Notes from 49

A few days ago, I turned 49.

That’s seven times seven, a number with a strange, occult neatness to it. I am now also seven times older than my daughter, which feels less like arithmetic and more like a small existential prank.

Years that end in 9 have always carried an ominous grace. Didn’t 1999 feel more futuristic than 2000? And isn’t 49 just 50, pretending it still has plans?

This birthday arrived without my mother.

There was no early message. No recounting of how, now 49 years ago, she became a mother to a little boy just after midnight. It was a full moon, and the moon was in Leo (not that she believed in astrology, but I draw an absurd amount of comfort from knowing I was born under a full moon).

This was my first birthday with both my parents gone.

That sounds like a gloomy sentence, but it isn’t necessarily a gloomy place. It is, at 49, a reasonable circumstance, in the blunt actuarial sense. It would be monstrous for someone younger, especially someone whose frontal lobes have not finished assembling themselves. But for me it is mostly quiet.

Quiet has its own acoustics, its own physics of spreading.

It entrains a sadness that follows you into late nights and settles beside humming kitchen appliances. It reaches out to tug at the hem of your shirt when you hold open an elevator door for a woman who looks exactly like your mother did fifteen years ago, fixed in memory: old enough to no longer be the source of your youthful consternation, young enough not to resemble the bent, half-shaded figure who could no longer take phone calls.

I didn’t plan much for the day itself. Cake and coffee in the mid-afternoon. My wife was working. My child was at school. Ordinary life, continuing with its indifferent competence.

I didn’t even work out that morning. I’d had a needle-stick accident at work recently and found myself taking the follow-up medications and blood results a little too seriously, as though my body were suddenly a fragile and bureaucratic object. There was no nausea at least. I would have wept if cake became a threat.

The day before, I fumbled a bench press at 65 kilograms, forgetting that my trainer was spotting me. He had to shout for me to keep pushing so he could rack the bar just in time to prevent a trip to the emergency room. My right shoulder had frozen in some inexplicable moment of betrayal. To save face I invented, no, summoned, an ache and a twinge to explain the mishap.

What hurt more was that bench is the lift I enjoy most.

I’m not spectacularly good at it, but I progress steadily, and there is a deep satisfaction in lifting an iron bar while staring at the ceiling, being forced to dial down the screaming in your brain to near zero.

For a few seconds, you are nothing but breath and physics.

Afterwards, though, the mind does what it does.

It starts looking for evidence. Evidence that I failed somehow. Clues that I missed something and was found wanting.

My mind, in fact, invents the evidence. It points to the number 49 as though it were an indictment.

Too old, it declaims, adding footnotes that I have been too old for already too long.

Attack and decay: these are words applied to the mechanics of piano keys and sound curves. It would be wonderful if that were their sole ambit. Instead my mind feels attacked while my body, slowly and not-so-slowly, decays. And what is there to show for this time spent unspooling for half a century? Where is the decluttered study? The written project? The Instagram telegraph of personal bests in reps and kilograms?

But why should all of that have been realised by now, as though life were a checklist due at midnight on the eve of fifty?

Instead I sat mildly sedated, hearing Debussy in my mind because I forgot to actually launch the music app. It was Reflets dans l’eau, something I long to see performed live one day.

I long, too, to write beautiful things again.

I could long to visit beautiful places too, but even the thought of travel feels incongruous right now, like longing for something is an organ that has atrophied. (Which is ridiculous. A single song from my, ahem, youth unfreezes it all in half a breath.)

Still, there have been beautiful places in reach.

A dear friend treated me to a breakfast with very crispy bacon overlooking False Bay as we luxuriated in our decades-long friendship. There followed a walk into the green belt that felt like entering a green cathedral. I did not need to run. I did not need to be directly in the sun. There have been the interior landscapes of books, so many books: about collapsing stars, about orbits, about fungi, even about hockey players falling in love as they duel on the ice. But the most intimate vista of all, somehow, was my youngest cat attempting acrobatics in a tree as I hovered over the pool’s weir with algaecide and expired pH test strips.

The world was still offering itself in small, ordinary mercies.

And what I wanted, more than anything, was peace. A peaceful birthday. A peaceful year. Not the kind of peace that comes from winning, or finishing, or finally proving something, but a far more unhurried kind: the ability to live inside one’s own life without too much flinching. To let the days be ordinary. To let the body be fallible. To let things like grief sit amongst the things on my desk without turning the entire landscape into an elegy.

May it all be meaningful without requiring tragedy, was and remains my prayer. May it require only the bare minimum of chaos.

For the world, for all its indifference, grants me brief flickers of intimacy: coffee, trees, my child’s voice in the next room, the sudden return of a melody I thought I’d lost.

It was time to exhale, and to breathe in again.

Happy seven times seven to me.