NEW YORK -- The other day I got on the subway here -- a crowded subway, I hasten to add -- and shimmied my way into the middle of the car, where I found room to stand. A young man, maybe 25 or so, was sitting to my left. He was trim and fit. He seemed to be looking in my direction, but then he motioned for someone to take his seat. I looked behind me to spot the old gent, lady, pregnant woman or disabled person he was so nicely helping out. I saw no one and looked back in his direction. He pointed directly at me. I fumed.
I wanted to say something: Who do you think you're helping, bub? I don't need your seat. I am perfectly capable of standing. And standing and standing and standing. Of course, I said nothing of the sort. I merely shook my head no, mouthed a thank you and turned away. I was crushed.
In "As You Like It," Shakespeare wrote of the seven ages of man. The expression comes from Jacques's speech -- the one that begins with the familiar "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." He goes on to say, "They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages."
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The Bard has Jacques list them: Infant, "whining school-boy," "the lover, Sighing like furnace," then a soldier ("seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon's mouth"), the justice, the elderly gent ("With spectacles on nose and pouch on side") and, finally, a "second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." Yea, verily, yea -- not to mention, Oy, oy vey.
But these ages are no longer applicable -- at least as far as I'm concerned. I have been an infant, a schoolboy, a lover (the furnace is not yet banked), a soldier, and I suppose I'm on my way to the other stages. But I measure them all not by what I was at the time -- always a journalist, anyway -- but by singular, momentous events. Having someone offer you a seat on the subway is that sort of event.
Share this articleShareSo, too, was the first time someone called me "mister." I was working as a soda jerk -- is there still such a thing and, if there is, is it now called a "soda person"? -- when some boy called me mister. I was just a kid myself, 14 or so, and when the boy said it, I looked around to see if my boss had returned to the store from his afternoon nap. I looked. No boss. Suddenly, amazingly, I had been promoted to mister.
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I skip all the usual stuff relating to being "the lover" with that ferocious furnace -- you've seen the movie, anyway -- and even fatherhood. It was truly momentous and downright amazing, but I felt no older afterward, just poorer and suddenly burdened with an awesome responsibility. But it was not too long after that -- a mere decade or so -- when my family gathered on Cape Cod one summer's eve for dinner. By then my father had retired.
It was a nice meal. It was a warm meal. It was a meal with my parents and my sister and all our children, two by last count. I ate what I wanted without regard to cost. Then the check came. The waiter placed it on the table, and I waited for the usual to happen. Only it didn't. My father made no move for the check. Slowly, it dawned on me. Me! I was supposed to pick up the check. It was, as Gail Sheehy might say, a passage.
There have been others and still some to come. I fear the day women don't return my look on the street. I fear the day I am one of those old men for whom the past is in the present -- the ones who want to talk about the powerful people they once knew. I fear my body going south on me, my father's arthritis crawling down my arms like a sort of rigor mortis, seizing my fingers in a permanent fist so I can no longer write. I fear that more than anything.
Many things are behind me. But many things are yet to come. I have passed through five of Shakespeare's seven ages, but I will fight the last two as long as I can.
Thanks for the seat, young man, but I will stand, damn it, I will stand.
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