stuff. Merlin knew that.
More than anything, though, and I understand it clearly now, the jump shot was a matter of aesthetics, an art form for a small-town
kid—the ballet-like movement, the easy release, the gentle arc over a telephone wire through the summer nights of Iowa, while
my mother and father peered out the back-porch screen door and looked at each other softly.
The Turning of Fifty
______________________________________
I n my late forties, I came quartering down the years and forgot how old I was. When asked to give my age, I would run a quick
cipher: “Let’s see (mumble, move lips slightly) … born in … present year… subtract …” Was this a simple inatten-tiveness caused
by the distractions of a busy life, I wondered? Or maybe, I wondered again, if some winsome sleight-of-hand by the mind itself
was at work, the balming of harsh reality by a man growing older.
In any case, others noticed it first. My turning fifty, that is. A few months before my birthday, people started speaking
to me in peculiar tongues, saying things such as “Hey, hey, Bob-O, the BIG ONE’s coming! How are you going to celebrate it?”
“I’m too busy to have a birthday,” I countered, shuffling away from the subject.
That was not good enough. Indeed, I was told, this is a seminal occasion and deep, indelible markings should be tooled upon
the hours of August 1. So, when pressed, I would claim the day to be mine alone and declared I would spend it sloshing around
in some quiet swamp with my cameras.
But I dawdled, made no plans, and others kindly took over. My friend Scott organized a small birthday party held two days
before the actual date. Old friends were generous enough to attend, I sat in a lawn chair with red balloons tied to the back
of it, and Scott took a class picture. That was as wild as it got. We had a genuinely good time, in a quiet way, and the affair
fit my approach to things. Well, the balloons seemed a little out of character for me, but I thought afterward that everyone
ought to spend at least one day a year sitting in a chair with balloons tied to the back of it.
I drove the sixty miles up to Rockford the evening before my birthday and took my mother out for dinner. Lifting my glass
as she lifted hers, I grinned, “Thanks for getting me here.” She smiled back, said she was proud of me, and told me again
how the delivery took place in the middle of an Iowa thunderstorm and how the hospital lights failed just before I was born.
I leave the significance of those latter two events open to various interpretations.
On the day itself, I put aside my low-fat, semiveg-etarian tendencies and ate two Maid-Rites. That was rather like an act
of homage to my youth. For it was in Roger Dixon’s Charles City Maid-Rite where I first lunched as a young boy, and I have
retained a nearly religious zeal for the loose-meat sandwiches since then. As part of this, trips to Des Moines often are
scheduled in such a way that a stop at Taylor’s Maid-Rite in Mar-shalltown is not only possible, but inevitable.
There are, you see, few rituals more sublime than slowly spinning back and forth on a counter stool and watching sandwich
makings being scooped from the steam table of a true Maid-Rite cafÉ. Truth in this case flows from a purity of undiluted purpose,
a place where nothing other than Maid-Rites are served, except for the essential milk shake and graham cracker pie.
After the Maid-Rites, I took a nap, did my three miles on the road, read for several hours, and watched a movie. No “Over-the-Hill-Gang”
T-shirts were purchased, no champagne was chilled, and bad jokes about getting older were avoided entirely. My wife wrote
me a lovely note that said, “Pm short on words, but long on love,” which I thought, apart from the sentiment, was a model
of good writing and deserved a steel guitar lick underneath it. She also gave me a small crystal embedded in silver
More than anything, though, and I understand it clearly now, the jump shot was a matter of aesthetics, an art form for a small-town
kid—the ballet-like movement, the easy release, the gentle arc over a telephone wire through the summer nights of Iowa, while
my mother and father peered out the back-porch screen door and looked at each other softly.
The Turning of Fifty
______________________________________
I n my late forties, I came quartering down the years and forgot how old I was. When asked to give my age, I would run a quick
cipher: “Let’s see (mumble, move lips slightly) … born in … present year… subtract …” Was this a simple inatten-tiveness caused
by the distractions of a busy life, I wondered? Or maybe, I wondered again, if some winsome sleight-of-hand by the mind itself
was at work, the balming of harsh reality by a man growing older.
In any case, others noticed it first. My turning fifty, that is. A few months before my birthday, people started speaking
to me in peculiar tongues, saying things such as “Hey, hey, Bob-O, the BIG ONE’s coming! How are you going to celebrate it?”
“I’m too busy to have a birthday,” I countered, shuffling away from the subject.
That was not good enough. Indeed, I was told, this is a seminal occasion and deep, indelible markings should be tooled upon
the hours of August 1. So, when pressed, I would claim the day to be mine alone and declared I would spend it sloshing around
in some quiet swamp with my cameras.
But I dawdled, made no plans, and others kindly took over. My friend Scott organized a small birthday party held two days
before the actual date. Old friends were generous enough to attend, I sat in a lawn chair with red balloons tied to the back
of it, and Scott took a class picture. That was as wild as it got. We had a genuinely good time, in a quiet way, and the affair
fit my approach to things. Well, the balloons seemed a little out of character for me, but I thought afterward that everyone
ought to spend at least one day a year sitting in a chair with balloons tied to the back of it.
I drove the sixty miles up to Rockford the evening before my birthday and took my mother out for dinner. Lifting my glass
as she lifted hers, I grinned, “Thanks for getting me here.” She smiled back, said she was proud of me, and told me again
how the delivery took place in the middle of an Iowa thunderstorm and how the hospital lights failed just before I was born.
I leave the significance of those latter two events open to various interpretations.
On the day itself, I put aside my low-fat, semiveg-etarian tendencies and ate two Maid-Rites. That was rather like an act
of homage to my youth. For it was in Roger Dixon’s Charles City Maid-Rite where I first lunched as a young boy, and I have
retained a nearly religious zeal for the loose-meat sandwiches since then. As part of this, trips to Des Moines often are
scheduled in such a way that a stop at Taylor’s Maid-Rite in Mar-shalltown is not only possible, but inevitable.
There are, you see, few rituals more sublime than slowly spinning back and forth on a counter stool and watching sandwich
makings being scooped from the steam table of a true Maid-Rite cafÉ. Truth in this case flows from a purity of undiluted purpose,
a place where nothing other than Maid-Rites are served, except for the essential milk shake and graham cracker pie.
After the Maid-Rites, I took a nap, did my three miles on the road, read for several hours, and watched a movie. No “Over-the-Hill-Gang”
T-shirts were purchased, no champagne was chilled, and bad jokes about getting older were avoided entirely. My wife wrote
me a lovely note that said, “Pm short on words, but long on love,” which I thought, apart from the sentiment, was a model
of good writing and deserved a steel guitar lick underneath it. She also gave me a small crystal embedded in silver
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