Truisms for Older Men
A few years ago, in a period of reading the excellent Saratoga mysteries by Stephen Dobyns, I read Saratoga Backtalk (finishing it on 17 April 2000, according to my database of books read for the year 2000). Since then, I've had occasion to retell as sage wisdom some advice for men past middle age that I read there on the first page of the narrative.
As I remembered it, it went like this. There are three warnings that men over 50 should heed:
- Never waste an erection;
- Never trust a fart; and
- another one I could never recall.
Now, these may sound peculiar to the younger crowd, as though we men in our golden age have some peculiar obsessions, but they (the first two as remembered, at least) are really just useful observations about getting on with daily life, useful because we can save embarrassment and frustration if we pay attention to the advice instead of forcing ourselves to relearn these wise admonitions separately and individually.
Last night as we mentioned once again these golden bits of wisdom in conversation with our friend Richard, he asked yet again what #3 was and, again, and yet again I couldn't remember.
Finally, tonight, when Isaac and I were at the public library, I thought (in the final moments before closing) to rush to the "D" section of the mysteries and look through all the Dobyns titles until I found the remembered lines. I found them pretty quickly, in the volume mentioned above, since it was at the bottom of the first page of narrative (page 11 of the book) as I pictured it in my memory.
I was pretty accurate on the meaning, but not too precise in my memory of the phrasing. This is what Dobyns had written:
My name is Victor Plotz and I'm fifty-nine years old, or thereabouts. The age when they say you don't waste a hard-on, trust a fart, or bust your noggin on dumb ideas.
Not bad, I'd say. In fact, although #3 was useful in the novel to get the story going, I don't think it really has the force of human-natural law that #1 and #2 do (as I know from personal experience), so I'm not surprised that it slipped from my memory. In fact, I seem even more inclined to bust my noggin on dumb ideas now than, say, 20 years ago, so I'm not so certain about that one anyway.
In fact, now that I have noted the exact quotation, I may go back to my own list of two when I next have occasion to mention them, which I'm sure will be soon.