My Dirty Gutter Moment

There were hints along the way; evidence that I was about to cross a threshold that cannot be taken in reverse. A couple of years ago I pulled a muscle in my shoulder while adjusting a showerhead. Not long after that a twinge developed in my right knee whenever I walked up stairs. I began to notice that, left unshaven, my facial hair was more silver than brown. As my thoughts turned to bedtime, I began making judgement calls on parents that let their kids play outside after 8:30PM on a summer’s eve. Those children are so loud! Why aren’t they in bed?

Various clues of what was coming.

The threshold I didn’t see coming was being Old. Ancient, really. Less than two years from 50 and I crossed the line unexpectedly but with such clarity that my brain formed a simple two-word phrase to mark the occasion.

Oh, fuck.

So, what was that singular event? To answer that I need to shift the timeline to the height of the television phenomenon called Baywatch, which began airing in the fall of 1989, when I was twelve years old. My experience with the show didn’t really start until 1992 or 1993, probably at the peak of my raging hormones. The red bathing suits, multiple slow-motion shots of beautiful people running down the beach, and more nonsensical plot points jammed into a 60-minute TV timeslot than anything before or since. I told myself I was watching because I wanted to support a local gal’s acting career. As I recall, I’d seen a spot on Entertainment Tonight or possibly a CBC report about Pamela Denise Anderson and how she was discovered at a BC Lions game. She played CJ Parker on Baywatch for many seasons and I was a fan. (There was also an element of national pride as well – the same way I felt about Michael J. Fox or Leslie Nielsen or Mike Myers.)

Time moved forward. I grew-up and matured, somewhat. I hadn’t seen an episode of Baywatch for decades when I found a streaming service that had a dedicated channel to the show. It played season after season on repeat. It was a novelty to re-watch a few episodes with so much time and space between my original viewings. It made me curious about what Pamela Anderson was up to these days so I checked social media. Ten years older than me, she’s approaching 60 and looking stately and regal than ever. She has dropped the high levels of a make-up that was a hallmark of the 1990’s, especially for a show ostensibly about lifeguards. There’s something more mature and stately about her, while still provoking my inner high schooler that lurks in the shadows.

As one does, I scrolled a little further.

With a prelude of many garden shots, there’s a picture of her in a white dress, the hat on her head tilted downward obscuring her face in a simple artsy shot that somehow conveys a powerful yet gentle human being. But my eyes drift, upward. The structure behind her has a gutter running the length of the building and there’s a sprout of something that has taken root and is growing in the trough.

“Ms. Anderson needs her gutters cleaned.”

And it wasn’t some asinine euphemism. I thought, “Those gutters need to be cleaned.”

Oh, fuck.

I crossed the boundary between young/middle-age and old in that moment. In some cultures, there’s a sense that when a boy loses his virginity he  becomes a man, perhaps has that first sip of beer with this Dad, learns to drive, or successfully completes a land dive (though that's really specific to Pentecost Island in Vanuatu) but I’ve never heard how cultures demarcate the progression to Old Man.

For me, it was noticing an eaves trough that needs cleaning in the background of a picture of one of the most beautiful women on the planet -- whose image is permanently seared into my brain but is suddenly blotted out by the observation that someone should really get a ladder out and take care of that gutter before it becomes a bigger problem. That’s what getting old is, seeing beauty but putting that on footing a little lower than proper home maintenance.

This transition point does need a catchy name or acronym though because My Dirty Gutter Moment is obtuse and not really friendly for proper SEO.