Everything Old is New Again

Loss came in on little cat feet. People kept asking me “aren’t you sad about leaving this community you’ve been living in for fifty years, all your friends?” I would casually say no, only dimly aware that the person asking the question was probably one of the people I was supposed to be missing in anticipation of leaving the Berkshires. Dumb. I would say, rather, I know I’m going to miss Stockbridge. The historic white clapboard houses, the old maples and elms, the cemetery, the librarians who have supported my book habit for so many years. Stockbridge has been a paradise for a city girl who never expected to land in a place where you could walk in the street without wading through trash, where the green rose to meet you every morning. I have loved this town and its draconian zoning board that has kept everything as it was when Hawthorne wrote The House of the Seven Gables in his little red cottage. It has been a privilege to live here and write here. This is the place I’m leaving behind. Now that I’m on the offramp, I’m beginning to notice the receding cast of characters. I’m beginning to mourn the lost of these people who have looked me in the eye and known who I am.

There was a meditation I offered hospice patients when I sat with them in their last weeks. I would say, “imagine you are lying back on a gondola surrounded by flowers and lots of pillows, very comfy, and you are floating gently downstream past the Venetian palaces of your life. Along both shores, your people are gathered to say goodbye. Some are beaming at you and waving. People of all ages and descriptions from different parts of your life. Amazingly, these people love you and want to wish you well. Leaving home is like that. It has the quality of a dress rehearsal.

Photo by Zan on Unsplash

I am porous by nature and breathe in the sadness of my friends alongside my own. I don’t know if this is the same as being compassionate, but it’s an aspect of my personality that I am well aware of. Everything filters down and simmers together in the same pot, the salty memories combining into a thick gravy. It has what the food people call depth of flavor. At first, I rejected the idea that people were so involved in what I was up to. It seemed grandiose, self-inflated to imagine that my life decisions would have such an outsized impact on other people. I didn’t believe that anyone could possibly care so much. I also wanted to hold all the cards, make this move all about me and the arc of my life. But loss is a poker game, not a solitaire, and there are some people I’ve been playing this game with for a very long time. We have sat around the table eating peanuts by the fistful, letting the chips fall. And somehow, mostly without noticing it, we have grown old together, except for those who didn’t. My friends have been a paradise for a city girl who grew up lonely in a pre-war apartment with older parents and Steve Allen on Sunday nights.

Now I’m texting my grandsons to wish them good luck on the first day of school, learning their language and adapting to their way in the world. I’m watching my granddaughters’ emerging adulthood unfold on Facebook. I call it the anthropology of amazement, this re-learning what it feels like to be young, to look ahead to years and years of hanging out and figuring out, falling in love and falling in love again. It’s taken me a while to let go of my resistance to the young. I’ve been wary of the way they go about their ballet of trial and error, as if to say “What do you know about rock and roll? Where were you when we marched on the Pentagon?” Dumb. Maybe this resistance is tinged with just a little jealousy and a splash of nostalgia for a time so free of consequences….as if I wanted to stay up all night, which I don’t.

What I want is to learn from them and to clear a path in the mental underbrush so they can learn from me. They are my people now. After all, everything old is new again. I want to catch some of their exuberance and nurture an understanding between us that they will have my back when reality bites and I will do my best to be there if the creek rises or the fires get too close.

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