My Back Pages and Dermot’s Theory

By Stephen O’Connor

In the winter of 1985, I was 29 years old. The snows melted away, and so did my time in that golden decade. As I approached my thirtieth birthday, people said to me, “So, how does it feel? The big 3-0 is coming!” I suppose I sighed as if I felt the weight of senescence, or as if I were suddenly becoming wise. The truth is, the big 3-0 was no big deal. I found that at thirty years old, I could still run the field with the twenty-year-olds. I could read the fine print without glasses. I had no aches and pains; I bounded out of bed like the fabled Nemean lion, and on occasion, I may have even roared. And if, on St. Patrick’s Day, I had a pint or two too many, I could swig a cup of coffee in the morning, and I was as right as rain. The thirties were not so bad. I even managed to insinuate myself into the company of a lovely woman and get her to marry me in my thirties; how bad is that?

In the winter of 1995, my fortieth birthday was looming. I prayed that no one would stick a photo of my third-grade mug in the newspaper with the caption, “Lordy, Lordy, look who’s forty.” The day came, and I survived. People said, “You don’t look forty.”  I said, “Thank you.”  I had no gray hair; no reading glasses were perched on my nose. The wrinkles around my eyes were only visible when I smiled, and since I never smile at myself in the mirror, I had the impression that I was still young.

I was “drafted” onto the Pepperell over-forty soccer team. The terms of my contract were that I had to buy my uniform and take my turn bringing the post-game beer. I could still sprint down a field without fear of pulling a muscle, though it seemed my lungs had begun to shrink just a little bit. A teammate explained to me that the human heart pumps blood at a rate of so many times per minute—minus your age, so the older you get, the less capable the pump is of keeping up with your exertions.

I adjusted and got used to sucking wind through a ninety-minute game with an overworked pump. By the fall of 2004, at the age of 49, I began to notice that my hamstrings were sore after the game, and a former track coach said to me, “You’re old now; you need to stretch out for a half hour before the game.” I understood how Carlos Carvalho felt when he limped off the field one day. “What muscle did you pull?” I asked. He responded, “All of them.”

The winter of 2006, and I turned 51. In the spring, I joined the Westford over 50 soccer team. Have you seen those guys? Picture Ebenezer Scrooge in shorts. I tried very hard to tell myself that fifty is not old, but a glance at my teammates stripped me of that illusion. And I fit right in. This can’t be! I was young very recently, or so it seemed. Why did Bob the mailman keep sticking those AARP applications in my mailbox?

An Irish relative, Dermot O’Connor, came to visit us over the Christmas holidays. He was 52 or 53 at the time. I hadn’t seen him since 1980 in Dublin. The black beard I remembered was a grizzled silver; his thick mane of dark hair—a smooth dome. However, as we reflected over a glass of twelve-year-old Redbreast on the fleeting nature of time, he assured me that he was not in the least concerned about aging. With confident if mystifying Irish logic, he explained that as long as you could put your socks on standing up, you were not old, and that was a scientific fact. His teeth might fall out, and his back bend like a willow in a gale, but by God he would manage somehow to get his socks on standing up and so convince himself that he was still a young buck.

My Colombian mother-in-law stayed with us over the holidays, too. I explained Dermot’s Ponce de León socks theory to her. She laughed and said, “No, Steve, you’re young as long as you have dreams.” I liked this philosophy, because it implied that not only can you stay young by clinging to your dreams, but conceivably, if you should become more of a dreamer as you get older, you might actually become younger. Perhaps therein lies the key to the baffling lines in Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages,” in which he claims to be much younger than he used to be.

The years rolled on as they do. I played my last soccer game at 62 with the Dirty Groton Scoundrels. Recently, I got an invitation to join a “walking soccer team.” I cried.

Walk with a soccer ball? At least trot for God’s sake! Keep struggling against the inevitable you “heroic hearts!” Remember Tennyson: To seek, to strive … something something  …  “And not to yield!” Ignore that young waitress at Dunkin Donuts who looks you up and down and asks, “Would you like the senior citizen discount?” She probably needs glasses herself. But take the discount—what the hell. And if some rainy morning, you should fall and bang your head on the bedpost while you’re trying to put your socks on standing up, for God’s sake, remember, as you lie there in your underwear on the floor with one sock half on—you still have dreams.