Captain Midlife Sends a Valentine

By Roger Rosenblatt

Valentine's Day approaches. So many hearts still to be won, muses Captain Midlife as he studies his magnified decaying face in the shaving mirror, while striving to put the picture of T.S. Eliot's Sweeney out of his mind.

Out of his mind, indeed. The quavering romantic nature flops like a landed fish but never expires entirely, our middle-aged boy discovers. Debts pound at the door like crazy firemen; responsibilities rise like dunes on the Cape; girls in their 20s call him Sir (Oh, call me Captain); and still our hero hopes. Will love come to Captain Midlife? Has it been there all along? Stay tuned as the insomniac, not-yet-ancient mariner rests his head on the railing at a Knicks-Bulls game in which he is Air-Jordaning three feet over the rim | one moment and the next eloping in a Chevrolet Impala with that remarkably attractive blond behind the refreshment stand, the one lathering mustard on the franks.

He could build a wonderful life with her; he is absolutely certain of that. They could pass delightful days discussing the netherworld of basketball arenas, talking of crowd control, relish, ramps. Or would it be better to start life over again with the lady cop in the subway? She looked mighty fetching in blue. A life of summonses and judo. Or the solemn woman at the rent-a-car counter? A prospect of long nights spent writing their initials inside little circles. The cashier at the A&P? The jogger with the Westie? The Captain confesses that he is much taken with that lanky public defender on TV, the one who never smiles and who dresses like Alcott and Andrews. Late dinner conversations on civil rights and torts (Have a tort?). How about Alcott, or Andrews?

You see, Captain Midlife has never got it into his thick if frangible skull that his life is exactly where it is, consisting of a loving wife, three loving children and a loving dog, which, while no Westie, has much fine oddness to recommend it. Well, sometimes he understands this, and sometimes he does not. When he does not, his mind packs up its belongings and sets sail like Ulysses (the very first Captain Midlife), hopping from port to port, dreaming up a storm. The Captain knows too well what the voyage of Ulysses was all about. Circe gives the old come-hither. Calypso does her little dance. The Sirens sing. No need to tie the buzzard to the mast. He's been tied there all along. The Odyssey: one long wild fling.

But in reality the Captain stays close to shore these days, and there he often amazes himself by falling in love with his actual surroundings. Middle age expands one's range of loving, discovers Captain Midlife. The objects of his deepest affection are things he once ignored or took for granted.

Such as his house. Suddenly the Captain finds that he cares strongly for his house: tables, doorknobs, chests of drawers. Finicky as a clerk, he keeps his house shipshape, puts up a shelf, arranges the flowers. Is that you, Captain Sloppy? Everything in its place, replies the Captain, who finds himself included in the everything.

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.