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.