On Turning Sixty

 Last night, after dinner, Tom gave me a small wrapped box. Inside was a set of photos, mostly of me and my friend Jilline. We can't be older than twenty-two or twenty-three, and we're posing in silly Mae West-like outfits gleaned from J's massive costume collection, and we are shockingly beautiful. We're playing with clothes, and T, just as young as we are, is playing with his camera--two things that often happened when the three of us were together.  But I had completely forgotten this particular episode. Opening the box was like being confronted with a self I'd never met. I cried . . . for so many reasons--surprise, loss . . . mostly for Jilline, so vivid then, long dead now; but also for the girl I was, that lovely clueless body; but also for the invisible eye looking into the camera, my constant, my still-constant.

It was a confusing and emotional moment, emblematic, perhaps, of what it feels to be stepping into my next decade today. I am, as I always am on my birthday, so glad to be alive. I love life, and the earth, my people and animals, my books, the tomatoes on the vines, the fire on the hearth, the leaves spinning slowly from the maples, the hoot of a child, the shout of a gull . . . I love them all, I write about them all, constantly conning among these details, sifting among them, marveling.

But as I turn sixty, I also step formally into the next rituals of my life: the rituals of age, not old age yet, but the door into that corridor has opened. I am not afraid, though I am apprehensive. I am not yearning to be young again, yet those photos of my young self give me pain. Who is this milky-skinned girl, without sons, without poems?

She would be amazed to imagine growing up to be sixty years old. She read so many books in those days, she read books passionately, and she glowed at the idea of becoming a real writer but she had no stamina, she still thought being a writer meant being a novelist, she winced away from the idea of being a poet though she loved poems, she loved Keats and Hopkins with all her heart, and she also loved boys, she loved romance, the drama of romance, the rush of heat, the spinning loss of control, she would be amazed to know that, nearly forty years later, she would still be with this same guy, she would be thrilled, this must be true love like in the books, she was such a sentimental fool, and she loved her friend Jilline, she hadn't had many women friends in those days, she was such a sucker for boys, but Jilline saw through that, Jilline gave her some lessons in a new way of love, the love of hopes and dreams and talk and making art and longing to become, to become something beyond the body but also the body as canvas, she didn't dream that Jilline would be dead at forty, she didn't dream that Jilline would live on as a dream, she looked at herself in the camera lens, she was twenty-three years old and she did not  know what she saw.

That child, that self. She is a kernel inside the roughening shell, something green but also very fragile. I did grow up to be sixty years old. But I also stayed goofily in love. I also stayed starstruck with Keats and Hopkins. I learned to make friends with many women, women who keep teaching me, as Jilline had begun to, that the bonds of friendship are a rich and complicated version of devotion. I learned that sons are better than poems, but that nonetheless making poems is what I have to do.

I learned that there's no real ending to this sort of thinking--but that dailiness calls. I need to stop writing now, and get up and go do some living.