Is Was Will Be

One of those trace memories from earliest childhood breezes through my awareness. It’s faint, all in pastels. I am sitting on the kitchen table with my pudgy legs and bruised knees swinging back and forth. I am so small that, shockingly, sitting on the table is permitted. Could be three years old. Could be 1948, the year Truman surprised Dewey. I’m telling a larger person, possibly my sister, that I will soon be six and that this will be a crowning achievement. I imagine six. I see it looming, but I can’t quite make it out and I don’t really know what it is. I’ll probably need new shoes. Maybe I was thinking about school, anticipating the excitement of crayons in unimaginable colors, aquamarine, chartreuse. Not yet knowing about the tedium of having to remain in an assigned seat facing the blackboard, Miss Hanlon, the American flag for the better part of six hours every day. That little girl is with me still, along with her tenuous grasp of the future. I am all the ages I have ever been and some I haven’t even gotten around to yet. Every age is somewhat familiar, but also distant, washed out. I cross paths with the thirteen year old conjugating French verbs, listening to the Top 40. In my mind’s eye, I see the twenty-six year old giving birth to a son in the Karolinska Sjukhuset in Stockholm and the thirty-three year old in another hospital on the East River in New York listening to her father’s death rattle. Where I’m situated on the timeline of my life keeps shifting in and out of focus. I climb the stairs to the top of the slide, hurtle down to the ground and start all over again. Especially in my inner life. The idea that there’s such a thing as progress, of moving inexorably in a forward march toward some desired end, doesn’t do justice to my experience. Clearly, it’s the scaffolding that supports the western, secular version of reality. It keeps people lined up, sitting at their desks. I’m always going back to pick up the pieces, pick up the people I’ve been in the past or reaching out to parts of myself I haven’t met up with yet. I’m always starting all over again, unwinding like the Torah scroll.

In late March and through April when I was living alone in Minnesota, a tabula rasa, I experimented with old age. Instead of the usual holding it at bay, piling up sandbags against the flood of loneliness and infirmity that might be coming, I tried it on for size. I walked to the grocery store and bought a single portion of fish. I walked to the pharmacy and filled my prescriptions. I paid careful attention to the tremor in my left hand, advancing slowly and deliberately when I carried a cup of hot coffee back to bed in the morning. Out for lunch with my son, we walked arm in arm. I noticed him learning how to watch out for me without being insultingly oversolicitous. We made adjustments, each of us shifting slightly to maintain balance, like riding a bicycle or walking on a tightrope.

Then in the end of April, Frank came back from California and joined me in Minnesota where spring was just sending out its hopeful tendrils. I could feel myself getting younger under his gaze, somewhat protective but also appreciative. When he looks at me, he sees a woman in her late seventies, but also the girl on the beach in Tobago forty years ago, her hair unruly and bleached by the sun and the sea salt. We spend an hour in a nearby wildflower garden visiting the geraniums and the bluebells. We check out the turtles sunning themselves on a log at the pond and the family of geese who preside over the shoreline. We watch our sons ripen into middle age. But we do not say to them, “You’ll see when you get older,” the way my mother always said to me. We understand that they already know. They saw six coming down the road when they were toddlers covered in ice cream and they see sixty now. We all have a deep memory of the future. It smells like rain on fiddleheads.

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Our new feature, Many Voices, will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. In May, Many Voices will welcome Toronto-based spiritual director, psychotherapist and poet, Jinks Hoffmann, in conversation with Susie Kaufman. Please honor us by sending your thoughts and your writing.

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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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