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2002
Chattanooga Times-Free Press Columns by Dana Shavin
Home for
the Holidays: the Face of an Interfaith Marriage, December 1 |
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Hear it? It's the roar of the
approaching holidays. Halloween has just bowed out in its riot of
costume and color when Thanksgiving shoves in like an overbearing
mother: Eat! Eat! it demands, and so you do. By the time November draws
to a close, Chanukah and Christmas are waiting on your doorstep, the
Siamese twins of festivity and family. "Feed me," they plead, and so you
do, everything from your spare time to your spare change, keeping to
yourself just two things: the spare tire around your middle you got as a
gift from Thanksgiving, and the unpopular thought that sometimes the
holidays are just plain hard. As I write this I am planning my family's Thanksgiving celebration at my tiny house in the country. It will take place two days late, which means dinner will segue neatly into the second night of Chanukah. We will have a blended meal of turkey and potato latkes in the same kitchen where a few short months ago my husband and I hosted a Passover Seder for ten. In five more weeks, armed with gifts and food, we will load up the dogs and drive to his hometown in west Tennessee where Christmas, in all its glory, will be waiting. This is the face of an interfaith marriage at the holidays. Although I am Jewish and my husband is Christian, we have discovered in our differences a sameness that informs the way we live our lives. What has always been most important, as we negotiate the rocky path of our disparate faiths, is respect for each other's traditions. It is within these traditions, regardless of what they look like, regardless of what we call ourselves, that we find ourselves reaching for the same greater good. Sometimes the blending of traditions comes hard. I spent my first Christmas at my husband's parents' home staring hungrily at the most lovely and un-kosher pork roast I had ever seen. On the mantle a town of snow villages stood shoulder to shoulder, bathing our faces in an eerie light. Later that night as I sat in the shadow of the Christmas tree and opened a stocking with my name on it, I wondered whether I could ever be comfortable in such a foreign landscape. It is the same thought my husband had the first time I took him to my mother's for Chanukah. On the way to Atlanta I taught him, in Hebrew, the blessing we would recite as we lit the first candle in the menorah. His pronunciation was flawless. I had also coached him about various "Jewish" things to expect. "You can't just get a plate out of the cabinet," I explained. "There are plates for meat and plates for dairy, and ne'er the twain shall meet." Later I could explain how the twain sometimes met in the form of coffee with cream enjoyed prior to the close of a chicken dinner. But not now. "Also, my mother knows you're not Jewish, but we probably shouldn't mention going to your parents' for Christmas yet. And just for the record, we probably shouldn't mention the word 'Christmas' at all." He was sufficiently prepared for his first immersion in Jewish culture, and sufficiently nervous. What happened, however, was that as we burst into the house ablaze with the spirit of Chanukah, we were greeted by the vision of my mother fixing potato latkes and belting out "Silent Night" with the radio. My mother, who had long feared my assimilation into the mainstream of No Longer Jewish Enough, had loosened her own grip. It was a defining moment, and one which forgave me my previously unforgivable forays into Territory Different From Ours. It reminded me that the messages of love and peace do not belong to one religion or the other. But this is also the face of an interfaith marriage: one of us might go to church if the other was willing. One delves into the history of religion and the other reads fiction. Neither of us is completely comfortable in the home of our in-laws. And we are conspicuously aware that the presence of children would have complicated and enriched and no doubt changed the way we travel within the open spaces of our faiths. We haven't got it all worked out by any means. But December unfolds in our tiny house in the country much like it does elsewhere: candles burn and ornaments sway; we shop for presents and wrap and dream. We visit one family and then the other. We eat our latkes and open our gifts. And as we make our way toward the new year, we will pray our quiet prayers of watchfulness, and ask that our differences forever inform our blended hearts. |
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My friend Jack wrote me a letter
this past week apologizing for something he said to me in 1984. He had
re-discovered a letter from me (also from 1984) in which I was angry
about a comment he had made. Apparently I had been very angry, because
the letter was five pages long. In rethinking the comment, he wrote last
week, he is afraid he was misunderstood. We were twenty-two and
twenty-six at the time. Now we are forty and forty-four. He wants to set
