You Will Disappear Some Day Like That

It is time to get back to my blogging, although it is possible that no one but me is aware of how erratic my posts have become, or indeed, how absent. I started neglecting the blog because I was unusually busy for a while, and then I just fell out of the habit. Now I am approaching it tentatively, as though it were a friend I haven’t called in a very long time. I’m feeling rusty and awkward and unsure what to say.In fact, I have decided to shamelessly plunder my own journals to get myself back into it.  Here is something I wrote on a summer day several years ago:

Yesterday I made a birthday cake for R, the kind of cake for which you sift flour, melt baker’s chocolate, and fold in sour cream and sweet milk. He sat at the table, thin and white-haired, looking bemused.

“I never thought I’d get old,” he said. “I did everything right. I really took care of myself. I thought I’d never get old…and I’m old.”

He talked about the foundation he had started, his legacy, his son’s legacy; he seemed to feel that all the good things for him personally were behind him. He seemed to be looking toward the exit.

But do any of us believe in our own deaths? No matter how near to our ears the rumors of mortality whisper, no matter how deep and jagged a gash prior loss has left in the heart, it is still inconceivable that one day soon enough the world will be happening without us.

Not enough time. There is never enough time no matter how much time there is.

It seemed relevant enough to revisit that entry today, not because I think I am so very old, but because I do indeed feel myself aging. Also, we have entered a new phase of our lives, with Monte retired, and although his brand of retirement is a working and busy one, it has definitely ushered in new patterns for us. Everything is shifting.

And I understand the sense of surprise that my friend in his 80s expressed. I feel it too sometimes upon glimpsing my own face in the mirror, or watching my daughter from afar, a young woman on her own trajectory entirely separate from me.

There are a thousand small reminders daily that erosion is occurring, even if I feel exactly the same inside.

Last week I took my mother to get her hearing tested. I think she has not heard a human voice clearly for a very long time, and she looked for a moment quite startled as she sat in a booth and the technician’s words came across to her via headphones. She had that same fleeting look of bemusement and surprise at lunch afterwards when she mentioned that her birthday was nearing and uttered her age with disbelief. She still has long hair and twists her white ponytail into a banana curl. She wears pink and frets about her wrinkles and wistfully speaks of her first dance with my father, who would be 99 if he were alive.

Variations on a theme: Just yesterday I was listening to a replay of an interview with Leonard Cohen on Fresh Air, and he said, “You just have to get very careful…it’s inappropriate for an elderly chap to register authentically his feelings… you have to get quite covert as you get older, or you have to find some avuncular way of being, but still you are wounded, you stagger, and you fall.”

Wounded. Staggering. Falling. I suppose we all are.  But I like William Stafford’s hint of consolation:

“The old have a secret./They can’t tell others, for to understand/you have to be old.”

I am saddened by the looking back and the aching sense of gone-ness. I'm just a barrel of quotes today, but here I think of Carlos Casteñada: "The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same."

So I am growing things, traveling, diminishing my aspirations, and trying to savor this last lovely season before old age really does kick in.

I just finished Muriel Barbery’s unusual book, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and found many thoughts that seemed both poetic and wise. She speaks of finding the always within the never, and how a camellia can change fate. She says, for example:

Beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It’s the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death. Oh my gosh, I thought, does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance?

It makes a lot of sense to me these days.Now morning is entering this room through an open window: the chittering of birds, the affirmation of some distant machinery, mild spring air with a surprising absence of wind. I am going outside to smell the orange blossoms as I age, and observe the light.

I close with William Stafford, as I so often do, but who can blame me?You will walk toward the mirror, closer and closer, then flow into the glass. You will disappear some day like that, being more real, more true, at the last.