My birthday happened. A friend emailed me the week before to make plans. A dinner. The message included, “Is this a big one?” I knew what he meant and, no, entry into a new decade is still a year away. “Don’t rush me,” I replied. Still, at my age, they’re all big ones in terms of numbers and they all seem to be rushing me.
Another birthday? Already?! Pick any random smaller number—27, 35, 43, 52—they came and went so fast. How do I slow the speed setting on this treadmill of life?
Alas, the speed setting is locked. And so, yes, another birthday, another number on the age clicker.
I’m not a birthday guy. It has nothing to do with bigger numbers. Sometime in my early twenties, I started letting Happy Birthday messages go straight to the answering machine, a gadget that sounds as ancient as the telegraph and messenger pigeons. I can’t cite a particular birthday, but I suspect I go into hiding on my “special day” because I was disappointed with how it was or wasn’t celebrated once or twice. Was it the pair of socks my grandparents gave me when I was eight, ignoring my wish list which included Lite-Brite and the gender inappropriate Easy-Bake Oven? Maybe it was the Hardy Boys book they gave me the next year and the year after. So boring. So many words. (I was a very slow reader.)
I shouldn’t blame my grandparents. Their gifts never dazzled, but they did have a nice tradition of buying a little something for the other grandchildren when it was a different sibling’s birthday. Pez dispenser? Pet rock? I don’t remember. Maybe that’s what the socks were, a non-birthday consolation, and my sketchy memory has made argyles the main attraction.
Someone that mattered probably missed a birthday. Probably a whole cluster of friends. My guess is it was part of leaving university as all my Forever Friends started new lives in Boston and Tulsa where new jobs and, yes, newer friends made the birthdays of friends from college easy to forget. We didn’t have Facebook sending us reminders. We didn’t have calendars on phones or laptops. We had to open up address books every January and write all the birthdays on wall calendars that celebrated “The Far Side” or Miami Vice or Vermont. Some of us prided ourselves in how many birthdays were committed to memory along with phone numbers, state capitals and all the actresses who played on TV’s Charlie’s Angels, in order of appearance and ranked (#TeamKateJackson).
The Swedish cinnamon bun,
aka kanelbulle.
Whatever the genesis for shunning my birthday, it’s now entrenched. I go into hiding which isn’t as bad as it sounds. Usually, it means I go on a solo hike—a treat in itself—or head out of town…in recent years to the Oregon Coast, Seattle, Victoria or Stockholm. (The Stockholm trip was three weeks and the birthday being smack in the middle of it was merely fortuitous. It meant an extra kanelbulle on another day of being gloriously ignored by Swedes.)
This year's birthday escape:
a glorious, seven-hour hike.
I spent one birthday in a psych ward. It was a little too anti-birthday, even for me.
Aging has been on my mind more than usual the past couple of months and not because my local drugstore sent me a $5 voucher, saying, “We wanted to celebrate with you.” (A virtual celebration with a drugstore sounds sadder than argyle socks but, yes, I’ll take the free shaving cream. Begone, gray whiskers!)
The truth is, I don’t feel older. I continue to contend my body and mind are aligned with thirtysomething. It sounds so much better than any other decade-something in part because I adored the TV show way back in the ’80s. (Good god, I just Googled the cast and they’re all sixtysomething and seventysomething. Duh…but still a shocker. It seems only Paul Rudd and characters in comics don’t age.)
These characters drink heavily
from the fountain of youth.
I get a reality check whenever I leave my condo and have quick, casual exchanges with people who don’t know me. I’m just the guy in front of them, waiting to order my oat milk latte or the person they’re trying to get past as I hunch over and eyeball Häagen-Dazs pints in the freezer aisle at the grocery store. Three words set me straight: “Excuse me, sir.”
Okay the “excuse me” is fine. Nice manners. Better than a sigh, a grunt or a shove. But it’s the “sir” that feels like an assault. Did they say that as they maneuvered by the skateboard dude on aisle three? I may feel one age, but clearly I look another.
I mean, good for Colleen
Hoover, but what about
the rest of us?
For practical, non-vanity reasons, that’s a concern. I worry I’m aging out of my big career dream. I yearn to have another novel published. Actually, many novels. Move over, James Patterson and Colleen Hoover, I want a spot on the shelf, too. And off the shelf…grabbed by an avid reader, scanned at the register, taken home, read and loved…or at least liked enough to evade those crushing one-star reviews. (Who are these terrible people? Weren’t we all taught, If you don’t have anything nice to say…?)
I’ve been querying agents by email, my cover letter and first five pages ending up in virtual slushpiles and thereafter, it seems, passing through the virtual shredders. No response means no thanks.
I shrug it off the unspoken dismissals. I remember all the men who rejected me. All the messages sent on dating sites, never answered. All the coffee dates that went nowhere, the few promising ones seeming so only from my perspective. I know rejection! I handle it well!
But I don’t want to. I want an agent to finally say yes. Actually: “YES!!!” I generally think extra exclamation marks are redundant. Normally they cause involuntary tics. But bring ’em on, dream agent. Exclaim! Exclaim! Exclaim! Take all that love and enthusiasm to Random House and HarperCollins and land that book deal. Let me be your golden nest egg!
Oh, how I dream.
Let me continue to do so.
My best shot to getting an agent to consider my latest manuscript is to have their full attention, face to face, instead of being one of a sixty querying emails they power through on a Saturday afternoon before they get to do something more appropriately Saturday afternoon-y.
Two weeks ago, I attended a writing conference in Seattle and pitched three different novels to three different agents. Each pitch was in one of those hollow hotel conference rooms with oversized beige drapes, beige tablecloths and a carpet adorned with rust-colored flowers and swirls intended to cover at least twelve years of wine and coffee stains. (No stains from me; I did, however, spill a quarter bag of flax pumpkin granola while waiting in an armchair in the lobby. Sorry!)
My in-the-flesh face time with each agent amounted to four minutes each.
Bing!
A timer and some watchful volunteers made sure we’d vacate our chairs posthaste.
The first impression was everything. With eighty wannabe authors entering the pitching room at the same time—it was one of four such sessions—I needed to stand out for all the right reasons. For days, I sharpened my spiel. I timed myself, whittling things down from a rambling seven minutes to ninety seconds, the time recommended to allow an agent to ask follow-up questions, assuming they didn’t scowl, wave their arm and say, “No agent for you!”
While I knew the content of the pitch mattered most, I knew other things factored into an agent requesting pages and ultimately wanting to take me on as a client. I brushed my teeth in the men’s room. I popped a mint. I adjusted the collar of my conservatively stylish shirt. And I poofed up my hair which I’d had cut and highlighted the day before. No gray. Even the sideburns got a paint job.
Please, let no one smile vacantly and say, “Thank you, sir.”
Let me look young. Younger, at least. If not thirtysomething, then fortysomething. I needed agents to see a long, bright writing future in me instead of my name on waiting list for Shady Pines.
LET ME BE YOUR CASH COW!!!
Things went well enough. Two out of three agents requested more. We clicked. This time, the word click feels like a good thing. Maybe it will lead to something. This old-ish guy has so much more to offer.
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