer in Galway, Ireland, and has had coffee with perhaps Ireland’s greatest living poet, Seamus Heaney.

No, I felt strange because, as I looked around I saw several former students—a sight that is distinctly NOT a rarity for me—and I noted that some of them were among my earliest students, from 1986 when I was student-teaching, 1987 when I was subbing to keep bread on my table, and 1988-90 when I spent my first two years under contract at Soldotna High School … and I noted that some of them were starting to look old. Simple mathematical calculations told me that the ages of these exes of mine ranged from 36 to 40. Shit! I thought. These people are nearing middle age. And suddenly, not surprisingly, I felt very old.

The bride is 37. Her older sisters are in their early 40s. Her youngest sibling, Patrick, the baby of the family, graduated from high school eight years ago and is already 26. All around me were former students with graying temples or balding pates or varying shades of dye disguising strands of white. All around me was middle-age spread, chunky butt, flesh on the precipice of sag. And, despite the fact that many of those thirty-somethings around me were, in fact, aging quite gracefully, the fact is that they reminded me once again just how long I’d been teaching, how many years I’d been playing the game of life.

Every so often, small references to my own mortality get thrown in my face. Today was one of them. It wasn’t a bad thing, really, like discovering I had an inoperable brain tumor or having someone to carefully explain to me that I was in the early stages of dementia. This was more like the “nudge” I used to feel when I’d find out that one of my students was the offspring of a former student, or that one of my old classmates was a grandparent—although that last one’s really common anymore.

The soil of my life is constantly being turned.