things straight, before another decade slips by. There are three amazing things about his letter: the first is that I actually remember the conversation in question. It contributed to a change in the way I thought about, and later conducted, my life. The second is that, out of hundreds of letters that we exchanged and saved over a period of eighteen years, Jack's random reach into the box where mine are housed produced one of such importance. The third is that, after nearly twenty years, my friend still cares enough to want to set an old hurt right. His comment had to do with my pronouncement that I had finally begun to feel optimistic about my life. I had just started graduate school, was dating someone, and had adopted a dog. I felt like pieces of my life were finally beginning to fit with other pieces, like a future was knitting itself together in anticipation of my arrival. I may have said that I was happy for the first time in a long time. I'm pretty sure I described the dog, and maybe the boyfriend too. Jack responded that my professed happiness had diminished the intensity with which I usually viewed life. My happy letter, it seemed, lacked the usual depth and picking apart of ideas that defined the way Jack and I had always related. With the onset of school and dating and dog-parenthood, I had become externally focused, which apparently I had not been in the five years we had been friends. That was what his letter of 1984 was about. What I heard in that letter, however, was that I had reached a paradoxical low: happiness had made me boring. Because I had worked hard to stop being unhappy, and because my newfound external focus came as some relief, I felt it was Jack's place, as a good friend, to cheer my arrival into the world of happy people. Instead I heard that my hard work had diminished me. It was this perceived criticism that prompted my five page rebuttal. There is an old myth that depressed people are more creative and enlightened than their happy counterparts. If you are depressed, this is some consolation. For many years I, along with Jack, believed that creativity and enlightenment had to ride in on the waves of despair. The more despairing you were, the more creative and interesting you must be. I believed this right up until I stopped being so unhappy, and I began to actually finish the projects I started. When I was depressed, I did think deeply, but mostly about things that further depressed me: namely, about the fact that while depression is painful and difficult to cure, it is preferable to shallow satisfaction. What I didn't consider is that satisfaction need not be shallow, nor must it run interference with wisdom. Contentment, I have learned, can imbue life with a deeper sense of connection to a universe spinning mightily in a soup of things both mundane and miraculous. It took that mis-heard comment from Jack to make me re-think what I had always believed: that misery propels us toward, and even at times stands in for, enlightenment. Still, I suppose I am an oxymoron to many: I am a happy artist who doesn't feel I've lost brain cells to the supposedly corrosive force of contentment, and I became an artist not because I was unhappy, but because I was not. So I need to write my old friend Jack and tell him it's ok. If not for his comment all those years ago, I might never have challenged the myth of my enlightened angst. |
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We are on our way back to Georgia
from an art show in Ohio when right about Cincinnati, it hits me: one of
my best friends from college lives somewhere around here. I haven't seen
her since her wedding, circa 1985, although we have kept in touch and
for years promised to meet at a city in-between where we both live. I
call her from the car. "Wanna have breakfast tomorrow?" I ask, trying to sound casual. There is a moment of silence followed by screaming. She's figured out who I am, and in the locomotive rush of seconds that follow, I know she's doing it too: adding up the number of houses and jobs and children and lost fathers it has been since we've seen each other. The last time a space of seventeen years passed in our lives we left our hometowns and converged at Bard College in tiny Rhinebeck, New York. Somehow the hallmark of seventeen years heralds in the way we will always meet. At Bob Evans Restaurant in Blue Ash, Ohio, I sit with my husband waiting for Becky to arrive. I am trying to think of things to tell him that will make him feel like he knows her. In doing so, however, I notice that my information, while descriptive, does nothing to make him feel closer to her. ("Becky and I had hair down to our waists; Becky and I used to make up limericks about people we didn't like.") I realize then that Becky and I hadn't actually "done" anything that served as a benchmark of our college years together. We had simply become friends during a time that was as exhilarating as it was frightening and as simple as it was confusing. In short, college, because it stripped away the externals of family and home, reduced us to our most basic and vulnerable selves. Becoming friends was how we kept shards of ourselves from flying apart, and it is this that is our bond, more than our hair or our metered poems. I am afraid I won't know Becky when she gets there. After all, people gain and lose weight. They wrinkle, tan, pale, morph, have surgery, change in all sorts of good and bad ways. "What if we don't recognize each other?" I ask my husband, and in that instant Becky walks in, looking just as I remembered--nearly six feet tall, long dark hair, radiant complexion. I think that, had it been appropriate, we'd have simply sat and stared. Taken in the vision of one another until we caught a glimpse of twenty years ago: of castle-like buildings in late afternoon light, of tofu breakfasts and ten-cookie lunches, of women shaving their heads and piercing their ears with safety pins. Of hoot owls outside the library at midnight and unrequited love. Of long weekends caged in by mountains and