A distant fifty
By: Gt Goodwin
Tags: Personal Essay, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Life Lessons, Life

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Fifty is a dubious milestone although I know some celebrate it. I hear of surprise parties, expensive dinners, maybe a bucket list vacation. My wife envisions a trip to Hawaii or some other exotic, for us, destination. She is damn near giddy about the prospect, but mostly what I feel is stunned. A previously dim horizon has suddenly clarified in alarming proximity and detail. Fifty is not my number. It’s my father’s number. A faraway number.

As I near my fiftieth year, the impulse to reflect and make an assessment of my life has lately been hard to ignore. In my accounting, I have been surprised to find that there is no sense of ground covered, no relief at nearing a destination. I have instead an uneasy suspicion that rather than gain, these five decades have cost me something. I have accrued a mortgage, a couple of generally reliable cars and a modest savings account — the material hallmarks of a life spent grinding in the corporate world. These are the sorts of things I thought I was working for, but I find that I’m having trouble counting them as signs of headway. I find myself counting other things.

This lowball tumbler here on my desk, for example, once cradled in the hard knobby ironworker hand of my grandfather. The curved surface is frosted with the words Bass Anglers Sportsman’s Society — Member. He was also a Life Member of the NRA, an Army veteran, a union man and occasional Sunday school teacher. Life. Member. I like to drink sweet tea from it as he often did, the clink of ice against the glass shaking loose my childhood memories of him.

Also on this desk sits a green foam beetle fly tied by good friend John Bolton, gone now nearly ten years. I can see him plucking it from his vice to hold to the light, turning it this way and that before judging it worthy. It was one of many things he shared with me during our time fly fishing Georgia farm ponds together. John’s career in the airline industry allowed him to fish extensively throughout the world, but he still chuckled every time one of those country bluegill slurped down one of his creations. 401K? You can have every penny of it if I can go back and spend a few more summer evenings on those ponds with him.

A shelf beside this same desk holds a stack of ragged baseball caps once belonging to my sons, dusty relics cast aside after the various seasons had ended. At one point though these old hats were important to them. The headbands are discolored and dirty, deeply marked with their sweat, their work, their anxieties as they met challenges on the fields of competition. I sometimes pull one from the pile and slip it on over my own aging head, imagining this as one way to remain close to my boys as they grow into their own lives and begin to slip from my orbit.

My reading/writing room is cluttered with such artifacts. I believed for much of my life the world view that the pursuit of profit and lucre is an honorable pursuit, but with nearly fifty years of perspective I wonder about the truth in this. I can’t convince myself that the things I hold as valuable can be measured in tender as common and mundane as dollars. Truly valuable things are rare. Irreplaceable. A drinking glass once held by a good man. A soiled cap worn by someone who means something to you. Old growth forests and pristine rivers and reedy ponds in quiet pastures. Fish rising to a fly tied by a long gone friend. I realize this could just be sentimental tripe from a man suddenly faced with the reality that his life is almost certainly more than half over. Or it could be, as I prefer to think, a turning back to things I’ve known all along.