Essay: Captain Midlife Sends a Valentine

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Friends, too, he loves, the older the friends the dearer. In recent years the Captain has unearthed a deep-seated longing for friends whose existences he used to think of merely as loose satellites to his own. Now he writes to them, phones at regular intervals, actively seeks their company. Old friends are Chaucerian, the Captain declares; the tolerance is wide, the ironies gentle. No gassed-up urgencies, no panic, no competitiveness. You stand with them shoulder to shoulder as on deck, looking out at a time that you at once control and do not control, hearing the footsteps of the young gaining ground while you go about the business of nursing elders or burying them at sea.

But we are not at sea, mates, the Captain shouts into the gale. Not dead yet. Hold tight. His cronies link their arms and close their ranks.

The Captain also loves his work (lucky dog); he loudly, wholly loves it. A man who drives a bulldozer once pointed out to him the distinction between doing real work and writing for a living. Captain Midlife concedes the difference more than ever now when what he does is what he does and not what he is going to do when he grows up. This isn't work, it's me, the Captain acknowledges, exults. What he loves most is the words. The words! At night he hears them scuttling across the linoleum in the kitchen, rattling the dishes. He goes downstairs for a chat. They have a midnight snack.

Words flutter in his air like seabirds. Tern. There's a word. A noun. The Captain adores all nouns, proper and improper. A proper noun is a metaphor, observes the Captain, feeling very much the master of his bark. Bark! Noun- verb. Verbs are the best. Bray. Loop. Whir. In his captain's chair, the Captain sits every morning, pen in hand, happy as a clam, happier than any fisherman casting for trout. Trout! Is this the life? Captain Midlife asks unrhetorically, gazing about him with an astonishingly stupid grin.

One day when he is old enough, Captain Midlife may call a convention of his words, spread them on the floor before him and write an autobiography. It would begin with a description of the Captain as a boy, when he lived beside a park into whose thicket of dark trees he would peer at night from the height of his apartment and search for the love who awaited him there. Exactly what she looked like he could not say at the time. She was exquisitely beautiful, he was certain of that: gentle and intelligent, quiet, stubborn, funny, kind. Sometimes he imagined that he would swoop from his window into the park like a glider, landing gracefully, noiselessly before her. Off they would fly together, eventually to marry. But after a while he would leave her to test new waters, and she would write her life upon a loom.

. In the end the Captain would return, as all captains do, to the girl of his dreams.