snow and thoughts of home. Instead we dive directly into conversation. We talk about Becky's job as a banker, her children, the house they've just bought that finally has enough room. We talk about my art shows and dogs, how our mothers are getting along, our house that gets smaller the longer we live there. Her children, eleven and seven, eat their eggs in silence. After a while I can see it on their faces: the glances around the room, the shifting in seats. "You're old," they're thinking. I know this because I thought it too, about my own parents, when they talked about life before or besides me. How strange it is to suddenly have this kind of perspective: to have faith in your own youthfulness even as the truly youthful have none. An hour later, my husband and I are on the road again. We turn our last hour over and over in the car, examining it, dissecting it, putting it back together again. I'm sad, I tell him, because my past feels so distant. But there's a contentment too. Just over the Kentucky border, it all starts to make sense. "It's like meeting the person you could have become, but didn't," I say. "Someone your age who had a similar upbringing and went to the same college, but then did everything you didn't: married young, had children, got a job in business, bought a house that was big enough in a suburban metropolis that was diverse enough..." I pause to watch a farm zip past us on the freeway. "It's like coming face to face with the anti-you," I say, and in an instant, I know that this meeting was a gift to myself, a glimpse from my past into my simple but well-loved present. Lives converge and go unknowable ways, but souls follow a rightful path. In Cincinnati, and in Chickamauga, things are exactly as they should be. |
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My mother tells the story that
when I was six, I insisted on wearing a feather in my hair to school
every day. And every day I came home in tears because the other kids
made fun of me for wearing a feather in my hair. While I don't remember
the alleged feather, I do remember long stretches of abject misery that
roughly corresponded with the school year. All twelve of them. One problem seemed to be that my mother and I inadvertently colluded in making fashion decisions based on some internal sense of loyalty to the bizarre. In first grade she hemmed my dresses so short I was practically sent home for indecency. The next year, she would, for reasons unknown, glue a large gold emblem to the front of my horseback riding helmet, thus earning me the nickname "Headlamp" and effectively reversing any strides I'd made toward popularity at horse camp. By sixth grade, through no fault of her own, I had outgrown every other child in my elementary school by seven inches and twenty-five pounds. As if that wasn't punishment enough, it also happened to be the year that glasses, braces, bangs, puberty, and an affinity for fringe belts all converged on me at once. And those were the good old days. In 1974, high school burst on the scene with the kind of sinister undercurrent a séance brings to sleepover. "The best years of your life," I heard from adults, which was about as reassuring as being told to enjoy your torturers because you might one day miss the attention. In ninth grade, important truths about myself began to surface: like that I would not have a date prior to the 1980's; I would always find the smell of horse poop preferable to the smell of perfume, and, because of these first two facts, I would never, ever see the inside of a prom hall unless I became a custodian. I discovered that I would always feel like I had a feather waving comically out of my hair. Worst of all, I saw that the world was a place of innumerable paths, none of which, it seemed, I fit on. Things continued in this vein for years. No path ever felt exactly right, though many felt exactly wrong. By the time I was twenty, I had made the decision not to have children. When my friends began to have babies, I found myself a member of an exclusive group called "childless by choice." Articles were written about women like me, I discovered, but it didn't make the men I dated, all of whom wanted children, any prouder to know me. They left in pursuit of women who didn't need a disclaimer, women who made sense right out of the gate. But I was content with my decision. And so, content, unmarried, and childless through my thirties, I carried on, hacking away a path out of what felt like so much underbrush. I left a career in mental health for a chance to try my hand at art. I bought a house well outside the city limits since a single woman has time for a commute. I fell in love outside my faith. We painted the faraway house gold and purple and green. One thing I have realized about getting older is that while certain of your traits may fragment and realign, there will always be a place for them in the puzzle of who you become. I will always feel, in some way, that I am headed west as the world heads east, that my dresses are too short and my legs too long. That I am lucky to be an artist but unlucky not to be a surgeon. It is my lot in life to follow my instincts but curse opportunities missed. To feel at once at peace and in turmoil. To wear my feathers with pride and with shame. But if there is anything I like about getting older it is that I've learned to live with dichotomy, to define myself as many things at once. As it turns out, it isn't the path that makes the person at all. |
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My mother called the other day to
