Hamptons Diary: A Man Turns 61 By Brian Mott

On the eve of my 61st birthday,

I look around my life for my totem.

I am searching for the shape of a man

who has negotiated his way out of the ICU more than once

– the number of times I have had the first handful of dirt thrown on my coffin is not zero –

and has finally decided to get better at being me.

It took a long time to narrow the search.

At nine, I was an encyclopedia, heavy with facts but no narrative yet.

At 15, a calculator, trying to solve for an unknown {x}.

At 20, I was the puppet, dancing outside the dealership, all frantic, hollow limbs jerking to a manufactured wind.

At 35, I was a door ajar. Open to the dark, leaning into a silence that I thought was a destination. (Thank you to the universe for its lack of interest in that audition.)

Now, at this age, I look around the house.

The car in the drive?

Too much anxiety— all zero-to-sixty and the vanity of polished chrome.

It’s a machine that fears a collision, whereas I have survived totalings that the insurance adjusters wouldn’t have cleared.

The leather jacket in the hall:

that’s a performance I’ve finished playing.

An unnecessary skin that tries too hard to look tough,

cracking in the rain,

sagging under the weight of someone’s side-eye.

I have no use for resilience that needs to announce itself.

I stop at the cupboard and see the crystal glass,

thin-stemmed and singing a high, clear note.

It’s beautiful, I suppose,

but it lives in terror of the sink, the countertop, the slip of a hand.

I have spent enough of my life being brittle,

worrying that one sharp tap would shatter the song.

No, I find myself in the kitchen,

reaching for the heavyweight in the bottom drawer.

Tomorrow, I am the cast-iron skillet.

I am the one you want when the meal matters more.

I have been seasoned by the near-misses — the high-heat fires that should have cracked the base, the long soaks in the dark that should have left me rusted.

Instead, I have grown mottled and dependable.

I’ve absorbed the fats and the salts of six decades

until the surface is pebbled and dark,

tempered by the very things that tried to claim me.

And I don’t care what you bring to the flame:

the common onion, the celebratory steak, the bitter greens.

(Bring whatever ingredients you need, but please throw me a joyful shallot now and then.)

I am not new, but I am warm,

holding the heat long after the stove is turned off,

ready to nourish whatever comes next.

Brian Mott

Brian Mott lives with his husband, Southampton Town Trustee, Jimmy Mack, and their rescue pit, Sammy. He attends rallies to scream it out, and writes poetry to make it hurt less. He teaches adult ESL. He works to make it all a little better.