Age Appropriate

Sometimes, mystified by the behavior of one of my sons, my wife will point out if   it’s age-appropriate, making me wonder why I still shout at ballplayers on tv and argue with the dead. Last week, my oldest son, with a wild pitch, turned my left ankle into an eggplant. I didn’t yell at the doctors who refused my insurance, or get angry with a friend who told me to soak it in bourbon and garlic. No, I read Montaigne who said self-revelation is the purpose of discourse, which, in his day, meant knowing whether to be flattered if a friend didn’t use a food-taster, or amused if a witch cast a spell of   weeping on an in-law. Blaise Monluc, the king’s lieutenant general during the civil wars, Montaigne says, threw so many hanged Protestants down a well you could reach in and touch the top one’s head. Yes, Monluc, who was fond of saying “When the scaffolds are full, use trees,” knew what was appropriate. On occasion I’ll run into a lobby to avoid greeting a friend, not because my mind vanishes and I can’t remember his name, which is true, but because I must flee what is darkest in me. In other words, when evicted from a strange lobby into a stranger street, where every scaffold is full and bodies dangle in the long blue sorrow of the afternoon, without context, explanation, or sympathy, it’s good to know, even momentarily, how to live, among the relevant, the passionate, and the confused.