tell me she's thinking about selling the house and moving into a loft. I
lived in a loft once. Late at night with the TV turned low you could
hear the muffled sighs of four restless horses dreaming of rodeos and
racetracks. Just as you sank into sleep, a well-aimed hoof would smack
the wall of the barn roughly corresponding to the spot directly below
your head. During the day you had to squeeze sideways out the front door
to keep would-be house flies from zooming in en masse and setting up
their own private nation. And "housekeeping" duties included scooping
manure twice a day and sweeping loose hay out of the breezeway. This is not the kind of loft my mother was talking about. My mother doesn't live in the attics of livestock. Her idea of a loft is something with clean lines, sunny, well-lit rooms, pre-paid groundskeeping, and asphalt parking spaces with names on them. The news about the possible move took a while to sink in. Now that it has, I plan to call her and tell her to halt her search. It doesn't seem right that my mother could renounce my childhood home for the likes of some glorified apartment. I guess I always assumed she would stay where she belonged, nestled in the woody suburban neighborhood of my youth, nursing fond memories of my siblings and me (especially me) as children. I always thought that if she moved, our history would be lost, like it only existed in the place where it was made, instead of inside each of us. I should have seen it coming. For years my mother has been threatening to "clean out the basement." Mostly I have regarded this threat as a metaphor, the true message being something like, "Why don't you come home and bring the dogs and I'll make pecan squares." I didn't take it seriously when she would call me every few months and warn me that the "bag" was going to the dump if I didn't come get it. The "bag" is an enormous sack containing somewhere between fifty and seventy-five hard plastic horses in every position imaginable. Some are frozen in a gallop. Some are grazing. One comes with its own stall. One has real hair. The "bag" is one of those things from your childhood you find yourself both unable to possess or discard, a thing that can exist, like your fragile history, only in the place of its origination. Now, I am sorry to say, it looks like I am going to have to make a decision about it, because I'm pretty sure it won't be going to the loft. There is another problem with my mother selling the house. When I was ten, we were robbed. The robbers backed a giant truck up our steep curvy driveway, and proceeded to help themselves to almost everything we owned. I can still remember the three patrol cars in front of the house and my mother racing to meet me as I got off the schoolbus, screaming at me not to panic. But I did panic. I was afraid the robbers had stolen the horses, which at that time had not yet been relegated to a bag. The horses were there but almost nothing else was. My parents' bed, including the headboard, was gone, as were their dressers, TV table, TV, and lamps. The kitchen table and chairs were gone. The den and living room furniture were all gone. Even the vacuum cleaner was taken from its closet. Gone too was the thing I loved the most in my mother's house, a hand-carved mother-of-pearl inlaid table with scenes of life in China. It was a piece of furniture my ten year-old heart would remember, and miss, for the rest of my life. The police had no clues and made no pretenses: file insurance and re-decorate, they told my parents. And so they did. Soon enough our empty house filled up again and after a while I stopped being afraid, but I never forgot the mother-of-pearl table. I still find myself looking for it in antique stores and yard sales. One day that table will surface, I tell myself, and take its rightful place back in the living room of my youth. Unless, of course, my mother moves. Then, I suppose, I will have to make a home for the fragments of my past in me. |
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It was easier the first time
around. My first marriage at age seven, an impromptu wedding to the
family Welsh corgi, was blissfully simple: a quick look through the
closet for attire (I wore a culottes set, he wore a t-shirt), a short
service (beginning and ending with my pronouncement of weddedness and
nothing about having, holding, or relative health), and one long
afternoon sipping invisible tea and seeing how many times my new husband
would "shake" before he trotted out of the marriage, down the steps and
into the garage to nap. My second marriage, this time to a human man, was not nearly so impromptu. It required thirteen years of something like dating, followed by three months of planning a menu, followed by fifteen minutes of vows, capped off with four hours of eating. Having married once at seven and once at thirty-nine, I can confidently say that I am a marriage veteran. But I'm at a loss for one thing: since we did not own the dog's parents, I had no prior experience with in-laws. I remember the exact moment I realized that nothing I said or did was comprehensible to my husband's parents. You would think I might have noticed the communication gap sometime during the course of the afore-mentioned thirteen years of courtship. But the fact is, until you are married, whether you are able to relate to your intended's parents is of no consequence whatsoever. After you are married, however, things that didn't matter before now matter greatly. In my case, I woke up to a family brunch the morning after my wedding and stared across the void at two people