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Michael Jackson was born on August 29th, 1958 and died, as we are all very much aware, on June 25th, 2009. I was born on September 19th, 1958, and as I try to be very much aware, am still alive. As anyone born in this same year can attest, there is some small added significance to the "King of Pop"'s death. Ever since I first realized that we were birth buddies, which was when I was 11 years old and reading a fan magazine taken off the desk of the one African-American girl in my elementary school (I was stealing magazines and he was already the front man of The Jackson Five), I have used Michael Jackson as a kind of extended time piece for my own life.
As Michael broke away from his brothers and began his solo career in the late 1970s, I was immersed in college and breaking away from my parents. As he reached superstardom with Thriller, I was working on my Ph.D. at Yale. I remember dancing to Billie Jean and Beat It with my girlfriend who was eventually to become my wife. I still can envision moving on the dance floor with her, trying to match my footsteps to the thumping bass of Billie Jean. We were at a party held in the Yale Art and Architecture Building, and we were dancing next to my wife's friend, who was dancing with a scion of the Rockefeller family. A little drunk, I felt a momentary sense of glamour, wealth, privilege and possibility. It felt like both Michael and me were reaching the top of our game.
By the late 1980s, Michael Jackson had transcended all expectations of what the top of the game might be. He had become literally the most popular performer in the world, his image and voice instantly recognizable. In contrast, I settled into a rewarding, but hardly glamorous, career as a professor at a small liberal arts college. Even more, while I was dutifully padding around the block on 2 or 3 mile jogs in order to stave off the inevitable aging process, Michael was leaping over subway turnstiles and leading packs of dances in splits, pirouettes, and backflips, showing no signs of leaving his 20s behind.
By the mid-1990s, Michael's channeling of Dorian Gray had begun in earnest. He had become obsessed with youth, surgically altering his appearance to avoid any sign of age, living in a Block City of Neverland to foster the illusion for himself and the children with whom he surrounded himself that one can be safe from the adult world and the relentless demands of time and responsibility. I, on the other hand, like so many others our age, was being smacked in the face every day by the responsibility of being a parent to two young children. The distance between his world of fantasy and ferris wheels and my world of supermarkets, laundry baskets, and school project crises could not have seemed wider.
By the early 2000s, as we entered our 40s, it seemed like his Block City had come crashing down. Allegations of child abuse and his increasing bizarre behavior and appearance filled the tabloids, while his musical success and influence had faded into the background. Should I confess to some schadenfreude, pleasure at his fall from grace, a grim satisfaction at his inability to cheat time and escape the treadmill of middle age? Perhaps, but even more I saw Michael Jackson as no longer part of my cohort - he was my age, but not of my age. He had become frozen in a pop culture that no longer concerned me; even in the pop culture that my pre-teen children embraced he had become more of an oddity and spooky character than a musical innovator and legendary performer. The kind of meaning that I sought in my life no longer came from a possible grasp of fame or celebrity, but from the pleasures of a cross-country ski with my wife, my children's discoveries of books and tastes and new best friends, from the slow accretion of accomplishment in my work, and the moments of fellowship in song or prayer at synagogue.
Yet now at his unexpected death, while planning a comeback (Fitzgerald said, "There are no second acts in American lives"), Michael suddenly mattered to me again. Along with millions of others around the world, I listened to his music again, in some cases for the first time in years, and watched him float through the air in endless video clips. His beauty could not help but move me; his high tenor and staccato breaths sent a chill down my spine. But beyond any remorse at the loss of his genius, his death sent out a sky-brightening flare to the rest of us 1958'ers - What are we going to do with the years left to us? Whatever went wrong with his life, he managed to bring a passionate intensity to his time in this world. At nearly 51, do we have some of this fire left? This is what his death asks me - I have done the dutiful work of living a responsible and productive adult life - one daughter in college, the other about to be, money saved, minimal debt. But have I burned bright enough? It is not money, glamour or celebrity that would answer this question, but commitment to and expression of a passion, whether intellectual, physical, artistic, or spiritual. His death at nearly exactly my current age puts me on warning - any time, any time, any time. I suppose I am looking at that man in the mirror and asking if it indeed is time for a change.
