the rix mix

Tomorrow, Nov. 11, is my birthday. What was called "Armistice Day" when I was small child, remembering the end of World War I. A "minor" holiday, but a day off from school was a day off. I don't remember many birthdays so I don't expect others to know mine. I remember astrological signs & sometimes the approximate date. One of my girlfriends was born on St. Patrick's Day, can't forget that, no date for a quiet toast at a bar.

Getting older, I miss playing the good bad boy. Not a dangerous bad boy (sometimes a criminal mistaken for a rogue, more often a faithless womanizer misjudged as a flirt). Rather, I was the self-centered artiste. When I was younger there were always young women challenged to compete with my selfish embrace of The Muse, to coexist with the goddess if not take her place.

I enjoyed the calculated romantic gesture, most effective when it was thoughtfully creative yet modest. I could never afford the expensive gesture, so I had to be creative. Steal flowers out of gardens & add an original poem. Some women did say they liked "walks on the beach." Most guys don't like walking on the beach unless they're going somewhere in order to do something & they have to walk on the beach first to get there. If the walk was the thing, I was all for it. Especially if I could choose the beach & the route to the beach. I quickly lost interest in one woman because she had no desire to go to a place not more than 10 minutes from her home where we could watch tugboats on Arthur Kill, the tidal waterway between Jersey & Staten Island. So what if the view also included oil tanks & a mountainous garbage dump on the other side. A certain type of young woman was pleased when a good bad young man poet would rather walk on a beach than fill his hours with more responsible or profitable activities. She didn't need to believe that was the way I was all the time. She could tell herself it was only a phase. Eventually, she learned the truth.

The beaches people my age walk on are in Florida, or the Bahamas, or Hawaii. It's not just that they've earned & can afford those beautiful locations; there's also a general dulling of senses. The familiar becomes bland. So many of them also love the staged glitz, phony class, & noise of gambling casinos . They go for the $100 showroom extravaganzas, the oldies acts, the country singers on the downward slope, the comedians with the reliable material, the 90 minute abridged versions of Broadway musicals. These are good rewards for financial security? For being responsible, raising kids, making the mortgage payments on time? Feeding the profits into slot machines? (There's a lot to like about Vegas, but the people who live & work there ain't fooled by it.)

Now I'm just irresponsible & unprofitable. I got lost on the road less traveled by. The speaker in the Robert Frost poem says that road makes "all the difference," & it does, but the poem doesn't promise it's a better road. It's not about that. We think about the roads we didn't take, the alternative timelines. We try to think about them without regrets.
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Ten years ago I thought my living alone was an unusual occurrance, just a bridge from one relationship to another. Then I knew I was choosing it, & that I was choosing it one day at a time. I met other people making the same choice. It was a sad realization, as few of those people seemed especially happy; some expressed dissatisfaction, but digging a bit deeper it usually turned out they were alright. They reached that point not by raising their standards & looking for some unlikely "soulmate" & becoming frustrated with the search, but by skipping the matter altogether. Part of it is that one no longer feels "lucky." If one ever did. I've had some relationships that were really good for awhile, even a long while. I was so naive that it genuinely surprised me when I encountered middle-aged people who had never had a reliable lover/companion. But it made sense if a woman who had endured a miserable, short-lived marriage, then raised children on her own - few single men are looking for those women in those years - would hardly place a "relationship" at the top of the list when the work is largely finished after two decades of struggle. & during those same decades I was doing whatever I wanted & indulging myself with a weekly radio show. Literally & figuratively walking on the beach.