I had essentially never seen before. One was staring unhappily at a mound of bagels and lox on the table, casting longing glances toward the oven where, in his dreams, biscuits and gravy lay in wait. The other ate heartily of bagels but spoke at length about proper kitchen organization and the relative benefits of spot-removers. In one overnight, the fact that we might as well have been communicating cross-species surged to the forefront. Shortly after becoming a new bride, I found myself having a conversation with my mother-in-law concerning the baking time of potatoes that left me with the kind of rage and confusion you might expect from other, more worldly discussions. The problem seemed to be that it was my kitchen, I was responsible for the potatoes, and I didn't have a clear plan. "How long will you leave those in?" she asked. Was that a thin veneer of sweetness barely masking her disdain for my cooking abilities? I was certain of it. "Till they're done," I said obliquely. "When will that be?" she asked nervously, angling, I knew, for an answer expressed in minutes. "When the centers are soft," I said, ignoring her unspoken plea that I set some sort of timer and assert control over the tiny tubers furiously baking away at 500 degrees. To my credit, I was the picture of calm on the outside, but inside, important organs were twisting in important ways. While I looked, to the casual observer, like somebody's wife fixing dinner for the in-laws, underneath I was somebody's six year-old screaming, "Leave me alone! They're MY potatoes and I can do it myself!" I'm pretty sure I won that vicious battle for control, but there have been other, more subtle ones. During another visit, my mother-in-law was shocked to learn that I didn't own a vegetable peeler, near-mortified to discover that my cookware was not Teflon. Or that's how it seemed to me. "Now I know what to get you for Christmas," she said soothingly, forgetting, for one blissful moment, that we don't even celebrate the same holidays. Recently my father-in-law had the presence of mind to change the subject from cooking to sports. "How's the basketball team at Gordon-Lee?" he asked as we drove past the school. I could have had a longer and more knowledgeable conversation about obscure presidents' childhoods. "They're doing great," I offered. "Lots of homeruns last year." He stared at me with the lack of understanding only a father-in-law can muster, a look that fell somewhere along a continuum between, "Why don't you have a real job?" and "Where are my grandchildren?" And as if things couldn't get worse, my husband's cousin gave birth to a baby girl last week. Baby Kelsey arrived, thoughtfully, on my mother-in-law's birthday, while my husband and I hadn't even remembered to send a card. Which is going to cost us. So I'm in the market for a vegetable peeler and some well-placed information about basketball. Next time they visit, I hope to speak at least a little in-law. |
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I recently heard an appalling
statistic on NPR. Children were asked, "How many times would you ask
your parents for something you really wanted even though they have said
you can't have it?" The answer was different depending upon the age
group, but the average twelve year-old estimated she would be willing to
ask about 120 times. 120 times? When I was twelve and wanted a
horse even more than I wanted to live on mayonnaise sandwiches and
Instant Breakfast, 120 requests was just a suggestion. The conversation with my father went like this: "Dad, can I PLEASE have a horse? I swear I'll take care of it and I'll never ask for anything else as long as I live!" "I'll buy you a horse when you're twenty-one." "Dad!! By the time I'm twenty-one I'll be married!" "Well, then your husband can buy it for you." It sounds endearing until you consider that we had this conversation several hundred times a year from the time I was six until well into puberty. In spite of my father's staunch refusal to buy me a horse, I studied fervently for the moment he would, out of sheer boredom, change his mind. By age seven I had practically enshrined my copy of The Treasury of Horses with its glossy pages boasting an artist's rendition of the tiny prehistoric eohippus (an early predecessor of the horse thought to stand only eight inches high) and full-color photographs of every contemporary breed of horse arranged by continent. By age eight I had memorized all the body parts of the horse from fetlock to croup, just in case I was one day confronted on the playground by a stranger holding the reins to a thoroughbred that would be mine if only I could answer one question: What is the name of the short bone in the ankle of a horse? "PASTERN!" I would yell with glee, as I was instantly transported from the realm of Girl Who Can't Play Kickball to Girl With Horse. The thing about horse-crazy girls is this: while they can rattle off the names of obscure horse body parts, tell you the country of origin of King of the Wind, and throw around terms like flying lead change and posting on the diagonal, they can't put into words what it is about horses that so enthralls them. They know the word "martingale" but they don't know "transcendent." They can post without stirrups, turn 360 degrees in a saddle at a trot, and canter their horse over a three foot jump with their hands in the air, but they can't tell you why they want to, don't have words like exhilarating, omnipotent, invincible. They'll tell you they ride just because. A month ago I ran into an old friend from elementary