I pick up the phone to hear my sister's voice
in mid-reminiscence: "Hey, you know what I remembered
today?"
"What?"
"Remember when we used to go to pick mom
up from work, and we'd be sitting in the car waiting…and
finally she'd come out, and as she was walking towards us,
one of us would say, 'That's my mom!' And the other one would
say, 'Hey - that's my mom too!' And then we'd look at each
other and go -"
Here I pick up the thread of the storyline,
and together we utter a single, dramatic gasp, pretending
to be soap opera characters who have suddenly realized they
are long-lost sisters. "Duh duh DUH!" we cry, mimicking
soap opera "moment of truth" music, and giggle helplessly.
It was fun sharing this mini-flashback to our youth, because
in a couple of months I'll turn 44, and in January my sister
will turn 46. In other words, we're really and truly middle-aged.
For instance, the reason she called this morning was to give
me a report of my nephew's SAT scores. He'll be a high school
senior in the fall - about the age his mother and I were back
in our "Hey, that's my mom too!" days. My nephew
is marvelous, and I just about burst with pride every time
I look at him - but like most rattled oldsters who are
continually stunned by the most predictable of life's transitions,
I'm startled as well. Surely he's not that old, that tall,
driving a car, graduating from high school!
Oh, what is it about summer that makes us look
back with such aching nostalgia, to take stock of the years
passing us by, register such alarm at the 6'3" nephew,
remember silly word games we once played - sometimes still
play - with a sibling? In the past few days, the sun has turned
fierce after weeks of "June gloom," San Diego's
characteristic, pre-summer cloudiness. Now, when I leave my
office in the afternoon, an ice cream truck is parked in front
of the playground across the street. The vendor starts up
his engine, the cheesy music begins to play, and I'm immediately
seven years old. It's all I can do to keep from chasing after
him for a sidewalk sundae. These are sweet memories; why
does it make me a little sad to remember them?
If the beginning of winter is the time of determination,
of buying new calendars and drafting bold resolutions for
a year of success and prosperity, then the summer solstice
marks the year's reevaluation point. Even if we've been
underachievers in the first half of the year, there may still
be time to reach our goals. But we can't speed our way through
this transition. Just as the sun at the summer solstice appears
to stand still in its movement across the horizon, then turn
around and move the other way, that is our job at midyear:
to stand still for a moment, look around, and take stock of
where we are. It's usually too late in the year to start
from scratch in an entirely new direction and hope to achieve
anything by year's end. But if we take the time to look back
over our shoulders and reevaluate our progress, we can then
slowly revisit our goals over the next six months, reviewing
our plans and filling in the missing gaps.
Midlife, I'm finding, serves a similar purpose.
Here I am at the summer solstice of my life, standing still
and looking back at where I started out. It's not too
late to do great things with my life, but certain options
are forever closed to me. It's definitely too late for me
to be a child prodigy or an Olympic athlete, for instance,
and probably too late to be a tenured professor or to bear
children.
But is it too late to do whatever it was I wanted
to do with my life, back when I was a kid? And what was that,
exactly? I was always burning to do something, but not always
the same thing. I loved to read, and sing, and write,
and play alone. I dreamed of being famous, but never of being
rich. I dreamed of being married, but never of having children.
I wanted to travel the world, I think, but I was afraid of
it too.
I'm fortunate that my dreams and passions were
built to a fairly small scale. I'm not famous, but then, I
lost interest in that dream long ago. Everything else worked
out pretty much the way I'd hoped. I'm pretty happy with my
life choices. But you get to the middle part of your life,
and as you begin looking back over it all you begin to
want to jettison parts of your past, as if to make your
life more fuel-efficient so that it will carry you farther.
You look for new places and situations that you can step into
without all that excess cargo of stuff and failed dreams
and loss and sad relationships.
Case in point: We've lived in our house for
nearly eight years now. It's the longest I've lived in any
house since 1971, when we left the Indiana farmhouse that
my grandfather built. And the truth is, while I love our house,
I'm tired of its problems. Some days I would happily move
to a new house and take on even worse problems than the ones
our house possesses, simply because they would be new
problems. It's my version of a mid-life crisis, I think;
I'm completely satisfied with my spouse and don't need a fancy
car, but I can and do crave a different house, a whole new
Cancerian shell for incubating the person I'll be in the next
half of my life.
But inertia is a powerful force. So instead,
I rented a small office not far from my home, a tiny, womblike
space no larger than 100 square feet, in a building that's
part of an old church. I relished having a new space dedicated
to my writing, one I didn't have to share with a guest bed
or cats or boxes of old bank statements. In feathering my
new nest, I didn't have to take into consideration the colors
in adjoining rooms, or ancestral portraits, or pieces of furniture
that would be expensive to replace. I could do exactly
what I wanted with it; nothing from my past needed to be incorporated
into my little garret. It was delicious.
What I ended up with is a room unlike any I've
ever had, or would ever be likely to have, in my home - the
colors are pale and cool, the furnishings sparse. No internet
connection, no email; there is nothing to do there but write.
Some days I spend as much as an hour just sitting there by
the window, enjoying the quiet, letting the breeze blow the
sheer, white curtains against my arm, daydreaming. I can imagine
that I'm someone else, rewrite my history, and take a sort
of intermission from my life.
Gradually, though, a few rogue possessions from
my "real" life - a book here, a CD there - have
migrated to my new nest. More and more, my mind picks at the
flaws in the room, my paint job, my choice of wall hangings,
as my fingers might nervously pick at a loose string on a
sweater. It's easier to write there, but my ideas aren't necessarily
any better. In short, nothing's changed but my location.
We are what we are, it seems. Even those of
us who make big, seemingly permanent changes in midlife, such
as leaving marriages or careers, eventually seem to find our
way back to the same old patterns we established in the first
part of life. How many divorcées have you seen whose
second marriages became, in a very short time, a carbon copy
of their first? Or restless career changers who find their
new profession presents the same political and personality
problems of their former one? Or for that matter, sisters
who grow older but still giggle together in their same old
secret language?
No, we don't change, not usually, not much.
Like crabs skittering down the beach under a pale summer moon,
we move in erratic ways, not along linear paths, zigging and
zagging, revisiting old missteps. In nostalgia, we long to
reclaim and embrace our abandoned childhood shells.Maybe,
we think, that's when we had it exactly right about who we
were and what we wanted. Maybe, maybe not. What we can
reclaim, at midyear or midlife, is the excitement and promise
we felt in the beginning - not yet lost to us, but only
waiting for us to slow down, and turn around, and let it catch
up.
