Suddenly Seventy
What’s Different Now?
It feels significant, but I’m struggling to understand why. And if it signifies something…what? I promised myself I’d write about it, and perhaps stumble upon meaning in the process. I turn to one of my favorite writers, Patricia Hampl, for a clue on how to begin. She writes:
Sit there and describe. And because the detail is divine, if you caress it into life, the world lost or ignored, the world ruined or devalued, comes to life. The little world you alone can bring into being, bit by broken bit, angles into the great world.
The detail. I’d like to start with the beauty of this moment, but what comes to mind is the dead cow in the creek bed, its rigid hind legs weirdly upright, a crowd of vultures gathered in the branches of a nearby sycamore tree, intermittently feasting, taking their time, starting with the tasty bits, like eyeballs. That’s the truth of it––the wonders and calamities of being here, living at the edge. I never would have imagined such a setting for my life.
But I never would have imagined my life at seventy at all. It’s just an abstract notion until you’re there.
How strange…the same old sorrows weigh upon me, but now I know they will never be quelled. I shall miss my loved ones forever, and I cannot shed the belief that I could have done better.
What is different is a new consciousness that, despite being contrary to all that self-flagellation and grief, coexists with it. It’s a vibrant and luminous consciousness, a reconnection with a being who has patiently waited for decades, ignored or denied, now asserting herself, familiar to the core, and capable of joy.
What’s different, too, is that on this particular birthday, several friends knew that the best gift they could give me was a poem. This one, in particular, by Derek Walcott, felt like the yearned-for lyrics to a tune I’d been lately hearing in my head:
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
I am feasting on my life, and at seventy, I damned well better, and I am loving the stranger who has loved me all my life, and to do otherwise does not help anyone.
What’s more, that Derek Walcott poem was read to me twice on my seventieth birthday. Once by a friend in the misty morning along a dirt road in the backcountry, where white ceanothus was in bloom, reminding me of weddings and snow, and once at an impromptu birthday gathering outside a hundred-year-old house with wisteria dripping from the wooden frames around its doorways, a view of noble oak trees in the distance, and green hills beyond. It is the perfect poem for this poem in which I live, this poem that is my life.
That’s another thing I know at seventy: my life is a lavish banquet, implausible and extravagant, as gorgeous as anything I might have imagined when my original self, the child, still knew how to see. It is more than I deserve, this extraordinary life, but at seventy I embrace it. At seventy, I know that the only graceful response is to accept when grace is offered.
Yes, be a good person. Share. Help. Be of service. Believe me, that’s deeply ingrained. But right now, I’m talking about something else. On my seventieth birthday, I’m allowed to indulge. I’m talking about something more inner-focused, the composition of the self from which I navigate the world. There’s always someone who said it better, usually a poet, but in this case Montaigne:
“To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most.”
I’m working on this. I am composing my character, crafting my life, finally learning how to be, knowing for sure that my final season of being has begun.
I’ve had conversations about this sort of thing while hiking with friends, which brings me to another thing I know at seventy: friendship is sustenance. I am grateful every day for a network of friends spanning all the geographies and decades of my life. They have given me winter nights frozen hard into diamonds, records playing in rented rooms, road trips and rallies. They have breathed life into lost causes, shown me new interpretations, reminded me again and again that I can be ten years old on my bicycle.
On my seventieth birthday, one friend, a sculptor, handed me a tiny bronze statue and a note. She stood by the gate of her house as she did so, her mass of thick gray hair blowing, the last wash of sunlight transforming the hills and bluffs into watercolor paintings, and these remembered images are a part of the gift. The statue, which shows two lovers entwined, is surprisingly heavy in my hands. It’s the first bronze she ever made, more than fifty years ago in Italy, its copy long lost. “Bronzes can last thousands of years,” she has written, “A good reminder that we are only here for a brief moment.” At seventy, this brief moment feels more precious than ever.
Donna sent me a poem of seventy birthday wishes, in packets of seventy: stories, belly laughs, lights in darkness, everything from canyon wrens to peppercorns (because life needs spice.) Richard sent me a leaf borne skyward by a random gust, sure to alight exactly where it should be. I have earrings and notecards, a bright colored beach tote full of hopes, and books I am eager to read. I have chocolates and baked goods that are mostly whipped cream, and as of yesterday, a lab result indicating high cholesterol––but I’ll worry about the latter after I’ve devoured the cream. Because. Seventy.
So, friendship has turned out to be a lifeline that I used to underestimate. It holds me up and keeps me from sinking too low into my solitary brooding. It makes me feel seen and validates the living I’ve done. We talk it through, my friends and I…and we walk it out. The pandemic-forced separations have rendered its value even more apparent.
At seventy, I am more grateful than ever for my husband, and my family, and for the grandson I will someday meet in person. And when the voices of my lost loved ones speak to me, when I feel their feelings as real as my own, I am learning to believe that this is one way they live on, and that dulls the pain a little bit.
At seventy, I see the ocean as liquid light, layered tones of silver, white, and gray. The grandfather trees keep watch in the canyon, rain splashing on their thirsty limbs right now, filling the concavities in the sandstone rock formations, birthing muddy rivulets on hillsides. There are so many places I will never go, so many things I will never learn, so many ambitions fizzled, but I have learned that the mystery and wonder of the world can revive me even from my lowest points, and I can stand here and be home.
At seventy, I know that I don’t need to know the rest.