Limping into Summer

And hoping that fatherly wisdom is false prophecy.

During his 69-year-long life, my father told me a lot of things that stuck with me. Some were for better, some for worse. I first heard the maxim haunting me now when I was a teenager, still unconcerned with the passage of time except to hurry it along out of boredom or impatience. “There comes a time in everyone’s life, honey, around the age of 60, when you have to decide whether you’re going to recommit to your life, or simply let yourself get old and die. If you decide to let yourself get old, and shut yourself down, everything starts going to shit around then.” It sounded very wise and sure at the time. “I will choose life,” I told myself, possibly wearing the same Wham! t-shirt you’re imagining right now. “Sounds easy.”

My father didn’t pick the age of 60 out of thin air. It coincides with the timing of Saturn’s orbit around the Sun, specifically the second time the planet comes back to where it was in the sky at the moment of your birth. Gen Z folks, seemingly all astrology-conversant now, have been inhaling negative Saturn return propaganda on social media, where astrology is experiencing an unprecedented boom. (Unprecedented, but not hard to understand: we’re in systems collapse everywhere. Why not look to the stars?) A shorthand explanation for the dreaded passage: the reaping of consequences. The acceptance of the immutable Sunday School equation that hard work + time + integrity = rewards.

My dad was a lawyer by training, but he started learning astrology a little after my parents divorced in the late 1970s. He took up the study to better play the commodities markets. In a few years, he was doing well enough at it to cycle through a series of new Mercedes convertibles, custom cowboy boots and fat gold chains. But enough is never enough; he thought he could do better still. He came across the work of a financial astrologer called Raymond Merriman, who claimed quantifiable results using the stars as his guide.

By then, my father had all but abandoned the Mormon faith he once held so dearly. He had also moved out of our family home into a series of new build apartments in various towns in Orange County. When he saw a Learning Annex course teaching the basics of astrology, he signed up. He was self-employed now and had a couple afternoons to spend in a fluoro-lit conference room near the South Coast Plaza. Why not?

Even if his conscious motivation was purely financial, his soul was searching for a new home, someplace that would help him sort out his impressive internal chaos and find a place for his former religion’s lesser-known cosmic tendencies. (Here is not the place to go into all of that, but if you dare, google “Kolob,” and enjoy the rabbit hole.)

Right at the start of class, my father told me later, the teacher asked for a volunteer to provide their birthdate, place and time so she could cast a chart to use as a teaching aid. My father raised his hand, she picked him, and a page of his destiny turned.

For the astrology people reading: the teacher explained that my father had two grand crosses, and one was in fixed signs. Such a stressful configuration is quite rare, let alone two. She was fascinated and asked him question after question. She and the class learned that my father saw his childhood as difficult, full of intense academic pressure and emotional neglect.

Atrocious scan, sorry. Clockwise from top left: Edward Marshall, John Marshall, George E. Marshall, Lil’ Jimmy, Frances Marshall. Both my sister and I look exactly like my father as a child.

My grandfather, George E. Marshall, in another dreadful scan. The original is a framed photo that now lives in my office. What makes a father give THIS portrait of himself to his son? Did he sign his full name because he thought my dad forgot? Readers, I give you the Marshall men.

The youngest of four boys, shy and precocious, Jim was born already eclipsed by Bobby, the family’s second brother, who was left non-verbal and in a diaper all his life from spinal meningitis he caught as a baby. In the 1930s there was no government assistance, so my grandfather started grinding as a Justice of the Peace in Las Vegas, giving in to occasional alcoholic binges and womanizing. Eventually became a District Court Judge and was excommunicated from the Mormon Church. My grandmother turned her attention to the church and the school board and advising political campaigns and keeping Bobby alive—anything except my father, to hear him tell it.

Unsurprisingly, my father had a hard time openly putting himself first except in outsized bursts of extreme selfishness that were mostly unconscious. He would get better at it over time, but as a younger man, he often operated passively, terrified of the consequences of confrontation. There was so much he judged himself for. He needed to be liked. This is not a great quality for a lawyer.

The teacher and my dad spent the rest of the afternoon analyzing his chart and by the end of class he was a true believer. I doubt if he had ever felt so seen as in that moment, when everyone present finally validated his struggles.

After that class, my father never once used astrology for the markets, but he used it for absolutely everything else. The idea that a mathematical calculation of the planets in our solar system, combined with a kaleidoscope of Jungian archetypes, could help him not only understand the past, but plot and plan the future, was irresistible. My dad brought considerable intellectual heft and a genuinely philosophical nature to his studies. He read all the most esoteric books and became convinced his life was an alchemical quest.

