A moment comes in almost any well-dreamt life when the best is past and what remains lacks the zest of hope. For athletes, this happens young; for performers, older. Workers ascending ladders sense their topmost rung. Makers can put off this fulcrum moment, when one’s trajectory stops tipping up, till antiquity. Monet painted until his death at 86; Mahler’s final completed symphony moans that he’s out of time. Shakespeare, by contrast, hung it up: The Tempest explicitly tips its cap goodbye.

                  Often we hear lives called “disappointments.” Isn’t any, whose possessors live past their prime? Anyone satisfied with their accomplishment hasn’t dreamt high enough. Surely, even Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Bach felt burning in mind the glory of undone deeds. Disappointed needn’t mean displeased, just dissatisfied. This is the torment of the subjunctive: would have, should have, could have. Only humans suffer thus.

                  Age 75, I oscillate uncomfortably between sighing resignation and outrageous hope. Browning’s Rabbi Ben Ezra with his bromidic promise, 

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be, 

irks or inspires, depending on the day. Robert Penn Warren depicts this fulcrum moment seeringly in his masterpiece, American Portrait: Old Style.  The poet, getting on in years, visits an old chum he hasn’t seen since they were boys. A star athlete in school, K. had gone on to play big league ball till boozing laid him low.

And the sun sank slow as he stood there,
All Indian-brown from waist up, who never liked tops to his pants,
And standing nigh straight, but the arms and the pitcher’s
Great shoulders, they were thinning to old-man thin.
Sun low, all silence, then sudden:
“But, Jesus,” he cried, “what makes a man do what he does –
Him living until he dies!” 

Sure, all of us live till we die, but bingo!
Like young David at brookside, he swooped down,
Snatched a stone, wound up, and let fly,
And high on a pole over yonder the big brown insulator
Simply exploded. “See – I still got control!” he said.

That could be me on a good day, picking up an adjective and winging it: “See – I still got control!”

                  And yet … insensibly strength abates, memory stumbles, the body tires: I am not the man I was. But am I not a new man, different, mellower, wiser in a way, like an apple on the sweet verge of rot? More or less is not the point, as dogpal Henry continually reminds me, but here and now. Revel in the present, I exhort myself, since it’s the only time we’ve got! 

                  Easier said than done.

                  Recently I’ve been revisiting a dozen years of daily missives to see what to make of them. I loathe the work. It’s long, arduous, and seldom scintillating. Every one of those four thousand or so morsels was dispatched wreathed with hope, at worst “not bad, all things considered.” How many have withstood the merciless “test of time”? A few I admire, but how few, in light of all.

                  The activity, which I can’t evade, plunges me in a funk. The truth hurts. To right myself, as ever, I write myself, which I’m doing now. Think if I’d died when my dad did, age 47, or when I had cancer in my fifties, or when my heart misfired, or before I embraced Jane! Then I’d have been “disappointed” – big-time.  But now, through blessed luck, if that’s not an oxymoron, I’ve been given my chance, scribbled to the limit of my strength, and if I wasn’t Shakespeare, I was as much as I could be. Isn’t that ample cause to rejoice?

 * 

At seventy-five

 Delicately I transport myself
lest brittled I shatter; dream
of finding baseballs
in a far-off field.
Homeruns! Whose youthful arms
now belabor pens.

Homeward he picks his way
through grass tufts never observed.
Has he been true, he wonders,
true to his word?