We’re beginning to venture out: masked, tentative, nervous. Did there used to be this many cars coming at me from all directions? Are all the people in this coffee shop safely breathing? Do I still prefer ZOOM church over attendance in a nearly empty sanctuary? Are some of these people in the grocery store refusing vaccination?
From the perspective of his 80th birthday, revered columnist George Will reminds me: “To be 80 years old in this republic is to have lived through almost exactly one-third of its life. And to have seen so many ephemeral excitements come and go that one knows how few events are memorable beyond their day. (Try to remember the things that had you in a lather during, say, the George H.W. Bush administration.)”*
I’m only a few years behind George in the accumulation of perspective. These days I feel greatly unburdened to glance at political headlines and move on immediately to the comics and my favorite advice columns and the crossword puzzles. Probably not in my lifetime will the world end in either fire or ice. I’ve had about fifty years so far, and may have perhaps twenty more, to do my bit for peace, justice, and love. Life’s a journey, all right, but there’s no “there” to aim for.
What I can live for is simply NOW. It’s an “eternal now,” as my favorite theologian Paul Tillich affirms. Time, whether described by physicists, cosmologists, or theologians, is a context for human life as mysterious as what some of us call God. What’ll it be today?
Here’s a pair of poems that bookend my life so far, the first from my 30s (I think) and the second from my 70s. Same person. Same path. Some progress?
CLIMBING
I have begun to narrow down desire.
As though tracing a river to its source
I climb, charting the change higher and higher
from placid meander to the turbulent course
where it began. I have loved much, not well,
collecting worlds to carry on my back.
What shall I leave? The spirits that compel
this climb demand a spare and steady pack.
Leave beauty, wonder. They are everywhere.
Leave hope, and drink from the relentless stream.
Leave knowledge, learn trust in the nimble air
until, suspended by a slender dream,
you seek only to climb, and not to know
where you came from, where you have to go.
OLD LADY WITH NO COMPLAINTS**
The outward qualities already met:
the white hair, glasses, wrinkles, overweight,
the random names I’m likely to forget,
the words for things (like icebox) out of date.
The comfy sweats retirees get to wear?
I live in those, with sneakers on my feet.
Do I look puzzled, with a distant stare
as though I needed help to cross the street?
I might be lost, but only lost in thought.
The road not taken troubles me no more.
Amused, I sift the clutter life has brought
and shut the past behind me door by door.
My bit in time seems infinitely small,
its prizes insufficient after all.
In breaking news, the almost 20-year-old stove we bought with the house bit the dust yesterday. This sets up unimagined consequences and complications. Even the resident fix-it wizard has to acknowledge that this puppy is beyond repair. We might learn what we never quite learned during quarantine: ordering in is helpful. But now we can add eating out.
**This poem won recognition in the 2020 Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. It is included in my poetry collection The Beekeeper and other love poems. Ironically, while prizes may be insufficient, they are still delightful to get.
Great essay! I’m going to read George Will too.
I think you’ve done a good job at losing the inessential and keeping the good stuff.
Thank you for your gentle humor and priceless practicality. And that ability to write so beautifully. I am so THERE with that wonderful second poem. Thank you!
Thanks, Barbara.
At least you’re living longer than your stove — or probably more than most mechanical organisms. (If you ever have to buy a freezer, Amana did well for us for about 35 years.)
Now, how about an ode to your poor old stove.
The National Society of Newspaper Columnists, which used to have me as its president, recently gave George Will our Lifetime Achievement Award. I find his best subject baseball, especially his “Men at Work” book. But, then, maybe that’s because we’re both members of the Emil Verban Memorial Society.