Now this witty but often shy guy was a hit at parties. Back before there was readily available software, whatever the question at hand, he would pull out his ephemeris, an epic-novel-sized catalogue of planetary positions, grab a cocktail napkin, draw a pie with twelve slices and decorate it with glyphs and connecting lines while people lined up to ask him to read their charts. He never charged for it and saw himself as performing a service. I witnessed it over and over. When my father started spending holidays with us as a family again, when I was in college, it drove my mother crazy.

Like many a fresh convert, my dad was eager to impart his newfound wisdom and surety about How It All Worked to his kids. I was the most estranged from him after my parents’ divorce, and became his most willing audience. I would listen to him explain the planets and signs and houses and angles for hours, long after my brother and sister got bored.

He felt he held magical keys and so I did too. This was an easier source of self-worth than what he had to go fighting tooth and nail for in a courtroom. His priorities changed and he started to glow. Business now had to have a higher purpose. I loved this part of his evolution. To me, he was becoming enlightened.

My father wrote a memoir. Just before he died, he asked me if I would look at it. I kept it in a drawer until three years ago. Despite the lofty title, it was a very sad read.

Just like my dad felt during his Learning Annex epiphany, so did I when he marshaled all his sophistication and dexterity to explain my whole personality to me. He could hardly be assed to look my way when I was very little. Now I was interesting to him and interested in his expertise. It was the most ready-made father-daughter bonding imaginable.

He was unsparing with me, preferring to give it to me straight. “You’re a natural at intellectual work and business, kiddo,” he once told me when I was maybe 13. “But your love life is going to be terrible.”

He got the business part wrong. I haven’t got an entrepreneurial bone in my body. But he was right that I have never been someone who peacefully paired. For a long time, I felt the weight of that, like a personal failing of a standard I didn’t choose. Now, thank God, I don’t give a shit. But it took me many years of work to get to this place. I often wonder if his read of me was actually a curse, or a prophecy that we both helped make self-fulfilling.

My father’s theory of the second Saturn return has been on my mind lately. I am not there yet, but I can start to see it coming. And so of course I worry and do the math, because the astrology seeds he planted sprouted in me. How could they not?

I moved to a tiny town where most of the unexpected comes in the form of sudden rainstorms and escaped livestock. I have given up on dating apps. (If I choose anyone now, rest assured, it will be the bear.) Evenings in Saint-Maxime are less likely spent on cruising and shenanigans, and more likely hate watching terrible streaming shows. Am I choosing life or senescence?

The latest target of my ire is AppleTV’s Jon Hamm vehicle, Your Friends and Neighbors. It is peopled with desperately empty, nipped and tucked Gen Xers dancing the night away at house parties to whatever mid pop music the show’s music supervisors can afford. These characters are determined to keep thrusting. Is that choosing youth when half the MO of the show is to put Hamm back into a structured suit and watch him exude business cockiness, like a ghost of his former glory?

Meanwhile I am just back from a trip to Patagonia that included some unexpectedly vigorous hikes. I left with a sense of adventure, but also a triply injured right hip and a fucked-up lower back. I came home with fabulous memories, new friends and a brand-new Baker’s cyst behind my right knee, caused by fluid retention. Am I choosing life, or senescence?

For all his ability to understand the nuances of other people’s emotion through astrology, my father was blind to much about himself, including his undiagnosed but very obvious depression. When it got bad, his gloom seeped in, flavoring his interpretations with the bitterness of determinism. Bad signatures in the natal chart, or bad passages in active planetary transits, were like giant spankings you had to bare your butt to prepare for. You couldn’t outrun the planets, he believed. Most astrologers agree, but their interpretations of what exactly that means vary wildly.

As part of a ghost-writing project a couple years ago, I did several interviews with a very wise astrologer named Anne Whitaker. As we got to know each other, I told her about my father’s long-ago diagnosis of me. She was flabbergasted. “That’s akin to child abuse what your father did,” she said with so much force it surprised me. “One of the dangers of working with symbolic systems like astrology is inflation. People can have the whole thing go to their heads and think that they are the big guru. You have to keep your own ego out of it.”

My father’s ego was so wounded—and you can blame his astrology for that, or growing up in the 1950s, or his parents, or Brigham Young, or poor Bobby, or him and only him—that I don’t begrudge him the feeling of satisfaction he must have had. I just wish it hadn’t come at my expense.

I look at the stars all the time, and I don’t want to disentangle aging and purpose. I want to believe my mind has some say over my body, though I don’t know if it does. My father died at 69, his body hurtling downhill at a shocking pace. I know it wasn’t his choice because he believed, up to the very end, that he would get better.

I would like a different equation than my father’s. I would take that at any age.