Captain Midlife Faces Christmas

By Roger Rosenblatt

The older he grows, the harder it gets for Captain Midlife to take this ( season. Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year's. Five weeks of souped-up revels strung out like dead leaf fires. Not that January is any great shakes either, with its glass-eye skies threatening to shatter; or loony February; or March blowing about one's head like some parent ranting in a never-cleaned-up room. Still, it is this season that gets the Captain down, and up, and down again. Poor Captain Midlife. Can anybody out there lend him a hand?

It is the extremes of the season that get him down, wear him down to a frazzle of somnambulant grinning. Jews and Christians sing out their lungs this time of year, bear candles against the abbreviated light. Even secular humanists find a way to hold the dark at bay. Captain Midlife knows of an elementary school that takes the separation of church and state so seriously, the only holiday it celebrates is the winter solstice. The children sing solstice songs ("Joy to the world, the sun has sunk"?). All in the name of pitting one extreme against the other. Pumping like a bellows, Captain Midlife adds his fine, rich baritone (still pretty fine, pretty rich, don't you think?) to carolers rocketing their voices up, up into the stars.

Then down he plunges again, suddenly, inexplicably, during a shopping spree or a laughing spree, down, desperate, into one of the mind's old, too familiar snow pits. In the middle of his fifth decade, he attends more funerals than weddings. Great swings of feelings come frequently, irrespective of the seasons. The outer world weeps with the sufferers of AIDS, wars, the mumbling dispossessed who pitch their crazy tents in doorways. The inner world weeps with loss of family, friends, colleagues; loss of dreams, of chance. But see: the Captain cannot stay down for long. He hits the bottom like a trampoline. Boing.

By now you'd think that he would have learned to take the holidays in stride, to sashay through the swing season with a dignified sense of balance. Not the Captain. Balance was supposed to come with middle age, but these days he feels shakier than ever. The season overwhelms him with its polarities. Grand abstractions are undercut by particular forms. The gratitude of Thanksgiving reduced to a half-chewed drumstick. The generosity of Hanukkah and Christmas to Tammy Faye Bakker dolls. The renewal of New Year's to a horn toot.

But these are nothing compared with the extremes in him, in brave, dumb Captain Midlife, jogging with the kids, exhaling frost; or out on the town, red-mufflered to the eyes, a Scotch ad beaming with conventional merriment. Inside his aching, brooding head, a mess of city-dump proportions. He crouches in the mind's attic like one of those soldiers who are never told that the war is over, and reads that Michael Korda, a modern adviser on how to live, says that by the time one reaches one's 40s, all emotional and professional problems should be settled. The Captain hopes he will not have to show Mr. Korda his inventory.

Last summer a doctor proclaimed the Captain "shipshape." The Captain sought a second opinion.

This is no country for middle-aged men, Captain Midlife has concluded. Or middle-aged women either, he adds hastily, a person for all seasons. Too much is expected of middle age, too much self-assurance to accommodate the too much power. Better to be chomping on one's salad days. The Captain's children have no difficulty maneuvering through the holidays, flapping like flamingos.

But Captain Midlife is a blinded navigator, frozen at the helm with a hoary smile on his face impossible to read except by other ninnies in their 40s and 50s, who, like him, through no fault of their own, have been handed control of the world. Control of the world? What a snap! It's control of oneself that takes real skill. Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year's. An entire stage of life compressed into a symbolic five-week journey of light and dark, crying and singing. And here comes Captain Midlife, dopey as the day is short, hollering orders into the gale, hailing other captains as they pass one another in the night, captains of industry, of law, of medicine, even of ships; every one of them a champion faker, every one knowing that under their stupefying bonhomie thuds the pulse of a hysteric.

Captain Midlife would like to speak with Gorbachev this week. Not about the missiles or Nicaragua -- about middle-agedness. "Mikhail Sergeyevich, don't you feel like throwing in the towel sometimes?" Captain Midlife was watching when Tom Brokaw, another middle-ager, asked, "man to man," what do you think and feel? But Gorbachev could only answer state to man, and the more certain he sounded, the less certain he looked. In middle age the gulf between what you are and who you are is too wide to cross, too -- what? -- extreme. Who knows what turmoil lurks in the hearts of men old enough to remember The Shadow? The Captain knows.

That's about all he knows, besides a few dozen carefully recycled facts, and the tricks of his odd trade, acquired mostly against his will. The rest is a persistent silent prayer that within the boisterous tugs of war, a quiet Intelligence presides, a tone, a voice, a river. Middle age is such a foggy place. Rarely does the Captain catch sight of something clear, and then it seems available only by telescope. Gratitude, generosity, renewal. There! Just for a moment. There!

A woman the Captain loves is dying of cancer in this season. In her eighth decade she has learned to accept life in its small and most cherishable doses: the devotion of her daughter; a few close friends; the animals she hovers over because she realized long ago that she was one of them. Around her country cottage, clouds like barrels rolled in pitch inflate the sky, while at his troubled and uncomfortable distance Captain Midlife stammers consolations wholly unnecessary for such a woman. He beats about preparing for her death. She calmly prepares for Christmas and pokes the fire.