Upon turning 55, being a late bloomer in nearly all things, I finally decided to have a full-blown midlife crisis.
No secret apartments with mistresses or shiny Corvettes on the curbside. I’m a cheap man of modest means and self-aware enough that I wouldn’t beset any woman with the misery of my company outside of my poor Melissa. I settled instead for insomnia and stewing in regret, the affordable options.
Three days after my birthday, I flew to Toronto and stayed at my younger sister Aimee’s place. There I hung out for a few days with my mother, who lives in Montreal. At breakfast one sunny morning, my mum and I sat across the kitchen table from each other. Just the two of us. I was trying to enjoy the cup of coffee that had gone cold, watching the summer trees outside seemingly beg for a breeze. Briggs, Aimee’s aging English bulldog, wheezed by the window in a patch of sun. She is a machine of mindless slobber.
My mum asked me how my childhood friends Adrien, Jonathan, Paquito, and Sean were doing. I told her we had been playing Dungeons & Dragons like we did back in high school. We meet on Zoom on Fridays and embark on adventures in the world of Panmuria. We’re still the same with each other, but there is a new layer of interaction. We now soothe each other and ponder the states we find ourselves in. We don’t really communicate in complete sentences. But then we have never been superconfidential. Instead, we provide reliability, faithfulness, our presence for the bad times, the specifics unspoken. Kind of like Briggs, we are comfort dogs, who sit by each other’s legs and pant.
I mentioned how Jonathan, who had just turned 55 too, brought up an ad from our youth, London Life’s 1984 Freedom 55 campaign. It touted that the right financial management could lead to happy early retirement. “Yeah, right,” Jonathan scoffed.
Jonathan’s tone was surprising. By any professional measure, he is successful. As a structural engineer, he has collaborated with some of the most famous architects in the world. Sometimes, when watching a movie, I’ll see a soaring skyscraper and say to Melissa, “Jon did that.”
I griped to my mum, if Jonathan hadn’t obtained Freedom 55, where the hell was I? I bemoaned that I had no followup to my debut 2011 memoir. “I worry about my literary legacy.”
My mother, who is a tiny, white-haired pocket battleship of trash talk, asked, “What legacy?”
“What will happen to my writing?”
“Who cares?”
“When I’m gone, what will people think of me?”
My mother jutted her jaw out to me, as if to taunt. “Who is the 13th prime minister?”
“What?”
“Tell me who is the 13th prime minister of Canada, ai yah.”
That’s my mum. Her logic runs ellipses, her train of thought often derails, and half the time no one knows what she’s talking about. I said I had no clue.
“You think you’re going to be more important than that? Legacy.” She spat out the last word and sipped from her cup, triumphant.
I flew back to Vancouver without any more insight on the topic of Freedom 55. I did, however, have a nightmare. I’m producing a national network radio program. It is air time. I don’t recognize anyone on the unit, I have no guests lined up, and I don’t know how to print any scripts. Total panic.
When I woke up, I released a pathetic sob that Melissa slept through and a sudden realization rushed in: why I no longer work in broadcasting.
Twenty years prior, I sat across from the head of radio news and current affairs and told her I was a great candidate to promote because I hadn’t attended British Columbia Institute of Technology’s broadcast journalism program—the school from which most new reporters and producers came. I told my boss I was a throwback to the heyday of the corporation when legendary hosts and producers had come from diverse walks of life with upper degrees in law or political science or English, even theatre. I had a master of architecture. I was sophisticated in an old-school way.
My boss glared at me. “I went to BCIT.”
I didn’t get the job.
In fact, after that debacle, the offers to host, report, produce, or contribute dwindled until it was clear I was persona non grata.
In the wee hours of the morning, I finally understood how my whole life forked at that moment, how in my supervisor’s office I ended what could have been a rewarding, illustrious career in broadcasting. I would have been known. I would have been recognized. I would have been remembered. That would have been a legacy, wouldn’t it? If only I hadn’t been a snob with a big mouth. If only I wasn’t an ill-equipped adventurer who avoided falling into a pit with a monstrous Gelatinous Cube at the bottom. I would have avoided taking one six-sided die of acid damage each round ever since. That’s D&D talk, but trust me, it’s horrific.
I admit I’ve made real choices with eyes wide open, like committing myself to being a writer and teacher so I could work from home for less but also be around to help raise my twin sons Emmet and Jack. Those were choices made without regret.
But, friends, that nightmare epiphany that my whole freaking life has been shaped by unforced errors where I walked past secret doors in the dungeon of life, unaware of the treasures kept behind them—well, that could have eaten up my insides.
If it were not for my mum, who had talked some sense into me.
“Now you see what I mean?” I saw my mum in my mind’s eye nodding at Briggs.
The old dog bathed in the sun, free of regret, with no clue what we were talking about. Just happy to be there.
Read more from our Autumn 2024 issue.
