Front-Loading

   
         I have a good friend whose older brother was my teen idol.  He was a gifted athlete--tennis, basketball, golf--and endlessly fascinating to girls who seemingly couldn't wait to go out with him.  Which they usually did.  And he made money too--lots of it.  He had it all.  Make no bones about it, I envied him.  I'm pretty sure everyone from the old neighborhood did. Of course it was an empty life, even I could see that, but what did it matter?  He was having a lot more fun than I was.
          Recently I learned that in later life he has not been so fortunate, that he's had a bad time with health, money, and marriages.  I was sorry to hear it when my friend told me the story, which he laid out carefully as a cautionary tale.  This is what happens to people who are not sufficiently mindful of their early lives, who burn the candle from both ends, who in fact burn themselves out too early.
          I mulled it over for a while, then suggested that maybe his brother had simply chosen to front-load his life--that maybe he'd decided to live as fast and brightly as he could while he was still able to enjoy it.  Maybe it wouldn't last, but maybe it would.  And even if it didn't, he'd still have the past that would forever be his and his alone.  "Not even Heaven upon the past has power: / What has been, has been, and I have had my hour." The Roman poet Horace said that in the first century BCE.
          I'm not at all like my friend's brother, and yet, oddly, I front-loaded my life too, just differently.
          My dad, like his father before him, died of colon cancer when he was fifty-five.  His death was a relief, for him and for me and my mother--he'd suffered for a decade by then, not just from the cancer but from a serious heart condition as well.  Watching him die for so many years, I determined in my early twenties to front-load my life.  Don't put anything off for a later life that may never come.  For some, the thought of an early death urges a life of pleasure, but for me it didn't.  Instead, I developed an acute sense of urgency to become all I could before the family curse struck me down.
          I dreaded the year 1997, when I would turn fifty-five, but I would be ready for it.  If it was possible, I would have some achievements by then, something I could be proud of, something my father would have been proud of.  My goals were to earn a Ph.D., become a professor, write literary criticism and history, and in short be part of the scholarly dialogue.  I earned the Ph.D. in 1976 and have spent the last forty years learning, teaching, and publishing. The benefits of a front-loaded life.
          Meanwhile, medical technology developed a method to detect and remove intestinal polyps that grow into fatal malignancies.  Like the death row prisoner who is freed by an eleventh-hour pardon from the governor, I was unexpectedly spared.  Still, I sweated out my fifty-fifth year--and am now four months shy of my seventy-fourth birthday.  It's a miracle.
          Mind you, it wasn't easy to front-load my life with work.  I became a classic overachiever--a solid player, a starter maybe, on thin teams, but not a Hall of Famer.  I acknowledged my limitations from the outset, but I wouldn't let them stand in the way.  Work became my mantra.  And it required sacrifice--like weekend golf, say, or Sunday brunch.  I wouldn't be sidetracked by attractive, long-term do-it-yourself projects and only begrudgingly spent weekend hours mowing the lawn, fixing the leaky toilet, and cleaning out the gutters.  I would not allow distractions.  Of course, I did what needed to be done at home and at school, but I always returned like a bulldog to the work.  Later, when friends and colleagues marveled at what seemed to them an enormous output and asked how I'd done it, I would answer with a question:  "What do you do on Saturday mornings?"
          I'm long past my front-loading days, but even now, by force of habit, I work a little every day on something I call my end-of-life project, a book on poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Back-loading, it turns out, isn't bad either.