Buzzing wakes me. It’s my mechanical watch, a Tudor Heritage Advisor. It’s one of those rare automatics that has an alarm function. I set it for 4:30 AM. I check my phone and see the watch has lost only a few seconds overnight, and I marvel for a moment at the engineering that goes into these little devices. No electricity, no batteries, just springs and gears, all calibrated with mind-bending precision. Sometimes I don’t want to deal with electronics. My father, an electrical engineer, felt the same way. We both loved the idea of a mechanical world, even though we knew it would be impractical.
I remember waking at 4:30 AM in 1986 to my fake woodgrain digital clock radio buzzing like a giant bee with murder on its mind. I walked into the pre-dawn dark from the little cottage my parents bequeathed me at 16 as a bedroom (we weren’t wealthy; the cottage had been Dad’s home office before he bankrupted his business and went back to working as a civil servant, and it didn’t even have a bathroom), down the path of limestone rock my father laid years before, and into the house. My mother was always up before everyone. She was there at the dinner table in our weird, glass-walled dining room, doing her hair and makeup like any good Southern woman of a certain age, coffee on one side of her lighted makeup case, a cigarette in an elegant porcelain ashtray on the other. Mama said, “Get you a Pop-Tart,” or “Good morning, baby.” I probably grumbled and opened a box of cereal. I probably ate silently there beside her. My mother was okay with me being quiet. Neither of us ever felt the impulse to fill the space with small talk.
I turn on the bathroom faucet. Cold water, just the tiniest stream. Velma, 9 sleek pounds of furiously loving, feisty, spooky-smart gray tabby, leaps silently onto the basin’s edge and begins drinking. Then she plays with it, flicking water with one delicate paw. She watches the drops fly with scientific interest. In the twilight upstairs hallway, her twin sister Daphne—identical markings but a little larger, a little fluffier—chases her tail. Then she stops and meows loudly at it. Her tail never does what she wants.
Those early mornings from 1986 are vivid memories, but the rest of the days are not. I was a social kid, and another benefit of Dad’s busted business was the car he gave me when he folded operations. I can surmise that I probably showered, shaved, and meticulously styled my own mop of brassy red-blonde hair (I can wax elegiacal about my hair now that much of it has fled, never to return) before preening in whatever Polo shirt I thought would best show off my biceps that day. I was an ADHD weirdo, an eccentric theater-and-music kid in the body and clothes of a guy who looked like every fair-haired teen bully from a John Hughes or Hughes-adjacent film about adolescent angst. I likely went back to my bedroom and called whatever friend I was giving a ride to that day to check in. It was probably John, a 6’7” Catholic altar boy with a black belt in karate and kind blue eyes. That year, he introduced me to the internet by downloading a scan of a Penthouse centerfold from a BBS. It took three hours just to get to her boobs. Today, John runs IT security for a huge discount retail chain. On the way out of the house, after saying bye to my mother, I am sure I stopped to ruffle our aging gray toy poodle’s head. Smokey lived to be 16. He was the sweetest, dumbest little dog ever.
I make coffee for myself and drink my overnight oats. I’m only the size I was in 1986 today (6’0”, 180 lbs) because I started on a GLP-1 in 2024. GLP-1s slow down your digestive system and can cause, uh, movement issues. Oatmeal and caffeine have become necessities, if you know what I mean. My wife, Dana, wakes up and begins her morning routine. She was born in Colorado, lived in California, but I met her in Georgia, and she lived there long enough to become a proper Southern woman—in the good ways. Like my mother, Dana spends much of her time getting ready at her vanity, doing her hair and makeup. Like my mother, she’s comfortable with quiet. It’s taken me years to get comfortable with it again. She’s only like Mom in those surface ways, though. Dana has a doctorate in education, while my mother graduated high school and went straight into the workforce. That said, Mom retired as a nonprofit CFO. If my mother influenced how I see women, it probably shows in how I’m drawn to quiet brilliance, to people who feel no need to impress you and somehow become more impressive as a result.
I remember now that in 1986, I was doing a big show at school. My friends Matt and Greg and I wrote much of it. Most of the drama club also contributed monologues, music, and scenes. The show was titled Gateways. It was loosely structured around Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man, a monologue by the character Jacques in Act II, Scene VII of As You Like It:
…And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then, the whining schoolboy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice
In fair round belly, with good capon lin’d,
With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws, and modern instances,
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose, and pouch on side,
His youthful hose well sav’d, a world too wide,
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again towards childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
I would love to tell you it was a work of genius, but a recording of the show aired for years afterward on Nashville’s Public Access cable channel, and I watched it several times as I got older. It was not a work of genius.
The sun is up outside, and Dana has gone to work. A man about my age walks his large, gray, standard poodle past the house, as he does every morning. My ever-social son Dylan, tall, handsome, and autistic, has spoken to the man before. The dog’s name is “John Dark.” Well, it’s really “Jeanne D’Arc,” and the dog is a female. The reference is exactly what you think it is, though I doubt the man will sacrifice his pooch to a pyre in the name of God. I watch them take the path into the woods at the end of my street. In his bedroom, I hear my son’s phone alarm. He is highly sensitive to harsh noises. Sometimes when I’m practicing a big aria, he still dons his noise-dampening headphones. His alarm plays gentle bird calls. He rarely wakes long enough to shut it off.
Perhaps my shank has shrunk a bit since 1986. I don’t like my spectacles to slide down my nose, so I wear contacts as often as I can. I’m full of modern instances but not sure I have any wise saws. Frankly, I’m not sure what age I’m in. And while I appreciate Shakespeare’s effort to organize existence through Jacques’s words, I think all those ages overlap and blend. They obey quantum physics more than timeless literary wisdom. When I pause in the present and study whatever age I think I’m in now, a previous age surfaces, and I see them running in parallel. This morning, for a while, I was 18 and 59 at the same time. Gray pets looked up at me in the pale pre-dawn light, seeking water, affection, and attention. A woman I loved in one way or another sat nearby, sculpting the face she’d present to the day in a well-lit mirror. My mind was on music or writing. Memory hurts for some. Some memories I have still hurt. But overall, this morning is kind.
(Full disclosure: This is a slightly edited version of a personal essay I wrote on TK.)