school with whom I had taken riding lessons. She said she had started riding again, that she was almost back to jumping. It was all I needed to hear to make my own long-overdue date with a riding facility in town. But it was not without trepidation that I pulled myself into the saddle again, picked up the reins, and trotted off in the direction of my childhood. It didn't take long to realize that things are not exactly as they were. I no longer have the confidence to swing around in my saddle willy-nilly at a run, can't remember whether to post on the inside or outside diagonal, and can't for the life of me figure out the multitude of leather straps involved in a double-rein bridle. Some underrepresented ligament in my knee hurts by the time I get off, some hitch in my lower back complains. But what does come easily are the words I didn't have at twelve. Now when someone asks what it is about horses that I find so enthralling, I can talk about the exhilaration of moving through the air astride an animal attuned to my every flinch; the ecstasy of finding my balance; the simple rapture of being borne aloft. It's true my dreams have changed. As an adult I don't think about jumping ever higher jumps and I don't fantasize about fame in the show ring. I no longer crave a horse to keep me company because I find the nuances of making friends overly complicated. I've finally found the words to explain myself but discovered I hardly need them. At forty I ride horses for the same reasons I have always ridden: for the inarticulate joy of the partnership, and just because. |
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Three years ago, safely ensconced
in the wide hug of my thirties, I bought a book called Getting Over
Getting Older. It was time to put to rest all the nagging fears and the
sadness I felt about aging, and to embrace instead a vision of a robust
and centered second half of life. My husband-to-be was so happy to hear
my plan that he handed me fifteen dollars for the purchase. At first the book was promising. On the cover was a photograph of the author, fifty-something year-old Letty Cottin Pogrebin. She wore a tiny skirt and stiletto heels. Her shiny blonde hair took a graceful dive to just below her shoulders, then made an adorable u-turn at the last minute. Her smile boasted two rows of perfectly tended teeth. In a word, she was radiant. Who wouldn't want to know what she knew about aging? Fifteen minutes into the book I was jiggling mass of terror. I had learned that in roughly four years my vision would deteriorate to the point that neither contact lenses nor reading glasses, nor any combination of the two, would be able to meet all of my sight needs. In roughly five years, my hearing would diminish significantly, causing me to give long thoughtful answers to questions nobody was asking. And soon after that, the lines in my face would look like a map of Alabama (including driveways). The good news was, if I could mask my horror at these changes, I might be considered a role model for smooth-skinned twenty-somethings searching for a dispassionate glimpse into their distant future. I slammed the book shut. Clearly it was not yet time to come to terms with aging. I didn't need a book to point out the changes my body was hinting at already, and besides, if I was going to fall apart in three to six years, I preferred that it be a surprise. No one really wants to plan for his own unavoidable demise. Now that it is three three years later, and aside from endless hours in front of the mirror wondering what exactly, in the absence of wrinkles and gray hair, makes me look three years older, what fascinates me most is this: how at forty the world I inhabit is so much different from the one I knew at thirty-seven. The fact is, at thirty-seven my world was pretty much made up of my husband-to-be, my family of dogs, and my burgeoning career as an artist. Three years later my brain struggles to wrap itself equally around what feels terribly insignificant--my day-to-day life as a painter and writer--and happenings of terrible import: a war in the Middle East, political and social upheaval in Afghanistan; the threat of drilling in the Arctic and my own conspicuous consumption of resources; ethically irresponsible stock investing, terrorism and knee-jerk patriotism, a friend with breast cancer. I liked the narrow perspective of thirty-seven. I was too young for a book on aging but old enough to appreciate my youth. Three years later my eyesight has sharpened, not diminished, and suddenly I see a web of complexity where before there had been a simple knot. Historical perspective has descended uninvited, and I find myself reading the world like a musical score, each refrain repeating upon itself until we--or something outside of us--rewrite our future. Even as my mind struggles to stretch around the largess of years--those gone, those to come--I fear I can see a place on the horizon where the world, incurable, drops off into space. I am--we are all--responsible for its ills, at the same time that we control so little of it alone. This is maturity, I think, the place in your own mind where suddenly everything and nothing at all have to do with you. This is forty. I wonder: how is it I can have lived this long and the world in all its complexity seem so new, and so newly personal? And then I find this quote: "It takes about ten years to get used to how old you are," it says, author unknown. Which means by the time I'm Letty Cottin Pogrebin's age, the world will have added twenty more years of complexity. One can only hope. |