Heavy and Weightless
The other day I went to a reading and talk by a celebrated author. I carried a little spiral-bound notebook as though I were going to a class and found a seat at the edge of a row in the lecture hall, next to my daughter and her friends. I even took some notes, but my mind was elsewhere, and all I have are fragments of the woman’s words. “I don’t experience I as a fixed identity,” she said. (Does anyone?)
She talked about “finding meaning in the rupture from one place to another” and “the aesthetics of placelessness.” I was tuning in and out, but these are phrases that I entered in my notebook. I recall a reference to the ritual of massaging rose-scented conditioner balm into one’s hair after shampooing, and something about how we must try not to transmit our fears to the kids. She described her identity as being very porous and talked about the importance of literature in her life, how it was a chance for her to create herself again.
It was a warm afternoon, and she wore a plain white loose shirt. I noticed her face was flushed and damp and her hair was pinned up. She has published eight novels and is undoubtedly quite brilliant, but now I was thinking about how good it would feel to exit the building and walk back home as the late day sun gilded the iconic stone facades of Oxford. My daughter and one of her friends lingered to get a book signed and were now engaged in conversation as we walked, and I followed behind like an afterthought, but I didn’t mind. I relish my mobility, and it was another opportunity to glimpse my daughter in the world she inhabits, and to feel proud, while accepting my own ongoing residency in those ruptures between places, a wobbly I looking out and documenting and trying to understand.
Monte and I are emissaries from Boomerville visiting the Planet of the Young. We recognize that we live in a privileged neighborhood of Boomerville, and that these young East Oxford parents are in fact the privileged offspring of our cohorts, but they seem to be grappling with pressures and worries and a relentless kind of busy-ness. It has become very difficult for me to remember how it felt to be that age…thirties and forties…raising a child, working in the world, in the thick of it all. It’s fascinating to revisit it from this vantage point. After Felix is deposited at his nursery, there is an informal gathering of local parents for coffee outside at a nearby cafe, where they catch up and fuel up for their jobs and errands and yoga classes and tending to the younger babies in the hours before returning for pickup at the nursery.
At one point, a young mom bursts on the scene, conspicuously inflated with good news, eager to share it, buoyant. When was the last time we felt lifted with good news? I ask Monte. And what would the good news be?
“The good news for us is the absence of new bad news,” he replies, sagely.
Chatting with one of my daughter’s friends, Kate, I ask about her mother, born in 1952, close to my vintage. In many ways she sounds a lot like me. She doesn’t do formal exercise, for example, she just walks and gardens and weaves physical activity into her daily life. But she grew up in England after the war, and it was different here than the 1950s New York of my childhood. My family struggled, but the prevalent postwar mood was optimistic. Here in Britain, there was the sting of hunger—actual hunger—which one never forgets. Kate says that to this day her own economic foundations are grounded in her mother’s basic approach. If you want to buy an ice cream, you can spend your bus fare and walk home. Bus or ice cream—which do you choose? Can’t do both. It’s simple.
I imagine there’s a shared Boomer sensibility, although it’s hard to define—a ridiculous irrepressibility, perhaps, and assumptions and delusions based on factors that no longer apply. We are nearing obsolescence but we still loom large. And here are the daughters (and sons) of Boomers at the coffee shop, tending to their post-Covid children, beneath the clouds of climate change and conflict, excess and scarcity in all the wrong proportions, sipping flat whites and double espressos and laughing a little, but I don’t know their language and I feel myself hovering over my daughter’s life like a part of her history that has come dislodged.
Meanwhile, I am getting to know our three-year-old grandson, to the extent it is possible in this compressed and intense way. I have discovered that the intricacies and capabilities of three-year-old humans are astonishing, and I have a particular interest in this boy, but he utterly exhausts me. A pattern of casual and regular time together interspersed with breaks would be optimal, but the universe has not granted us this option, and so I am bending and running and following his narratives to the best of my ability, and it’s a terrible thing to admit, but sometimes he is awful: unreasonable, demanding, and unkind. This in no way diminishes the fact that he amazes and delights me, but truth is truth, and my beat-up heart won’t lie, nor will my aching bones. Felix is a powerful force not yet fully civilized and instructed, but he’ll get there.
And I will watch his life unfold, mostly from a distance, but I intend to transmit as much love and hope as possible—and may this love and hope dwell within him always, an ever-full well from which to draw. I even think it will. Because despite all this privileged Boomer-esque kvetching, I also believe that stories are connected and ongoing, transcending our individual life spans, and that borders are elastic, and our porous identities are like windows letting in light and revealing views of unimagined landscapes.
It isn’t just crazy babbling. There’s a context to this, and it keeps expanding. Recent science is hinting that there may be intelligence at every level from molecular networks to cells and organisms, each possessing their own goals and agendas, with bioelectricity as a language medium, and that different configurations of physical objects can give rise to intelligence, memory, and learning…and don’t ask me to explain it, but it’s what I’ve gleaned from an article Monte sent me about the work of biologist Michael Levin, who is “uncovering the incredible latent abilities of living things.”
I’m not smart enough to understand all this stuff, but maybe my inability to grasp it is part of what excites me, for it suggests that there is a whole different way of looking at everything. The reality I’ve leaned into in the past may be one of many interpretations and possibilities, and this fills me with a staggering sense of wonder and vastness. There are so many things I’ve never thought about.
More succinctly, this unattributed quote came across my screen today: “Bats can hear shapes. Plants can eat light. Bees can dance maps. We can hold all these ideas at once and feel both heavy and weightless with the absurd beauty of it all.”
That’s where I’m at.