Borders and Boundaries

More than fifty years ago on New Year’s Eve, I was traveling in Central Europe, east from Vienna, when I came upon the Hungarian border. This was where my paternal grandparents, Ludwig and Teresa Rosenberg, began their journey to America early in the last century and long before there was an Iron Curtain to penetrate. In 1970, it was an uninhabited stretch of dirty snow and scrub marked by barbed wire and guard towers. No one was allowed to cross the fields which were laced with land mines. This, in the middle of what my grandparents knew as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a fairy tale of strudel and waltz music. In 1970, people took their boundaries seriously. No one was dancing or eating cake. On New Year’s Day, everyone was hung over.

Since then, crossing borders of all kinds has become if anything more fraught with danger and anxiety. Whether we’re at the southern border with Mexico, trying to parse the lines drawn in the Donbas and Crimea, or negotiating the intricacies of boundaries between friends and family members, the question of where the fences should go and whether or not they should be impregnable arises at every turn. If your family lives 1200 miles away, how often do you interact with them? What if they live ten minutes away? No one knows the answers to these questions. Donald Trump is exquisitely attuned to the need some people feel to hide behind a border wall. But it’s not only political borders that focus our attention. Even in private life, the degree of your need to wall yourself off from others seems to be one of those essential distinguishing polarities like messy or neat-freaky, tight-fisted or profligate, but infinitely more nuanced. In my own construction of borders, I find that I am sometimes more closed off than I pretend to be. I cherish the belief that I’m open-hearted, or at least well-intentioned, but that may not be true to the reality of my need to control my space.

A friend tells me that she has difficulty when people ask for her support. She feels compelled to say yes. That’s not my problem. My problem is that other people’s material gets in my way. Everyone has a story and often the plot line spills over into my life and washes over me like the tide, sandy and smelling of fish. Maybe I’d rather not get wet, know what I mean?

Photo by Art Wave on Unsplash

The border between life and death keeps coming up, too. Not only, at my age, am I witness to the endless parade of passing, I am also subject to an algorithm that dictates that death is a featured topic. Some people get Ron DeSantis, some people get celebrity sex scandals. I get death.

I ask myself, why are we all so preoccupied with boundaries? Maybe it’s because in the greater scheme of things, our time in a boundaried state is so very short. Eighty years is a good run. Ninety a marathon. In eternity, we are unboundaried. Borders are essentially unfamiliar, like walking upright. We’re just not that accustomed to it, so we have to struggle all the time to master the skills to claim and establish our separateness. My intuition tells me that if being boundaried were more native, I wouldn’t have to try so hard. It’s not the boundary that I struggle with, it’s the effort to maintain it. You never know when you might encounter drone warfare or someone who wants to tell you what to read. Sometimes I feel like threats to my integrity are everywhere, as if the membrane that separates me from the world outside of myself is wearing thin like an old person’s skin and organisms of all kinds are knocking at the door, not so patiently. I envy the life of a fish, at home in the water, swimming through rock formations and what’s left of the coral. Still, even the fish are under assault from the plastic bags we bring home from Home Depot. The more vulnerable we are as individuals, as entire cultures, the more seawalls we will try to erect to forestall the deluge. If you think deeply about climate change, about xenophobia, about the changes in social norms that people thought would never change in their lifetimes, you can see that in the end it’s all about a fear of disintegrating boundaries.

Any experience that I can have that mitigates that anxiety can be salutary. Any time I can step into rushing water without fear of drowning enlarges me and my capacity for life. Last night, I sat in the Target Center with some 5000 other ecstatic parents and grandparents attending the Edina, Minnesota high school commencement. I saw my grandson receive his diploma in a long line of eighteen year olds, tall blond boys of Scandinavian descent pointing at the roof in that gesture they’d learned from their sports heroes and Somali women wrapped in headdresses, one with only her eyes showing. The school principal asked us in the interests of time to please refrain from screaming when our kids crossed the stage, but most of us, in particular the Somali families who blew plastic horns, joyfully disobeyed. Celebration knows no bounds.

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

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