Auld Lang Syne

When Deborah said she didn’t like getting old, I used a time-worn joke for my response. “It beats being dead,” I said. As far as it goes, that’s true. But, I do agree with Deborah, I don’t like getting old either.

Having my knee hesitate before supporting my step, finding that all I have to do is look at food in order to gain weight, feeling my thumbs protest when I buff out the silver polish on the butter dish…none of that is fun. Much of it is made worse by the fact that I’ve been blessed with nearly perfect health all my life. Suddenly I find myself taking prescription medication daily. When did that happen?

But it isn’t all down side. As much as I am dismayed to see a stout, grey-haired woman looking back at me from the other side of the mirror, I am measurably happier, definitively more confident, and vastly more grounded than ever I was in my teens, twenties, and even in my thirties.

A large part of that has to do with being happy in my marriage. What was once a tempestuous, white-hot love affair has aged over the years into the mainstay of my life. I still smile uncontrollably when I catch sight of Bob in a crowd and I still count the hours until he’s scheduled to come back from a weekend diving adventure. Like the dog, I know the sound of his van, and I begin to listen for it by mid-afternoon on the day he is expected to return.

But as much as I attribute my fifty-something equanimity to a happy marriage, that’s only part of the story. The other part is the years of challenges accepted, lessons learned, and failures understood. In short, it’s the advantage of living fifty-six years, one day at a time.

I often think that I would have liked to have become more than I am. But to this day, I don’t know what that more would have been. Looking back on what I’ve done, I find I’m satisfied. Many of you have heard me say that I would have preferred to be a lawyer or a writer. But not having done either, I can’t be sure that I really would prefer those lives to this one. For the most part, I’m proud of what I’ve done.

My accomplishments are small things, to be sure. There is the Mexican poet who was released from the twilight zone because I would not give up on setting his immigration records straight. There is the daredevil architect who is walking without help today because I stormed the gates of Kaiser for him after his motorcycle accident twelve years ago. There is the Cohousing community that went from three residents to five and thereby became viable the night I put my deposit down. In the grand scheme, these are only small things, but they made a big difference in a few people’s lives.

Well beyond the things I’ve done, what mitigates the difficulties of getting old is how my appreciation for the world increases each year. That appreciation simply did not exist in the tormented, self-absorbed consciousness of my youth.

I don’t remember ever being so struck by the beauty of things as I am now. Even the plainest of teenagers takes my breath away. I find his or her freshness to be positively heartbreaking. This afternoon, while putting out the compost, I was transfixed by the shadows of branches and leaves on the wall. I don’t know if I would have even noticed them thirty years ago. Traffic rules seem like a miracle to me. Why, in a day and age when everything seems to be breaking down, do people still stop at traffic lights? Why do they still merge on to the freeway in an orderly fashion? The dependability of both behaviors is ineffable. Even my nemesis, the blue jay that steals the peanuts I put out for the squirrel, strikes me as profoundly brave when I see that he’s nursing a hurt foot.

Sometimes when I cannot thread a sewing needle, I hear my grandmother’s voice echoing across the years, “Thread this for me, will you, Pet? Your eyes are younger than mine.” I remember how easy it was for me to take the needle from her, lick the thread and carelessly push it through the needle’s eye. I had no idea then of what a gift it was to be able to do that. I simply could not imagine that the day would ever come when it would take me three or four passes to do something as simple as thread a needle.

I wonder, as I remember how my grandmother would laugh at my quickness, if the careless beauty of my long ago youth gave her half as much pleasure as that of others gives me today. As I wonder, I find that I long to have that sparkling youth back again. But I want it back without having to forsake the appreciation I have for it now. Nana would say, "You can't have your cake and eat it, too, Joan Catherine." Yet, that is exactly what I want--the cake of youth and the ability to taste it with the refined palate of age.