Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

Later this year, I will hit the half-century mark. Part of me would like to proclaim bravely that aging doesn’t bother me, though another part of me kind of wishes that it did. The simple truth is that I don’t really care. I’m here, and Lord willing, I will be for a bit longer. Yet, the big decisions that a young person looks forward to – where to go to college, who to marry, what career to have, how to raise children – those are behind me now. I made the choices and have seen them through to fruition. Anything that comes along from here on out won’t be anything I’ve sought, and that’s a good feeling. Life after 50 will be like a real-life bonus round.

Half my life ago, I wandered into adulthood at the end of the 1990s and only wanted two things: to marry this one particular girl and have a family with her, and to be a writer. I’ve gotten to do both. Before my landmark birthday arrives, that girl and I will celebrate twenty-three years of marriage, and we will also send one of our two children off to college. Between that anniversary and that departure, we’ll put the younger of our two children into a truck with his brand-new driver’s license. Because my wife and I met on my twenty-fifth birthday, my fiftieth will also mark the point that I have lived with her as long as I did without her. As to the latter goal of being a writer, my seventh published book was released last fall. The first one – a poetry chapbook – came out in 2002, followed by three books in 2009, then another in 2011, one more in 2018, and the most recent one in 2023. Those books, some other projects, quite a few short works, and a teaching career of twenty-plus years— I think I did OK.  So, the question of what I will do with my life has been answered. 

What really fascinates me, at this age, is how many different people we are throughout life. I’ve now lived long enough to look back at my own life from a critical distance, and what I see is how my approach to life has evolved with my circumstances. As a child, I was bright, meek, and agreeable. As a preteen and young teenager whose family was falling apart, I could be a jerk and tended to cause problems. Once I discovered the arts and girls as an older teenager, I was curious and invigorated, but also lost and selfish. Having to live at home and work during college, I was bitter and lonely but had hope nonetheless. Afterward, my mind hog-tied itself with shortsightedness and frustration when I didn’t find success immediately. All before age twenty-five. In the twenty-five years since, I have been changed fundamentally by a cascading tide of marriage then parenthood, teaching in a public school, a writing career, the internet and smartphones, a religious conversion, deaths among family and friends, the recession, and the pandemic. Considering my experiences, I can share that life is humbling and that we seem to do the best we can with what we are capable of at the time. 

My other predominant thought, as I consider how I have gotten older, is: I want people to just say what they have to say. I don’t feel the need to agree with anybody, nor to hear what I want to hear. I wish that people would share their truths in plain, simple terms, without anger or defensiveness, without the need to be indisputably right. During my time teaching creative writing, I used to tell my students to be themselves and remember, “The best writing says the most with the fewest words possible.” These days, in my reading, I tend more and more to prefer shorter works over longer ones. I find myself picking through the Analects of Confucius, Aesop’s fables, Issa’s haiku, or the sayings of the Desert Fathers instead of reaching for a novel or other full-length book. Perhaps, in late middle age, I’m losing some measure of patience, or maybe my writer’s mind has turned its attitude to the literary version of “I don’t buy no green bananas.” More than anything, I think it’s this— I’ve learned that, if you actually want anyone’s attention, you have to say your thing, and quickly.

Somewhat thieving the term from Neal Cassady’s posthumously published 1971 memoir The First Third, I am aware that I either already have or am now entering my Third Third. The growing-up First Third was complete by my mid-20s, and the marriage-working-children Second Third is nearing completion. Clearly beyond my peak, which came in the form of book publications and teaching awards in the 2000s and 2010s, I am approaching my denouement. Some people call our 40s and 50s “middle age,” but I’m not going to live to be 90 or 100. Middle age would really be our 30s to early 40s, though it would be difficult at that stage of life to realize that it’s halfway done. Me, I’m not kidding myself— this is the last of three Thirds. The final act! Which is usually when we find out what all that struggle was for.

More and more these days, I also think about Peter Matthiessen’s reminder in The Snow Leopard to “Expect nothing.” It’s good advice. As is something that the late Thich Nhat Hanh taught: frustration is just the anger we feel over things we can’t control. Living in a thoughtful way reveals that these lessons have many manifestations, including the story of Job, Jesus’s parable of the lilies of the field, and the Serenity Prayer. Each of us has a very limited amount of control over our lives, and we may as well accept that. That said, I’m pretty proud that half my life ago I sought two things, and despite the hardships, I got them both. So now I get to just go with the flow. Yep, everything after 50 will be like a real-life bonus round.

The writer, in the early days, during the First Third

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