Lost and Found: Things Missing and Discovered

A Many Voices Guest Post by Jocelyn Lovelle

I have given things away that I wish I had not. The bed my grandfather made by hand for my mother, hauled off during a move because I was angry, lost, scared and tired. The red boots I wore for 15 years, through births and deaths, starting a business and closing it, marriage, divorce and new love. 

Things have also just disappeared, by distraction or desertion or both. A friendship with one of the kindest hearts I've ever known, that I thought couldn't withstand my secrets, but which would have survived had I only shared them. A painting of fighting roosters given to me with strings (attached but never pulled) by a duplicitous man. The mango tree planted in the backyard of the house I used to own, and still love, in Costa Rica. 

Earlier this month, I went to my first (their last) Eagles concert. I was little-kid excited. Bouncing on my feet as we walked into the theater, dragging my husband along towards the merchandise. He seemed surprised at what seemed obvious to me – I was going to buy a souvenir. He's a calm, easy going guy, so he got in line and stood with me while I dithered over which sweatshirt, which tee. I asked him to take my picture with my swag. When I looked at it the next day I could see my excitement. Smile so big my gums showed. A little blurry because I couldn't stand still. And in it, a few silver-gray hairs caught the light just right and sparkled. 

I love those gray hairs. While I was one of the younger people there – the Eagles were over by the time I was seven – my hair now places me firmly in a certain bracket of years. Years in which I've started doing things more for myself and less to please others. I've read this happens to some women in middle life. That we become one of the people we take care of. We become more creative, or we begin to have space and time and a pressing need to look at our creative selves, to nurture them instead of someone else's. We start saying no, surprising and delighting ourselves with the word's subtle power. We start saying yes to things previously denied. 

Photo by Valentin Salja on Unsplash

Like spending far too much money to see an aging group of white guys stand on a stage and play songs, some of which were recorded before I was born. Like asking my husband to take a photo of me which may or may not be shared with anyone else, but that I wanted for my own enjoyment, a full color memory of the moment before the concert happened. 

I am drawn to these liminal spaces and particularly those before the live music starts. The anticipation of knowing that I am going to be living in the moment for over two hours. Being brought back to myself over and over through sound and familiarity, through songs that are in my bones and ones that are new. A visceral, and also divine, experience.

When my first husband and I were driving through Mexico and Central America nearly 25 years ago, we had a folder of CDs, one of the big ones, binder sized with four CDs to a page. Music as a planned and finite source of entertainment. These days I have become lazy with streaming music, putting on a station and half-listening to what comes on. My CDs, the few I have left (so many of those given away) shut away in a drawer, too much effort to pull out and choose which one, then choose again when that one ends. 

I miss this kind of attention to music. The way an album can help us get lost. Or help us get found. 

Those gray hairs help me find myself. I have so many friends, most of them, really, who disappear their wrinkles with Botox, who deny their gray with brown or blonde. And that's fine. We all have our ways of finding ourselves. The ultimate game of hide and seek.

For what is being human if not the infinite search to find ourselves amidst constant loss, constant gain, constant change. What we give away, what we leave behind, what disappears without a sound, what comes in its wake. Aging as the soul's lost and found. 

When I was in California last month, I went for a long hike and had lunch afterwards with one of my oldest and dearest friends. We met when we were 19, in our college accounting class. I asked to borrow her notes. She paused, then agreed. She didn't like me because I'd accidentally borrowed the guy she wanted to date. I gave him back quickly. He wore two pairs of socks and drove under the speed limit. I was too young for that kind of carefulness. We decided we liked each other more than we liked him. 

Her hair is no longer the sun-streaked brown of our 20s. It is now a dark charcoal streaked with dove gray and silver. A little unruly, the silver sparkled when the sun hit it. She told me she wore it down just for me. I have always loved her hair, but never more than now. 

I asked her if she ever felt like she should color it. She works at a major university in IT, in Silicon Valley, California's pressure cooker of ambition and success. She said, "No. Not really. Education seems to be the last place that rewards age. And I like it this way. It reminds me of me."

And what else do we really want in this life but to be reminded of ourselves, of our beingness. We collect things like generational handmade beds, photographs of our travels, of our own faces and of those of others we love, art, houses, pets, all to help us see ourselves and our place in this world more clearly. 

Being human is a blurry experience if we're not careful to slow down and collect the people and dear things that ground us. That tether us to time and place. Although as most of us come to know by middle age, time is mutable, place gets hazy in the distance and we are always left only with now. 

I miss those things I've let go of, sometimes when I think of them, my heart aches with loss, but the beautiful mystery of being human lies partly in how resilient our hearts are, how able they are to carry the things, the people, the pets, the homes, even though we cannot touch them anymore; and partly in how we can never know how giving something away, or letting something (or someone) go, paved the way to let something else in, to lead us closer to ourselves. 

Substack writer Jocelyn Lovelle writes Hello Beautifuls, about her experience being human; about connection and how it's what we all deeply crave and need; how love is always the answer and how burdensome and beautiful it is to carry the knowledge that we are both darkness and light, all the time.

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We will be on vacation in the sun next week. See you at seventysomething again on March 6.

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. All subscribers are now welcome to read Many Voices posts. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support seventysomething, have access to the archives, and become a contributor to Many Voices. Your ideas are always welcome.

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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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