Dear Diary: Antlers
After lunch, I threw on some trousers and ran a couple of errands. Stepping outside, I was surprised (as one always is, here) by the latest bit of striptease. The caissons had been pushed back from the driveway to the doorway, so that we can now walk across the broad terrace that will soon be our entryway. Only yesterday, and the day before that, when those barrels stood in the driveway, forming a very narrow passage, I found myself engaged in sizing-up exercizes with guys who were headed in the opposite direction. Now, that walkway has been erased, leaving a vapor of unreliable memories. There is plenty of room for everybody, and the calculus of do-I- or don’t-I-forge-ahead will be forgotten with relief. It was interesting while it lasted, though. I was bigger than the other men, and older, too. My eye was still sharp, and from years of living with “oblivious” princesses I had learned not to be outwardly cognizant of potential difficulties.
At the beginning of the third act of Siegfried, Wotan waits on a hillside for a token but determining battle. What has always interested me about this scene is Siegfried’s impatience: the old man (whom he doesn’t recognize, having no reason to do so) is an interruption in his program, which is to climb the mountain and see what there is to see. Wotan, for his part, is fulfilling a bargain, making it as difficult as he can for an intruder to violate the chaste imprisonment into which he immured his daughter (Siegfried’s aunt, as Anna Russel never tired of pointing out) several generations ago. I often feel like Wotan, obliged against my will to prick young men into acting like gentlemen, ever ready to be told that my services aren’t wanted. We love the old men with whom we have grown up, but we dislike all the others. Old men are truly a pain in the wazoo.
I wish I were young — oh, do I ever — but if I told you why, you wouldn’t believe me. Of course I’m going to tell you! I wish I were young so that I could do my homework, so that I could take advantage of every educational opportunity that was dropped in my lap when I was young. I wish that I could atone for my sinful derelictions in language labs: I would be able to speak French fluently today if I had been more diligent. I wish, in short, that I could have been sixty when I was eighteen. I wish that I had spent my entire life being sixty, because being sixty has really been working for me — well into being sixty-one! And yet — or perhaps it’s ipso facto — I find that I am more physically competitive than ever, ready to sweat the small stuff with other men at the drop of a hat.
I’ve learned something from the older guys as well. The older guys are older. Life used to be great for them, but it isn’t any longer. They wear the failure of jeunesse like a cologne. This is where coming into my own at a very late age sets me apart from my cohort. It also reminds me that, when were all fifteen or twenty, I hated the schmucks. I’m glad that they’re feeling old and useless; they had it coming.
And they say that antlers are for cuckolds. Nonsense.