DSK and Me

I’ve found it difficult to focus on the legal and political convolutions surrounding the Dominique-Strauss Kahn sexual assault case, not just because it seems to be coming down to a classic he-said/she-said confrontation of accounts, each side with personalities and histories that are not exactly Gandhi vs. Mother Theresa, or because the whole 24/7 cable news obsession with sex and crime has and is rushing to judgment with each new revelation in the case (speculation is all that’s left when there are no facts to fill out the 24 hours of sponsored vapidity), but rather because in the first report of the incident (alleged or otherwise) I read that Dominique-Strauss Kahn (DSK) is 62 years old, the same age as me (and he goes by his initials, like me, as if to rub it in). Virtually every news story, print or video, is accompanied by a photo of DSK, and it’s been hard for me to accept that the following two people were both born in 1949:

I remember the first time I realized I was growing old. It was about 25 years ago on a fishing trip in Arkansas. I’d stopped into a sports store to buy a fishing license. The proprietor took my driver’s license, began filling out the information, and when he got to birth date, he exclaimed, “Hey, I was born just a month after you!” This guy was fat, mostly bald, with what hair he still had gray, his round face wrinkled and hardened. He looked, in short, to me as if he could have been my father. But he was a month younger than me. That experience has remained etched in my progressively feeble mind ever since. And as I see people now my own age, like DSK, I can’t reconcile what I see when I look at them with what I see when I look into a mirror. But then I also can’t imagine me having sex, consensual or otherwise, with a 32-year-old hotel housekeeper. And I don’t know if that should make me feel better, or worse.