Lazy lightning. Half-hearted thunder. Like an aging uncle grumbling and fumbling with a light switch in an upstairs room, as I once described it. April has trouble making up its mind sometimes. She fired Winter’s choreographer in March, but she forgot to can the wardrobe mistress, and when a late snow dressed out the woods in angel flakes, she didn’t quite have the heart to put Spring production on overtime. So. Lazy lightning. Half-hearted thunder.

I like it. Clumping around backstage in the woods during a seasonal scenery change excites me. It’s like living inside an x-ray. New sets going up with new colors; green buds clacking in the treetops like techs in the flies; shiny puddles miming the sky; eager birds in the chorus flitting about, rehearsing their one line; diva and debutante flowers spreading their garish skirts and taking blossom bows in the breeze!

And, of course, for me winter-spring is a daily escape from the world of Muggles. The yammer of politics and ca-ca media becomes irrelevant once I get in the woods. Mom Nature chides me for the time I spend in society, and I don’t know how many times she’s told me to take off my skis when I enter her parlor and just go barefoot, but I can’t quite let go of the tether. Easy to feel alienated from the faceless world in these dumbed down times, but it’s a different story when you’re one-on-one with familiar faces.

There are the friends who call my name on the trails and want to chat. Ditto everywhere in the world of commerce. There are dogs to pet and warm exchanges to be made when neighbors pass by my house. And children to give to. Serial correspondence through one channel or another accumulates all day, and some special voices by phone make for special nights. On a higher ethereal plane there is my inamorata, and the goddess in the garden, twin guardians of my true core in an enchanted Brigadoon. And then there is YOU. Whatever part of the world you are in, whether we have ever met in person or not, whether we know or care what each other’s opinions are on issues in these fractious times, you are reason enough for me to stay tethered.

Can’t say how long that tether is, but aging fascinates me. I’m so out of sync with the progression of life’s phases that sometimes it seems I’m almost a spectator. None of us knows how long our gravy train will stay on the rails, but please throw away your myths of declining passion, activity and love. Those things only wane if you let them. Life is stimulation, incentive and inspiration. My plan is to live to 113 still on skis. That beats my hero, Jackrabbit Johannsen by one year. Concede nothing! That’s sensible advice to people who think they are inching toward decrepitude. Lots of centenarians doing incredible things, even running marathons. Guess I’d better make a gender distinction here before I start hurling motivation around. My inner woman is limited to dressing up as Florence Nightingale one Halloween in grade school, so I’m clueless about women aging.

That said, most men see that aging can be tougher psychologically and emotionally on the female persuasion. If you spend your life bombarded with cues to youth and beauty, and maybe bring a few bambinos to term followed by nature messing with your hormones, then who’s to blame you getting miffed if the biological imperative to physically attract takes some revision as you close in on menopause or wave to it in the rearview mirror? How to tell the world, “Hey, I’m smarter, wiser, and I’ve sorted out the stuff that matters, so I don’t need to compete with the perishables”? Thing is, maybe you don’t have to tell the world. Age frees you up in more ways than you can count, if you simply choose to be free. Not me saying that, I’m just channeling what a lot of women tell me. If you’re happily married, you know that passion migrates toward gratitude over time, and if you’re single and lonely, there are male counterparts for every need.

Male libidos aren’t exempt from a Hobson’s choice either, though men tend to go happily to pot like sumo wrestlers guzzling calories and celebrating vices. In my observation, aging for men is more a physical “reap what you sow” consequence than it is for women. But at any age, us guys get to choose our poisons. Want to dig your grave with your teeth or ride the whole way in a recliner fantasizing in front of a TV, go for it. I’m a big fan of fantasies, though mine are definitely not passive. There are alternatives to vegging back into the soil. If you’d rather be on it than under it, use what you have inside and out. As with thinking women, freedom and inner growth are huge rewards to thinking men. And laugh if you will, but there are sapiosexual women out there whose eyes will eat you up (God bless ‘em), even if you’re a bachelor and, like me, you’ve never been what you might call physically attractive. Said females come in every demographic, young or old, lookers or not, angels and harpies. I don’t know what drives them, don’t care. Know what you want. Find out what they want. And don’t assume every female wants to get married. Just be straight about staying single, if that’s your plan. Doesn’t mean you can’t BE in love with someone either. Like I said, know what they want; know what you want.

Speaking for just myself, banking a Holy Grail is part of the mix. It’s all about “knowing,” for me. The thing that’s central to my state of well-being is affirming the great imponderables, like is there a will (God by any name) behind existence, and is there such a thing as soulmate love. Did not expect to find either affirmation in my life, but I have. It’s way beyond the scope of this Sullygram to expand on that, but I think some men and women arrive at just that state of equilibrium where they know what is or was possible no matter what path they are on. How do you see yourself? Aging is in your power to control. It accrues from lifelong attitudes. Or as I put it recently in a Facebook post:

I see a boy, 9 or 10, lying on a bed quilt checked with colors. Above him is a pale green shelf he made, bordered with a dowel lip like a bow wave met by scale model ships. There is one of burnished metal, Viking perhaps but he likes the mystery of not knowing, and others that he has built himself from kits – a destroyer, two destroyer escorts, one battleship. And there are lamps. One of these is oriental. Two others with red and lime green bulbs represent port and starboard in the thick glass casings or hurricane lamps. The flex lamp by which he is reading has a metal cone that gets too hot to touch. A saucer of salted Spanish peanuts is on the bed, and a glass of Pepsi fizzes in a cup holder he has fashioned from a coat hanger and hung on the shelf.

The boy is me and that is what I remember when I read an old Sax Rohmer book. Those warm hours in that intimate sanctuary on cold winter nights in the former lumbering town of Bay City, Michigan. My whole life was ahead of me, and I could not have guessed what adventures I would live, but the magic of anticipation was there even then…just like turning a page. It is still there.

Hope you have the right page-turners in your library. Some photos below…

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan