I think I have finally aged out of being a child prodigy. I’ll admit my hopes have been waning these past few years, but I thought I might have an explosion of talent that would put me into the winner’s circle, like how some people gain a half-inch or so of height over the course of their twenties. Unfortunately, I remain five-foot-eleven, not a hair taller than I was at seventeen; and I have yet to emerge as the leading talent in any of my various professional or personal spheres. In college, I was notable only for being deliberately unpleasant on the school paper; in grad school, I failed to be hailed as a novelistic genius and the voice of a generation; in the years since, I have been distinguished mostly for being lucky in getting out of jobs right before the money runs out. Not a brilliant career. I have, however, discovered a new way to hurt myself by stretching in the morning, a technique so successful that I have been unable to move my head in certain directions for the better part of the week. So it seems that I’m already a natural at middle age. (As for being the voice of a generation—people my age are idiots, so why would I want to speak for them?)

I’ve gotten fatter, as you’d expect. I realized this while adjusting my belt a few weeks ago. Like every gentleman, I’ve got two leather belts, a brown one and a black one; my brown one, a woven number from (I think) Target, has been with me since I was thirteen, which struck me as I ruefully buckled it at a heretofore unused notch. This belt has seen me graduate from high school and college (and in a spiritual sense grad school, when I had finally gotten wise to what a drag commencement ceremonies are). It’s seen my grandfather die and my three children come home from the hospital (documentary evidence suggests that I have unconsciously decided the births themselves are dark-trousers, black-belt events). It’s been through birthday parties and bad dates, elections, horse races, concerts, conferences, and many quiet summer afternoons like this one. It almost accompanied me to Guantanamo Bay after a ticklish episode getting back through customs. It has kept my fundament decently clad on three continents, and I’m grateful.

The belt was just the beginning of the realization that I am now at the age where I have rather a lot of things that have been with me for a long time. My oldest pipe I bought when I was nineteen years old, and I still use it for smoking the same black Cavendish I smoked then; the battered shoes I wear to mow the lawn were given to me at roughly the same time. These things have become personal attributes, like Shiva’s trident or Charlie Brown’s zig-zag shirt—the physical evidence of having become established and, I suppose, predictable, boring. Still, I have to admit it’s rather pleasant. Certainly much better than being young.

It has often been asserted that conservatism is a cast of mind rather than a coherent doctrine; maybe that’s true, as far as it goes, although I’m not terribly sure this differentiates it from any other political tendency. (Nor is mindset necessarily exclusionary—what is the real difference between the latter followers of Trotsky bickering about the neat differences among their schools and the European continent’s bucktoothed legitimists poring over rolls of arms?) At any rate, I suppose I am conservative in temperament; I eat the food I like, I drink the drinks I like, I smoke the cigars I like—even when these things aren’t very good by any objective measure. I re-read books and re-watch movies; rarely do I look forward to something new in theaters or on the T.V. For me, popular music stopped in 2016. Why would I look for a change? If the belt still fits, wear it.

Maybe this is the real difference between writers and editors. Writers run off in every direction, looking for new people and events, trying new techniques; editors stay in their offices, surrounded by weeks’ worth of takeout boxes of the same food from the same restaurant, insisting every day in the face of an increasingly indifferent world that this is how you use the en-dash—the same yesterday, now, tomorrow. One of these modes is clearly more appealing to the popular imagination (how many movies about writers are there, and how many about editors?), but one is proven to be better at keeping the lights on.

I suppose it’s not the end of the world that I’m not going to be a child prodigy after all. It’s difficult even to imagine an editing child prodigy, anyway; editing is a sort of professional adulthood. (Spare me the emails about edge cases like Norman Podhoretz, who was anyway thirty-three when he started managing a magazine.) Consistency, like safety, is a sort of virtue, if not supreme. Like a reliable belt or a good editor, it tends to keep you covered.