Published in the April 2013 issue

My father — who is in his mid-sixties — says he doesn't feel old. Not anymore. He says he once did, when he turned thirty, forty, but after that, age ceased to affect him. He says his mind feels the same as it did when he was twenty. "You're only aware of growing older when you're younger. It's like some sort of inverse ratio. The younger you are, the more fascinated and anxious you are by aging."

He won't accept senior-citizen discounts. He tosses out the AARP magazine that magically began appearing in the mail one day. He dyes his hair a charcoal black. He turns his head when a pretty woman swishes past.

I'm not sure I believe him. I feel old, after all. I feel like as soon as we finish growing, we begin falling apart.

He and I recently got into a wrestling match. Over the years, physical violence has been our standard. He cannot shake without trying to crush my knuckles with his grip. He cannot hug without slamming a palm against my back, knocking the air from my lungs. Once, when I was a teenager and we were shopping at a department store, he called out my name and I turned to face him and he sprayed my eyes with a sample bottle of cologne as if it were mace. I collapsed to the floor, howling in pain, blind for the next few minutes. This is as close as we will ever get to I love you.

In the past he always won. He was always bigger, the standard of strength and manhood. He once snapped a wrench in half when working on a rusted bolt. He once stacked two rowboats on top of each other and heaved them into the back of our truck. From high in the mountains, miles from any road, he packed out the elk he hunted. When he was a kid, playing baseball, the catcher dropped his mitt and took the bench, complaining that my father's fastballs hurt too much. No matter how many hours I put in at the gym, he would always overpower me when we were grappling, crushing me to the floor, hurling me onto the couch so severely the frame broke.

But this time was different. This time I was stronger. It was difficult for me to recognize at first. Even as I strangled him into a headlock — even as I dropped him to his knees — I kept expecting him to rally, to twist an arm behind my back and smash my face into the carpet. But he didn't. I pinned him, jabbing my knee into his spine, and he stopped struggling and then we shoved away from each other and fell back against couches on opposite sides of the room and gasped for breath and didn't look at each other.

I can't stop running. I run on treadmills and I run on forest paths and I run on county highways with grain trucks blasting by, knocking me onto the shoulder with the big balls of air that come rolling off. Sometimes I run so far I can't feel my feet, and it is as though I am clopping along on my anklebones. My throat goes raw and my breath tastes like blood. My eyes burn with sweat and the world goes blurry.

I'm running because in my father I see myself.

I am thirty-three. My hair is threaded with gray. There is something wrong with my back, an old injury come back to haunt me. It could have been the time I was T-boned at forty-five miles per hour or it could have been the time I tried to do a backflip off a ski jump and landed on my head or it could have been the time I deadlifted two hundred pounds and felt something burst inside me. An X-ray reveals the disk, directly between my shoulder blades, has almost dissolved. A horn of bone reaches from one vertebra to the next. They are fusing, calcifying. Without a chiropractor, I suffer from chronic headaches, an electric spike of pain that rises from my back, up my neck, into my left temple, and hooks my eye. The other day it felt as though the disk were a jellyfish bulging from my spine, sizzling me with its tendrils.

I try to ignore the pain. My feet pound asphalt. I glance at my ticking watch. I am running away.

My neighbor Dave Tapper is the kind of guy who builds his own ice rink, who quotes Consumer Reports, who gets red-cheeked with excitement when advising me on dishwashers, flat-screen televisions. With his short blond broom of hair and shoulders rounded with muscle, he could pass for California surfer if not for his thick Minnesota accent. He recently helped me break down and fit back together a floor-model treadmill I couldn't shove through my patio door. Soon we will wire my living room for surround sound.

He understands how things work, how to put them together and pull them apart, in a way that I do not. Maybe this has something to do with his job as a family physician at the Allina Medical Clinic in Faribault, Minnesota. The body is just another machine to him. Blood replaces oil, tendons replace wires, joints replace gears. He buys the best brands — and maintains them — because he wants them to last. He eats the best food — and exercises religiously — because he sees every day what happens to people who don't take care of themselves.

Dave says there are two types of aging: physical and psychological. Physical aging is what we see, but psychological aging is what we feel. They don't always advance together. Often the mind gives in before the body. Once the indestructibility of youth is gone, people start to feel old even though their body remains quite capable. "Often this happens to people in their late twenties and early thirties," Dave says. "Like you."

And that, he says, is the beginning of the end. People gain weight. They stop conditioning. They prepare their body for the chronic disease that will knock them out years later.

"You are," he says, "your own worst enemy."

My grandfather — my father's father — did not expect to live past thirty. Throughout his childhood, he experienced severe abdominal pain, constant diarrhea, and at sixteen, his colon was removed. For the rest of his life he wore a colostomy bag that looked like some kind of medieval girdle. He couldn't run. He couldn't play football or basketball. He couldn't go swimming, couldn't even take his shirt off at the beach. From the time he was a teenager, he lived a life as sedentary as a seventy-year-old.

When he ate celery or turkey or roast beef — anything rough — he would chew the taste off it and then spit it delicately onto the tines of his fork, so that by the end of every meal his plate was wreathed with chewed balls of green, yellow, brown.

He was tall and broad enough to fill doorways. He spoke at a near yell. He was rarely seen without a vest, bolo tie, and newsboy cap. When he spoke to women, he said, "Listen here, Dixie." He drove a Lincoln Town Car as big as a sperm whale, and even in the summer he wore driving gloves. He referred to the Beatles as "noise." He had inside shoes and outside shoes. He labeled everything he owned — his books, his tools, even his car — with his initials, HLP, as if afraid they might vanish.

This same compulsion made him drive by the buildings he designed as an architect. "I made that one," he'd say and point a finger cubed with arthritis. "That one, too." It must have been a good feeling — like a writer who sneaks through a bookstore to find his books on the shelves — seeing your work, your physical tether to the world.

