December 2005

L, the Romans count it

by Lindsay Thompson

Suspicion Breeds Confidence.
— Inscription on placard in the film Brazil (1985)

I’m not making any big plans for the holidays. There’s too much uncertainty in the air.

There’s gas prices. There’s terror. There’s avian flu. There’s the 1918 flu, recently recreated
and published as a how-to article. Having dodged two influenza quasi-pandemics, and one -really grand non-flu one, I’m worrying how to try to avoid a promised Mother and Several Vengeful Aunts of All Pandemics.

There’s even talk we are entering the End Times (hurricanes, earthquakes, pestilences, -tsunamis, the homosexual menace). Crashing to my end on a plane suddenly unpiloted seems
an alarming way to find out my seating assignment for the hereafter.

And shortly I turn 50.

At that age, Orwell archly commented, “Everyone has the face he deserves.”

Mine looks perplexed, if relatively unlined (a 30s friend peered at me recently and said, “You don’t look 50. Have you had work done?”)

Fifty always seemed unreachably distant. Australia. The return of Halley’s Comet.

President Clinton, at 50, fretted there were more yesterdays than tomorrows. “Love is lame at fifty years,” wrote Thomas Hardy in 1909, clearly not anticipating President Clinton. T.S. Eliot fussed, “The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.”

I’m told my invitation to join the AARP should arrive any day. I’m losing my place in the coveted 18-49 male TV ratings demographic. I will start driving much more slowly, and will enthuse about places where I can have dinner at 5:00 p.m.

“Really,” Philip Larkin commented in 1972, “one should ignore one’s fiftieth birthday. As anyone over fifty will tell you, it’s no age at all.”

But then — the big killjoy — he added, “All the same, it’s rather sobering to realize that one has lived longer than Arnold of Rugby, or Porson, the eighteenth-century professor of Greek. It’s hard not to look back and wonder why one hasn’t done more, or forward and wonder what, if anything, one will do in the future.”

Indeed. When I dust off my yellowing c.v. and compare it to the standouts of 1955 — Kermit the Frog, Gumby, Chief Justice Roberts — I wonder if I should have devoted more effort to being quietly, not conspicuously, undistinguished.

Back when I took the SAT, you could check a box and make your results available to schools. The ones that thought you interesting could send you literature.

So I checked the box and heard from two: Shimer College, which went broke before I would have graduated, and a truck-driving academy in Cheraw, South Carolina. There may have been a message there.

But noooo, as John Belushi used to say. I pressed on to get a degree in politics. Then one in philosophy, politics, and economics. Then law school, where virtually no one thought I should be a lawyer. College professor, writer, newspaperman, common scold (“Have you ever thought of becoming . . . a minister?” the dean once hooted), all were bruited to me.

So here I am, a ten-a-penny lawyer in a Seattle suburb, with a penchant for triviality in writing that makes Max Beerbohm seem deep.

I expect I’ll stick to my holiday routine: put up the tree, pour a drink (“I’ve got to get out of these wet clothes,” Robert Benchley quipped on a winter’s night, “and into a dry martini.”), and dust off my collection of Dystopian Holiday Videos. Farces like Christmas in Connecticut; deeply black comedies like The Ref, Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, Bad Santa, and Home for the Holidays. They’re a bracing tonic to the treacly tone of the season.

This year I welcome a new entry. I saw Brazil 20 years ago, but forgot it’s set at Christmas. As a terrorist campaign enters its 13th year (“Beginner’s luck,” snorts the deputy minister of information), Consumers for Christ parade past a poster reading “Happiness: We are all in this together,” promising “Top Security Holiday Camps/Relax in a Panic-Free Environment/Luxury With Security/Fun Without Suspicion.”

People pursue their normal routines, shopping, dining, and self-improvement. “My mother’s away for Christmas,” the hero tells his love. “She’s spending it at the plastic surgeon’s.” You get the feeling the script for the war on terror was actually authored by Terry Gilliam, Charles McKeown, and Tom Stoppard.

Happy holidays.  

For personal correspondence, Lindsay Thompson can be reached at tradelaw@hotmail.com. E-mail letters to the editor to letterstotheeditor@wsba.org or mail to WSBA, Attn: Letters to the Editor, 2101 Fourth Ave., Ste. 400, Seattle, WA 98121-2330.