On childhood encountered in midlife

I first smell it while walking south along US Highway 41 in Sarasota near the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall: the mix of cool air breathing out from southern live oaks and pines, Bermuda grass, and nutrient-poor sand. Smells like heat and looks like elementary-age soccer practices.

The details of this trip are obscure. Obscure to me and to the ones I told about it. I was going on a trip. A trip I needed to take to find parts of me that had been lost, tell my grandmother that Brooke and I had divorced, and live out a new freedom of being able to work wherever I wanted. It would last a full week, which felt indulgent except for the fact that it offered the cheapest plane fares, and it saw me waver again and again on whether I would follow through. In the end I did, and I’m glad.

That smell, though.

First time I’ve smelled it since 1995, but it retrieves memories further back—say, ‘85 or ‘86. The season of life when I wore soccer jerseys, knee-high socks with multi-colored bands, and cheap trainers. It hits me somewhere on the left side of my face with the force of a left hook, and I nearly collapse on the bridge over a small creek that I think could be Phillippi Creek.

Stop, breath, remember. The bluntness and mystery of past life.

My chief fault is that I’m utilitarian to the core. Pragmatic. And yes, a philosopher but a peddler of lived philosophy. I have little interest in ideas that I cannot connect to meaningful action. It’s a space too poppy for the academy and too bookish for most everyone else. I’m a bridge that no one crosses.

So, I stop on this bridge, which crosses a creek that may actually run past my grandmother’s backyard in Pinecraft—I don’t know—and for a moment I stop time, scrolling left to the years before the invasions of the internet, Al Qaida, and Nintendo. I’m on one knee beside my YMCA teammates, my Argentine coach Miguel Gomez behind and to my left. The Gulf Coast sun burning my blonde hair, eyes squinting. I didn’t yet know divorce, college, fatherhood. What did I know? What did I dream of besides scoring goals, drawing after school, and reading biographies of great Native Americans?

Childhood for me is shrouded in simplicity. Church twice on Sundays, once on Wednesdays, and soccer on Saturdays. My dad lays brick. My mom is at home. We learn. We play. We play some more. I’m good at soccer, and my coach tells me that the only thing I’ll have to know to do is play soccer. He thinks I’m a prodigy.

I don’t learn soccer. Turns out I need to know many more things than soccer, and I’m drowning in my ignorance.

This trip is obscured even more by the level of emotions I’ve had to endure. My life is a masterclass on the mundane and moderate. Put my emotions on an ECG, and I’ll prefer minimal ups and downs to this rollercoaster ride of soaring highs and bitter lows. I like emotional control. Case in point: several weeks ago, my father texts a photo of me in a boat at dawn looking into the morning mist hovering above the water and obscuring our destination, and I end up weeping in a coffee shop for an hour. A lady asks me if I’m okay and says she’ll pray for me. My Uncle Marcus hears that I’m in town and asks if he can take me out to eat. This time, I duck out the front door of a bookstore in time to avoid having another lady telling me I’m in her prayers. Between times have mountaintop elation at progress I’m seeing with my business, stabs of fear that I’ll not make it, reminders that entering the kingdom of heaven is more difficult than threading a needle with a camel.

Compassion bleeds me of tears. Fear drives me to work. I’ve managed to avoid substance addiction through it all.

In my 44 years, I’ve heard many people say, “I never thought life would turn out this way.” They find themselves in midlife confused, disoriented, and mapless. The landscape has shifted, and unfamiliarity abounds. Think of the Hunger Games where Seneca Crane is at the mainframe turning and disfiguring the arena to make things more interesting to some thrill-seeking, heartless audience. Life feels suddenly cruel, a spectacle of endurance and humiliation: “I never thought you were capable of [insert most shameful mistake of your life].”

It’s the most dehumanizing comment to make to another—as if any human is incapable of any mistake, of any annihilation of their personal values, when that is most central tenet of our humanity.

I read a book by Viktor Frankl while I’m on this trip: Yes! to life in spite of everything. I thought I had read all his books, but this one is a series of lectures he gave less than a year after being released from Buchenwald. If he can endure a concentration camp and say “Yes” to life, I need to read him. It sounds a lot like Man’s Search for Meaning, but that makes sense. These lectures were given between the time he wrote his seminal work and its actual publication. Stories, metaphors, ideas…They echo with the fresh shout of his manuscript.

I continue to walk south to downtown Sarasota, and when I get there I find that it’s a part of the city I never knew growing up. We didn’t come here; it wasn’t on the way to church or soccer. Who knew that five of Peter Paul Rubens’ The Triumph of the Eucharist are in the Ringling Museum of Art? That smell is here, though, outside of Selby Public Library beneath the oaks, on the benches, in an outdoor seating area of Starbucks.

It’s nice to have a whiff of familiar amid so much unfamiliar.

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On reaching the end of ourselves