Notes On Another New Life #8
Happy birthday to me.
In a few days I’ll be 77. I don’t wish I were a different age. There’s no one gone in me to miss. The other day, I looked in the mirror and said, “What would happen if you became the opposite of what you are?” I tried it, and I could see it would take practice, but not bad for a beginner. Instead of acting out of hurt feelings to a friend, I acted the opposite way. The opposite feeling was fake. The intention to flip myself was real. Nothing about 77 means anything that predicts how stuff is going to go in a life. Nothing, I promise you.
I’m approaching 77 with the usual question: Who profits from the bloodless, socially sanctioned profile of a 77-year-old woman you see plastered on every billboard and tree?
Everyone sees an age in you, no matter the age you are, and when they look at older age, they see death. Their death, not yours.
They pin fake merit badges on you that say “wisdom, or “dignity,” or “good job on the gray hair,” as they send you to a corner on the wrong side of the velvet rope, where, it’s hoped, you’ll stop draining the world’s dwindling resources and quietly shrivel to a crisp. You’re advised to play pickle ball, avoid footstools, dote on your grandchildren, and watch movies where Judi Dench and Maggie Smith flutter warily around foreign hotels.
Me: What about eating men like air?
The world: That's not your job, any longer, dear. You've earned your rest. Anyway, at your age, eating men like air will probably give you indigestion.
Me: I ate some yesterday, and I'm fine.
The world: How can I say this to you in a way you'll hear—you’re not relevant!
I’ll soon be 77, and surprise surprise I’m happy. It’s a coincidence, not a consequence of this age. Will I be happy the day after my birthday? Probably not. Feelings don’t freeze.
By happy I mean in the fuzz ball of individual happiness that has a life of its own inside an awareness of the two Americas, on one side an army of gun-hustling, conspiracy-mongering ragists and on the other side the rest of us, who feel bad about ruining everything. In the fuzz ball of individual happiness, you watch a bee on a rose, inside an awareness the planet is an expanding, human dump site. In the fuzz ball of individual happiness, you get turned on watching a Buñuel movie while women are reminded day and night the world doesn’t give a fuck about their rights. Everything unimaginable eventually happens.
I’m happy with the love and work in my life. Also my brain chemistry is each day is exciting! I wonder what will happen next!
For 16 years, after Gardner died and before I first spotted Richard in a book-lined room in Saratoga Springs, I was walking up and down Broadway, with a dog and without a dog, looking for something. I had friends. I had this stupid relationship and that other stupid relationship that broke my heart. They all break my heart if they don’t last. Friendships that don’t last break my heart. My heart has many times been broken. So, probably, has your heart. My heart continues to be broken by this failure or that silence. When, at 60, I met Richard and felt something happening, a friend I have known since college said, “Your life is still defined by men.”
The truth is, Richard and I are a terrible fit in terms of temperament. I’m flash to anger in one second and then let’s play. He’s English and what the fuck is wrong with you for hours and sometimes days. Maybe the age we’ve arrived at keeps us together. For the first time in my life, there’s space to be terrible and space to be less terrible because I don’t want to be with anyone else and I’m not afraid of being tossed out. It’s like writing a villanelle, a poem with a pattern, instead of free verse.
Fourteen months ago, I started a Substack publication called Everything is Personal, named after the title of a book I wrote in 2020. No one in publishing knows what to call the changes in how people read and how they pay for what they read. Publishers don’t know how to make money. If I had my way, I’d like to sell you my books off a pushcart, coming to your street and calling up to your windows. I’d like to offer you, on the side, a panini I’d made that morning.
I love writing on deadline. My stack is one day on and four days off. Basically, I’m still writing for the Village Voice, about whatever comes to mind, but on the stack. I work all the time. I have always loved working all the time—after learning how to write without trying to prove something. With work as with love, I suppose, it’s a matter of freedom in the context of limits and a pattern.
While preparing this column, I looked through old notes I found in the basement. I was wondering if I’d find a snatch of text from long ago that might speak to the way I still feel now. A chunk of writing popped out, not related to the way I feel, or maybe it is. I thought it was related to the way my mind continues to work. How, as a writer, to make something out of almost nothing? A drama from tiny increments of observation, rather than by climbing Mt. Everest or maneuvering through a perfect storm. The entry is dated November 15, 1980. I was 34.
On a bus, across from me, a young girl, 16 or so, was sleeping with her head against the window and her feet stretched into the aisle. She was carefully dressed in a woolen hat, gray corduroy trousers, and brown loafers. A roach was making its way down her right leg. It moved swiftly, and although it could have shifted to the seat beside her and crawled to the window or to the floor, it chose to move along a corduroy groove. It traveled to the bottom of her trouser leg and stopped for a moment. It went to the edge of her trouser and then disappeared inside her pants.
I was horrified. I had thought of waking the girl to tell her about the roach when I first saw it but had decided not to, figuring it would move off on its own. I had also wondered how the roach came to be on her. Had it been on the bus and crawled on her while she was sleeping—because she was sleeping and still—or was it her roach, in the sense she’d carried it, unawares, onto the bus? I thought about the risks of falling asleep on a bus or maybe anywhere that wasn’t your bed. Or maybe was your bed.
The roach appeared again. I was relieved. It crawled down the girl’s sock and into her shoe. If, at that moment, she’d awakened and stood up, she would have squashed it, taking the bug unawares as it was now taking her. She continued sleeping, and the roach continued its travels. It was so close to the floor, but it stayed on her resolutely and recklessly, making a tour of her ankle and hesitating again before walking back up her leg.
Why didn’t I brush the roach from the girl without waking her? Could I have done that? I didn’t want to touch it, and so I let the scene unfold, the despicable roach, innocent of its despicable nature. The girl would never know what I had seen, and I wouldn’t know what unseen things were happening to me right then, and actually all the time, that others could see. There might have been a roach on me, even as I sat there, watching her roach, or something worse.
The roach was groping along, with no idea of its impact on others or the possible dangers to itself of its effect. This, too, I thought, was applicable to me—and maybe to many others.
That’s the end of the entry. Of course it brings to mind Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, who awakes in the famous story “Metamorphosis” to find he’s been turned into a giant roach. We feel for Gregor and understand as well why the members of his family are appalled. Right now, the anecdote brings to mind what my friend said when I met Richard—“Your life is still defined by men.” Is it? Was it? Could she see what I could not see? Do I invite people to say whatever comes into their heads?
What I do know now, at 77, is on the streets, walking, I’m a dog that doesn’t know its age. The thoughts of a dog are complex and all in the direction of I will wait for you forever because of the possibility of love. Everyone knows love is all that matters. I have always known this, and it has made no dent in how I’ve lived. The way a dog will follow a smell and say fuck you to everything else. You’ve seen it. You know what I’m talking about. It can’t help it. It doesn’t want to be helped. Like that, I’m a dog.
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Hung on to every word, this was so wonderful to read! This is the sort of writing my soul is hungry for and what we need more of.
Happiest birthday!
Wow, speechless! There is so much to read these days, so many newsletters, I could have easily missed it. A moment of grace happened, and I got to read it, and your words enveloped my heart and mind. Thank you , big thank you.