during the toasts, Bree squealed like a nine-year-old, jumped up, and hugged him. I’m sure Charles Jacobs was the furthest thing from her mind at that moment, which was just as it should have been. But he never left mine, not completely.
As the hour grew late, I saw Mookie whispering to the leader of the band, a very decent rock-and-blues combo with a strong lead singer and a good backlog of oldies at their command. The bandleader nodded and asked if I’d like to come up and play guitar with the band for a set or two. I was tempted, but my better angels won the day and I begged off. You may never be too old to rock and roll, but skills fade as the years stack up, and the chances of making a fool of oneself in public grow better.
I didn’t exactly consider myself retired, but I hadn’t played in front of a live audience in over a year, and had only sat in on three or four recording sessions, all cases of dire emergency. I did not acquit myself well in any of them. During the playback of one, I caught the drummer grimacing, as if he’d bitten into something sour. He saw me looking at him and said the bass had fallen out of tune. It hadn’t, and we both knew it. If it’s ridiculous for a man in his fifties to be playing bedroom games with a woman young enough to be his daughter, it’s just as ridiculous for him to be playing a Strat and high-stepping to “Dirty Water.” Still, I watched those guys kick out the jams with some longing and quite a lot of nostalgia.
Someone took my hand and I looked around to see Georgia Donlin. “How much do you miss it, Jamie?”
“Not as much as I respect it,” I said, “which is why I’m sitting here. Those guys are good.”
“And you’re not anymore?”
I found myself remembering the day I had walked into my brother Con’s bedroom and heard his acoustic Gibson whispering to me. Telling me I could play “Cherry, Cherry.”
“Jamie?” She snapped her fingers in front of my eyes. “Come back, Jamie.”
“I’m good enough to amuse myself,” I said, “but my days of getting up in front of a crowd with a guitar are over.”
Turned out I was wrong about that.
• • •
In 2012, I turned fifty-six. Hugh and his longtime girlfriend took me out to dinner. On the way home I remembered a bit of old folklore—probably you’ve heard it—about how to boil a frog. You put it in cold water, then start turning up the heat. If you do it gradually, the frog is too stupid to jump out. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I decided it was an excellent metaphor for growing old.
When I was a teenager, I looked at over-fifties with pity and unease: they walked too slow, they talked too slow, they watched TV instead of going out to movies and concerts, their idea of a great party was hotpot with the neighbors and tucked into bed after the eleven o’clock news. But—like most other fifty-, sixty-, and seventysomethings who are in relative good health—I didn’t mind it so much when my turn came. Because the brain doesn’t age, although its ideas about the world may harden and there’s a greater tendency to run off at the mouth about how things were in the good old days. (I was spared that, at least, because most of my so-called good old days had been spent as a full-bore, straight-on-for-Texas drug addict.) I think for most people, life’s deceptive deliriums begin to fall away after fifty. The days speed up, the aches multiply, and your gait slows down, but there are compensations. In calmness comes appreciation, and—in my case—a determination to be as much of a do-right-daddy as possible in the time I had left. That meant ladling out soup once a week at a homeless shelter in Boulder, and working for three or four political candidates with the radical idea that Colorado should not be paved over.
I still dated the occasional lady. I still played tennis twice a week and rode my bike at least six miles a day, which kept my stomach flat and my endorphins flowing. Sure, I saw a few more lines around my mouth and eyes when I shaved, but on the whole, I thought I looked about the same as ever. That, of course, is the benign