As Is

Opening a new document, a record of my encounters with life over the past several weeks, is increasingly revelatory. I am writing these days by accretion and at the behest of random visitations. In plain English, I don’t have a plan. Things happen, people and sense impressions enter my field of vision. At first, they don’t seem related, but when I live with them for a while, when I funnel them through language, I often decipher some glimmer of meaning, some connection. You, reader, are unlocking a species of interior diary written by an aging woman who has just left home.

I resonate with the much-used, less-than-perfect porcelain dishes in my father’s antiques store. Intermingled in the stacks of Meissen and Dresden dinner sets, ferried out of the ashes of Europe to the bright and shiny new world, there were plates that were decorated with an intricate pattern of cracks. These plates and their friends, chipped crystal ashtrays and dented silver soup spoons, were not thrown away. They were sold “as is” and some people loved them and brought them into their own homes where they stretched out on linen tablecloths and observed the less-than-perfect life around them.

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Here in Minnesota, in Trader Joe’s, I saw a young white woman with three children under the age of five. With her left hand, she was pushing the infant and the toddler in one of those imposing strollers while in her right she hauled a baby carrier weighed down by food. Too much, too much of everything, I thought. In a supermarket in the down-at-the-heels other side of town, I saw a Black woman going through all of the purchases she had arranged on the check-out counter to see what she could reasonably put back so she’d be able to afford her groceries. Chop meat, the cashier suggested. Not enough, not enough of anything.

Noticing is what I do. Paying attention to people trying to buy food. Knowing that buying and preparing food is a commonality most of us share grounds me in my new reality. People eat everywhere. This may be why we’ve been walking to the store every few days to buy fresh broccoli, challah just out of the oven. Engaging the senses directly is an antidote to alienation. It can be the smallest thing…..the way the light falls on the reeds on the edge of the pond. Noticing the light calls me back from a long list of mental sinkholes, the monsters of regret, judgment and worry, not to mention the stranglehold of overthinking. When I remain at the pond, a man in a pink shirt walks over and asks “wanna see a big bird?” as if there’s more than one answer to that question. Then he points out a crane at the water’s edge only a few feet away. It doesn’t occur to me to check if the crane is perfect, or merely as is. I notice that the anxiety that lives high up on the borderline between my chest and my throat softens and dissipates. I marvel at the visitation of the crane and the shock of that gives the sensation in my throat a little nudge, relocating my awareness into my belly where it rests. I call this delight. It comes and goes like everything else.

“When I remain at the pond, a man in a pink shirt walks over and asks “wanna see a big bird?” as if there’s more than one answer to that question.”

Delight delivers an openhearted acceptance of what is. Everyone’s delight dresses in a different outfit. Mine is attached to color which interests me since I’ve never thought of myself as a visual person. It comes in a range of shades, and not necessarily in the natural world. At this very moment, I’m sitting on my balcony drinking very black cold coffee out of an aqua ceramic cup, one of a set of unprepossessing cups in pastels we picked up in a local junk shop, the dusty descendant of my father’s store. They are aqua, green, pale yellow and lilac and they have the power to convey delight, even in the face of aging and mortality and the shattering all around us. Color is coming to me as a glittering underground seam that is deeper and older than events and the words I use to describe them. It always arrives “as is” and touches me out of a lifetime of encounters with it. Prussian blue, emerald green, and that old Crayola standby, magenta. It invites me into the broken world.

Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.