Small Bites

I’m now experiencing everything in small bites, taking baby steps. When you’re young, you think of old as another country very far away, a country you may never travel to. You do not consider that the alternative adventure will take you under the earth or scatter you into the sea. You’re not yet thinking of those things. You just have a vague notion of old age as a foreign state involving stumbling over words and pavements. Then, if you’re blessed, as I have been in my family, people you care about age in tiny increments over vast arcs of time.  If you’re paying attention, you can notice the subtle changes from one day to the next. My sister, who is bed bound, has recently lost ground in her ability to see the world clearly. When I come in to visit her, I have to give her the additional clue of my voice to make sure she can identify me. This means that it’s much more challenging for her to get her lunch from the plate into her mouth. Understand that my sister loves to eat, so any impediment to that activity is a big problem. The idea that someone would stand over her with a spoon shoveling oatmeal into her mouth is anathema and calls up the image of the nursing home residents I worked with in Hospice being set up in a semicircle of wheelchairs that allowed the aides to walk around shoveling in a horseshoe pattern. This was a horror movie of rage and lost dignity. Better to make some strategic changes in the menu to allow my sister Roberta to eat with her hands the way they still do in many parts of the world. I will always remember the waitress in the Ethiopian restaurant in Montreal breaking off a piece of their fermented flatbread injera and, without preliminaries, sticking it into my mouth. In any case, for Roberta,  a chicken wing is a wonder, a banana is a blessing. After she eats her lunch, we sing some old songs before I hit the road. The weather is Berkeley-lousy so we break into “Singing in the Rain,” imagining Gene Kelly with his umbrella, taking the greatest pleasure in this duet even though, incrementally, I have lost my voice.

Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

Here’s another thing I’ve recently discovered. I find that trying to put my pants on standing in the middle of the room without holding on to anything has suddenly become a high risk activity. Every day calls for an evaluation of my level of strength and balance because maneuvers that I executed gracefully yesterday, like getting up from the floor freestyle without bracing myself, may no longer be possible. It sneaks up on you, until it doesn’t. But the good news is that the increments accrue in both directions. So while I’m teetering on one foot failing to hit the high notes in “My Funny Valentine,” I am also feeling oceans of love for my family washing over me at unexpected moments.

Aging in amazement is an orientation to life that notices and appreciates the spiritual gains that can accompany the physical losses. My sister and I beam at each other. My niece and I beam at each other. My husband and I beam at each other. I see that in the many decades I’ve ironed out the creases in my relationships with these remarkable people, I have come to see myself more clearly in the toasty materiality of our deep connection…..the feeding, the storytelling, the touching.  I see my weaknesses, my petty jealousies. It feels safe. It feels plausible to consider how I might grow even now, how I might expand incrementally like the universe itself to become better at loving. If I focus on the baby steps, I don’t get overwhelmed by some giant self-improvement project. I make it my business to be aware of the moments I give myself over to this love and the moments I withhold it. I take a more generous approach to my own imperfection. Imperfection after all is the taste of life. It’s not the taste of honey. It’s bitter and good for you like turnip and salad greens and is best eaten in small bites. 

************************************************************************************************************

Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. In February, seventysomething is delighted to introduce Substack writer Jocelyn Lovelle who writes about the excruciatingly beautiful and heartbreaking human experience of holding the knowledge that we are both darkness and light—all the time. 

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.

*************************************************************************************************************

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

*************************************************************************************************************