I had been smoking a lot and worrying, and no doubt the attendant coughing and hacking was taking its toll, but whatever the cause, the figure in the bathroom mirror before me was no longer young. Neither was he old, and I understood suddenly – though surely Marlow had known it before? – that there was something, someplace, a great in-between that was about to be finally crossed. And that I and the reflected figure in front of me were both in and about to exit it. Warriors no more, but a ways away yet from being geezers . . . Why hadn’t he noticed the others before – all of his fellow men with them in the Great In-Between?

They had not been invisible surely, they were merely going about their lives’ business quietly, doing what men did when they were no longer young but not yet old. Striving, succeeding, sliding, gliding on a path that would eventually reveal its final destination — Old Age.

By pure chance my Great In-Between had roughly matched America’s Great In-Between, when it emerged from its isolationist, go-along-to-get-along past into its unipolar most powerful heights of world policeman and making the world safe for democracy, one that by its ability to sunder the force of the gods upon two cities in Asia, shattered and remade the world in accordance its own myths. What followed was an age of miracles, an age of power applied to make things not good, not better, but best, an age of technological marvels, an age of ambition, and an age of hubristic Greek tragedy quality overreach.

Both were about to enter their dotages and periods of inevitable decline.

It was at that moment in front of that mirror that I decided to begin writing down my thoughts, observations and stories of times between my life’s bookends.

The Great In-Between was anywhere in the ocean of life that encompassed the space and time between youth and old age. Both would be visible from The Great In-Between but most of us would not sense, let alone use, them as reference points during our Betweenness.

I had named it The Great In-Between early one morning, three years before, while smoking a cigar during morning coffee with W on their Caroline Street home’s second floor deck. W had been yawning and straining to hold on to her thoughts and plans for the day at the office. Eventually, she let them go half-formed, like the near tornado of blue smoke forms coming from my lips. Out beyond the deck was the dense tropical foliage of palms, flowers, orchids and fruit trees. The houses beyond were hidden in the greenery.

“I’m in The Great In-Between” I said to myself quietly. I stubbed out my cigar and watched its dying ember blink out from red to grey in the orange sunrise light.

The evening of my life was approaching. I could finally see it arcing across the sky; a giant hand smearing the sunlit clouds out.

This was the point at which the where and the when of my Great In-Between became clear. Its doing, becoming and being would take time to unravel and pen into words.

Copyright © 2016 From My Isle Seat
www.vicsocotra.com