Old as the Hills and Twice as Busy

I was going to finish up with Ferrante this week, but that will have to wait. I am piled under work right now, end of the semester and working on a large project, and getting ready to go to a residency for 5 weeks. The paperback of Fellowship Point comes out May 9. My head is spinning, honestly. I keep saying to myself, I’m too old for this, which is an interesting sentiment. How can I be too old for the life I am actually living? What does that even mean? When I examine it, I find I invoke that in moments of overwhelm, when I can’t imagine how I will find the time to accomplish everything I have to do. At this point in life my sprit craves quiet, yet I seem destined to work. I have said quite a few times lately that if I could find a little house by the sea that I could afford to buy I would give up ever going to a city again for the rest of my life. I was in Manhattan three times this week and though I still enjoy the spectacle, the people, seeing art, I can’t bear the concrete anymore. It feels wrong. When I was a girl I spent many hours walking barefoot in small woodland areas around where I lived concentrating on not making a sound, as I read the Native people could. Every small snap of a twig was evidence that I had more work to do. Similarly I walked over the broken shells on the uncleared beach near my grandparents’ summer house to toughen up my feet, determined not to wince or cry out when I got mightily poked by a broken, razorish clam shell. As I write this I wonder how I developed such determination. I had a powerful sense of wanting to be ready for whatever came. If the Russians launched missiles from Cuba, if I was standing next to a great man when he was assassinated, if George Harrison needed me, if I had to lead an army like Jeanne D’Arc, if Nazis came into my house. I wanted to be ready to rise to any occasion where my wits would need to be sharp, where I would have to withstand pain, where I’d have to take on great responsibility.

When I think of that I wonder at how my life turned out. Things happened to me to which I responded not by being a great leader or soldier but by becoming shy and timid, foregoing my physical condition in favor of the comfort offered by candy and crushes on people and other distractions from the larger program. I stopped having a sense of mission. I must say I’m sorry about that. That sense of destiny or whatever you want to call it gave my days a lot of purpose. Although I was only a small child, and a girl at that, I had a sense of importance, albeit unknown to any other human. It was a good feeling. But in large part it depended on the fact that I felt, essentially, safe. I had a father who was a world renowned heart surgeon. When I went to the hospital with him people would jump out of his path as if he were king. I had a grandfather who’d risen from poverty to be president of his company. He had an office with a bedroom and a dining room overlooking Independence Hall, and a driver took him back and forth to work. My mother and grandmother didn’t provide the same sense of safety, but I didn’t expect them to. I knew from a very early age that men were on top. I identified with them, and avoided feminine gender markers. To this day I have never put on a pair of high heels.

My safety got shattered, and me too, but here I am anyway.

Recently I turned 70. SEVENTY. I am so incredulous about it that I blurt it out to anyone who crosses my path. I am seventy, can you believe it? Everyone believes it. No one argues or says it’s impossible. No one cards me anymore. There’s a lot to say about being suddenly O-L-D, and perceived as O-L-D, but it has been said before and I am just experiencing it in my own way. What I never would have expected is how vulnerable I feel, and how close to death. Every time I see a report of someone dying at seventy-two or seventy-four I catch my breath. Am I that close to it being all over? We do not know the hour of our death (except for the pianist Glenn Gould, who predicted his death and was right) but I do know I’m closer now than I have ever been and I feel it. That old sense of mission is occurring to me again as I consider what I want to do with time left. I don’t have a bucket list of things I want. More things I don’t want. I don’t want to hear one more story about anyone getting shot, I don’t want to hear or see anymore car accidents, I don’t want one more person to hit a child or eat an innocent animal or do violence to the land or deny healthcare to anyone or to make insane laws against trans people or to do harm in this world in any way. I don’t want to make the mistakes I have in the past based on fear.

What I want to do is spend my remaining time feeling love, feeling safe, feeling ready, and helping where I can. I have my work cut out for me. I’m too old for it, yet it’s all there is.