JOURNAL EXCERPT: April 2, 1978 9:30 PM

"Today was my father's birthday. He is 52 or 53, somewhere around there. There was no big celebration. Linda and I bought him The Complete Book of Running, and Jim bought him a toobox....He said both his presents were perfect. We bought him the running book because he runs workdays at the YMCA during his lunch hour. A mile and a half he runs Mon thru Fri, and in about 13 minutes. He has lost a considerable amount of weight and looks very slim. He is probably in better shape than I am at twenty-two years of age."

MANHOOD REDO: It's strange to read this now, especially since I turned 52 this past Friday. I'm struck by how my father and I are alike - at least in some ways - because although I don't run, I do walk most days to the metro stop on the green line, about a half hour, and then another fifteen minutes to the Men Can Stop Rape office, totaling about an hour-and-a-half to and from work.

I find men aging interesting, partly because I'm experiencing it myself, but also because the older you get, the harder and harder it is to keep up the invulnerable act. There was an article in the Washington Post today, "The Old, Hard Facts: Facing Up to Aging, Not Bowing to It," by Charles Wright, an ocotgenarian, in which he writes about his knee giving him trouble, needing cataract surgery, having balance problems, and various other ailments. They don't start when you're in your eighties. In my early fifties, I sometimes have benign vertigo, I have to put eyedrops in every night to keep my eye pressure down, I don't run like my father did because my knees couldn't take it, I have to do back exercises every morning to keep from injuring it again, and I have glucose intolerance (similar to Type II diabetes, only it's controlled through diet and exercise without medication). You might not bow to aging, but there are certainly times when it bends you.

And yet I wouldn't want to be twenty-two again. I'm less confused now, more comfortable with who I am, with who I want to be, and with the more humane and tempered masculinity I've chosen to live now.