Month: July 2020

Ironically, July 4 used to feel like the least independent day of all.

There became a tradition, towards the end of my marriage, where Independence Day would be spent leaving town and going to the coast; this wasn’t the summer break trip that it sounds like, and was instead born of necessity, thanks to a very nervous dog who hated fireworks and a spouse with little patience for a nervous dog freaking out. It was decided, therefore, to head to the coast for the day with the intent always to be that we’d be on the road when the fireworks were happening, so he’d miss them — or, perhaps, have other reasons to be nervous at the time, depending how heavy the traffic was.

The trips were almost always stressful, tense things. We would leave later than intended, or traffic would be bad, or some small, insignificant thing that would set the emotional tone for the day ahead; something that, in the grand scheme of things, was less than important would create a framework to explain away that day’s misanthropic attitude on her part towards the rest of the world. We’d drive for hours, barely talking but listening to her podcasts — anything that I wanted to hear would be under suspicion and have to pass muster, of course — and eventually arrive, allowing travel-sick dogs to escape the confines of the car and anxiously, gratefully feel the ground beneath their paws.

Thinking about this now, I’m surprised by the realization of how silent these trips were — or, really, how little conversation there would be, I mean. I knew at the time that this was bad, but I didn’t really realize how bad, I don’t think; just the amount of awkward silence there would be, between two married people on a trip together. We’d eat meals quietly, often because things were so tense, or else we’d simply run out of things to say after an afternoon of small talk. The signs that things weren’t in a good place all around, waiting for me to notice.

And then, there’d be the hours driving home, after the sun had set, with the dogs panting and gasping through nerves and me saying nothing as she got more and more frustrated because of the traffic, the late hour, the whatever of it all. I can remember how bad it all felt, how inescapable, a desire filling me each and every year for the day to just be over. The dull awareness of irony that what was meant to be a celebration of independence felt, every year, like just the opposite in every respect.

I paused to reflect, recently, that I’m 45 years old. It wasn’t a surprise, of course — it’s been true for more than half a year by this point — but it’s something that I hadn’t really stopped to think about at any point before then; there was always something else happening, something getting in the way. Such is life.

But 45 is a curiously important age to me, purely because it’s the age Bill Drummond was when he wrote his book 45, a book that’s been a strange core text of my life since I first picked it up out of curiosity way back in the year 2000. As the title might suggest, it’s a book about being 45 years old, except it’s not, really — it’s a collection of essays written about his past and his present when he was that age, with the idea that his age when writing would inform the work and infuse it with a specific sense of what it meant for him to be that many years old.

(I picked it up, I confess, not because I was a Bill Drummond fan — I wasn’t at the time, this was the book that made that come true — but because the original release of the book was 7 inches square, like a 45RPM single and I liked the design aspect of it. I was shallow then, and I’m shallow still.)

As the world would have it, I had the chance to meet Bill Drummond months after reading the book and becoming fascinated and inspired by him; he was touring the UK as part of some art project and he came to do a talk at this art collective I was part of, at the time. I can remember how excited I was, but also how the 26-year-old me felt about meeting this 45-year-old man — he was actually 48 at the time, I think, but I might be misremembering.

He seemed older, but not old, I remember thinking, in a realization that only someone in their 20s can have. Oh, to have 20 years more experience but not be over the hill! It gave me this strange feeling of security, that I had more time to do what I wanted, whatever that would turn out to be. (I didn’t know yet; I still don’t, arguably.)

And now, here I am, older but not old, myself. It feels fitting, as if I’ve arrived. Although I’m sure I would have imagined myself with more hair at this age.