In college, my roommate and I printed fake IDs for all our friends. We used X-acto knives on passport photos. We downloaded license designs. At that time, Maine and Hawaii did not have holograms, so that's where we were all from, Maine and Hawaii. We bought a laminator and used sandpaper to buff the corners. We wanted so badly to be older, because to be older meant you could drink at the bars, surrounded by women with menthol-flavored breath and moisture shining in their cleavage.

That's not what it means to be older anymore. To be older means you don't take the stairs two steps at a time, you take two steps a stair. To be older means you sag and bulge and calcify. When you realize that, you stop lying forward and start lying backward.

My wife likes to say she is twenty-nine. She says she will remain twenty-nine until she is thirty-nine, and then she will remain thirty-nine for the rest of her life. My sister, too, says she is twenty-nine, though she is not.

My grandfather used to lie about his age. Not the number, but the symptoms. Near the end of his life, my parents would accompany him to the clinic, and when the doctor asked him how he was doing, he would say, "Just fine." At which point my parents would intervene. He had dizzy spells. He had fallen on his way out of the grocery store and cut up his hands and knees. He experienced an electrical jolt when chewing. His fingers were so bent with arthritis he was having trouble changing his colostomy bag.

Or maybe it wasn't lying. Maybe it was willful ignorance.

My father does not want to discuss getting older. This is his nature. He prefers silence. He mutes commercials. He writes single-sentence e-mails. Every road trip I took as a kid — to Yellowstone, to Yosemite, to Puget Sound, to the scablands of eastern Oregon — the radio remained off. My childhood was muted except when I drove alone with my mother and she tuned in to KICE 100, the local country station. "Quiet," might have been the word my father said most often.

I remember stepping into the garage and finding him next to the carcass of a deer. He had gutted it and strung it from the rafters by its hind leg. A big silver bowl sat on the floor beneath it, and the only noise was the drip-drip-drip of blood.

His silence is more layered and complicated now. There is the silence between us in the bathroom, where I have stood by him at a bank of urinals and heard the stop-and-go progress of his urine. There is the silence in the kitchen, where he stirs medicated powders into his drinks to battle his high blood pressure. There is the silence in the bedroom, where he takes a nap every afternoon. And there is the long silence that gets closer every year. The silence I can sometimes taste in my own mouth, that of cinders and sulfur, of blood in a bowl.

Once, when I was a boy, when my grandfather walked away from our house, when he climbed into his Town Car, when he tooted the horn and started down the gravel driveway, my mother said, "Take a long look. This might be the last time you see him."

I felt then as fearful and bewildered as he must have when he drove me to a Portland address and found not the high-rise he promised me but a work site jammed with bulldozers and cranes and men in hard hats and steel-toed boots. "I'll be damned," he said. "It's gone. It's vanished."

So did he a few months later. He ended up living until he was ninety-three, but it was as though he had been ninety-three forever. He spent his whole life as an old man.

Sometimes people ask me why I work so hard. Because that's all I do, I work. I wake up early and go to bed late, without so much as a fifteen-minute slot unaccounted for.

I don't tell them the real answer. That I think I am going to die.

I am going to die, of course, but most people don't really consider their mortality until their car flips or the X-ray reveals a tumor or they hit their seventies and start showing up to church every Sunday.

I don't know when this began, maybe when I was a teenager and skied into a spruce and crashed into a sudden darkness and woke up an hour later alone in a tree well with frostbite. But it seems like I have always felt the specter of death nearby, like a shadow a lamp won't bully from the room.

I often wonder how it will happen. Will a cancerous cauliflower bloom in my colon? Will a grain truck smear me across a country road? Will I collapse on a long run or stroke out on the chiropractor's table or perish quietly in my sleep? I do not mind the idea of dying violently, and if I do manage to survive into my seventies, I joke about ending my life cleanly — avoiding the slow, crippling descent — plastering myself with T-bone steaks and wandering off into grizzly country. However it happens, whenever it happens, when the grave widens its jaws, will I feel I have lived too long or not long enough?

A friend once told me he saw a man being wheeled on a gurney, surrounded by EMTs, and felt a pang of jealousy. Because that man could rest, that man had an excuse to neglect his e-mails, to skip work, to ignore meetings, to stare at the wall and think nothing. We both laughed, but the laughter cut short. Because he was telling the truth. I am terrified of getting old, but I am unafraid of dying. Because then I can rest, can pause the urgency that otherwise infects me.

I drink every night. I don't think that makes me an alcoholic, but I'm sure some would say different. I need it, just like I need the gallons of coffee to jump-start and settle and cure a mind and body that sometimes feel so stimulated that thousands of centipedes might be twisting inside of me.

I told my grandfather about the pregnancy over the phone. He was weak and addled at the time, on his way back from a visit to the doctor. There was a benign growth in his stomach the size of a football, and it was interfering with digestion. A surgery had been scheduled, the surgery that would kill him.

"It's a boy," I said. "We're having a boy."

"Well, that's fine," he said. "That's good. That's what we do. We have children. And you'll have your boy and you'll keep him in line, won't you?"

"I will," I said.

"Be firm. Set rules. Give him love but not too much." He sounded very far away.

"He'll be fine. You'll be fine."

Yes.

There is a video on my phone. My son likes to watch it. In it, my father holds him by the hands and spins him in circles until his body lifts off the ground, faster and faster still, until his body flattens and twirls like a compass held over a magnet. They are in a bark-chipped playground. They both say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa" with every turn and laugh maniacally. And then they stop and stumble away from each other.

My son falls and lies facedown. My father braces himself against a swing set. They convulse, laughing in a gasping, choking way.

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