First Person

Sometimes I run into my old self on the street or at the local CVS. I’m walking down the skin care aisle and there she is, not sure of which way to go. I might smile warmly and tell her I hope she finds what she’s looking for if, in fact, I recognize her out of context. Or, I might not be in the mood. I might walk right on by and turn a corner in the direction of shampoo as if I’d never seen this woman before. Today, I’m feeling a wistfulness for my old self, even though she got in trouble all the time with ingenious intoxicants and boys named Harvey. Even though she didn’t make her mark on the world the way she had hoped. Sometimes I miss the yearning and the look-at-me dance moves designed to get other people’s attention, both men and women. Occasionally, I’m even nostalgic for the dramas of interpersonal hoo-hah where my imagination ran wild with jealousies and accusations. Of course, when I was stuck in that cement, I had no idea that it was, as my mother always said dismissively, just a phase. That in due course, it would back off leaving a surprising deep silence and spaciousness that took some getting used to. I would, as it turns out, come out of it a lot older, a little wiser, and generally less febrile. Still, there are days when I’m visited by the familiar taste of my younger self, bitter like cold coffee, salty and indigestible like a bag of potato chips at 2am. I have to develop a game plan for dealing with my past life when it shows up uninvited.

Photo by Diane Picchiottino on Unsplash

Recently, I found myself grinding away at an inflammation I carry regarding someone I know. I went at it for a while, scratching that itch, but then I remembered that I don’t have to be there, that I can pack up and go someplace else. So I imagined this person that was taking up so much of my mental space standing against a circular backdrop of pink carnations. The carnations graciously absorbed the bitter taste and delivered the blissful scent of the florist on Broadway near my father’s store. The flower shop was an emporium of loving intention. Celebrations of birthdays, graduations, even lives lost, were all wrapped in translucent green waterproof paper. Blossoms burst out in all seasons.

It’s quiet here in my life most of the time now. No more shouting over other people, sparring to see who’s the most clever, the most lavishly endowed with cultural references. It’s like the slow movement of a piano sonata after a riot of high-energy sixteenth notes. I am no longer a virtuoso of anything, if I ever was. In New York and at college when I was young, I had to fight for air time, lying in wait for the moment when someone whose brain waves were crackling at a higher frequency would stop to catch his breath or reach for the pretzels so I would have an opening. Really, I was unsuited for the contest, but I didn’t know it at the time. Eventually, I looked around for a game with different rules, but it took me a long while to find one.

Then in my late forties, I discovered listening. What a novel idea! No one had ever told me about listening. It was a foreign language and one that was unspoken. It was as if all that smart, performative speech just went out into the ether and dissipated. My nerve endings in their original state, pulled tight and vibrating like a violin string, began to settle. I noticed myself and the others around me in all our bird-like delicacy and I observed that cleverness was not a universal currency. Not everyone wanted to be around it. So I said goodbye to the first person I was in my fledgling attempts at selfhood and sometimes I miss her. I wonder what’s become of her. Sometimes when I see the ghost of her out and about I want to say “How’re you doin’? Where’ve you been hanging out?” She was entertaining but in the end unsustainable. Too much, too fast, too loud. Still, when I go looking for people I used to know who’ve passed on….my mother, my father, Bob, Jimmy, Joan and so many others….I know that she’s gone, too, and sometimes my older and wiser self misses her at the card table.

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On Sunday, March 26th, paid subscribers will have access to our new monthly feature, Many Voices. The special guest for March will be the poet Marjorie Power. Marjorie has published four collections and numerous chapbooks. To read more about Marjorie Power and her poetry, visit www.marjoriepowerpoet.com.

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I’m also pleased to invite you to a service at the Unitarian Universalist church in Housatonic, Massachusetts where I will be offering a sermon via zoom on March 12th. If you are in the Berkshires, please join me for the hour-long service beginning at 10:30 am. The sermon is entitled “Remembering What We’ve Always Known.” You can also email me at seventysomething9@gmail.com for the zoom link.

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