The Clock is Ticking

I'm taking a deep breath as the last hours, last minutes of my fifties slip away. For some reason, it feels both melancholy and surprisingly hopeful -- an occasion worth observing.

Our lovemaking last night was something special -- the connection between two old dogs -- I'd like to say, two sweet old dogs, who know each other very well and have been through some rough times and come through a little bit scarred, but with our gratitude and humor sharp in equal measures. We took a shower together, gently soaping each other up, well aware of our flaws and the niches, aches, wrinkles, bumps and lumps of the bodies we still manage to love. Because these are the bodies we have. And they still ache with surprising desire -- earthy and persistent -- more than you'd think, really, for a couple of old dogs.

I'm now the oldest woman my husband has ever made love to -- by many years, actually -- and he claims that he's looking forward to a continued erotic life with a woman in her sixties. With THIS woman in her sixties. This is, to be sure, uncharted territory for us both.

And today, a long walk through the neighborhood, and I found myself saying, "this is the last walk I'll take in my fifties" and now it's getting ridiculous -- this is the last blog I'll write in my fifties, this is the last cup of herb tea I'll drink in my fifties, this is the last time I'll pee in my fifties, this is the last time....okay, I'll stop now.

Curled in spoons after lovemaking last night, we talked into the almost dark, golden light of two vanilla candles, about how getting old requires finesse. The fear always lurks, a sharp-horned little gremlin -- the inevitable end ahead and god knows what will come between now and then. So we pledged to be happy, to choose to be happy. To not die until we die.

So, here in the last 170 minutes of my fifties, I say, "I'm happy." I am happier tonight by far than when I turned 30, and 40, and 50. I'm proud of that. And relieved -- that my life has taken me to this happier place. Tomorrow, when I'm 60, I'll get up with my husband and pet my cats and go to breakfast at my favorite spot and wander around at the Farmers Market and get together with our friend Teddy and hang out and gossip and dish about UM politics and the sorry state of the world, and tomorrow night Ted and I will go out to dinner together and then to "Hair," a frivolous little trip into nostalgia and we'll come home and find our way back into our happy bed and life will go on, as joyfully and for as long as Fate permits. And so tonight I breathe deeply, from the diaphragm, composing myself, and tuck away, at least for now,l the fear.

Sunday sunset in Flint

What is it that makes autumn leaves smell so tangy? Somebody knows the answer, but I'd never asked myself that before. Tonight, walking back from EVM's offices in the light of a beautiful sunset, I took advantage of my recent breathing improvements -- yes, I really DO have a diaphragm and have been relearning how to use it -- to savor the season's spicy fragrance. Ahhh...this has been a lovely weekend.

Walking into the Fire

Gary tells me I need to get back to blogging more. I always do what Gary says. So here's the start of my new East Village Magazine column. To see the rest, pick up hard copies around Flint starting Friday.

This month I’m starting my seventh decade. If the Biblically-allotted three-score and ten bears out, I’m down to the ten. It’s a bit shocking.
I’ve been experimenting with calling myself “60” for several months, but it still feels as if that ancient person with my name is somebody else.
Nonetheless, my left brain and the calendar tell the truth: I really was born in 1949.
According to family tradition (most of the principals are dead now, freeing me to embellish as needed), my mother went into labor after hitting a high note at choir practice at a little church in Ohio where my father was pastor.
Her labor, her third, was quick and easy and I was lifted out into the world by Dr. Homer Keck, a beloved neighbor and friend, before midnight. I’d like to think the rest of the choir – not exactly a band of angels, but a motley well-meaning bunch, were still singing. They were supposedly delighted by the fact of the preacher’s new baby, and I was born into an atmosphere of hope and joy.
There’s no way to know if any of this is true, but I’m grateful music – enthusiastic and a little off-key – was part of the hours just before my birth. I was born into music and art – albeit their religious branch -- and I have needed them later, when hope and joy, inevitably complicated by other realities, faltered and got harder to claim.
It’s art and music to which I increasingly find myself returning as I get old. I’ve recently rediscovered Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, for example, and I’ve been avidly absorbed by the spiraling, gorgeously complex movements loaded on my iPod as I walk the neighborhood. It reassures me: humans are capable of creating order and transcending evil.
And on a recent Friday afternoon, I had a chance to meander once again through the galleries of the Flint Institute of Arts. I cherished the pleasure of doing so with Kathryn Sharbaugh, the FIA’s assistant director of development and a fine teacher and ceramicist. As she told stories about the collection, I was touched anew by the power of two particular pieces.
First is a mask in the African art gallery. It’s from the Guro tribe of the Ivory Coast, and was a gift to the FIA from Justice G. Mennen (“Soapy”) Williams. It’s roughly a water buffalo, a feral, dog-like head with horns, jagged teeth and protruding, primal eyes. Sharbaugh said it was worn for ceremonial occasions – often to dance for rain.
What captivates me is the creature’s snout. Three or four inches up, it’s roughly coated with black ash. Here’s why: Sharbaugh said to get the gods’ attention, the dancer would sometimes walk right into the fire, dipping the mask into the flames.
That smoky snout stuck with me. At first the gesture of dancing into the fire seems reckless, even ignorant.
But who among us hasn’t had our trial by fire? And who among us, for that matter, hasn’t sometimes chosen to walk right into the heat of desperate action because there is no other way?

Harmony with the Body at Last

What I like about Tai Chi and yoga are that they're so not-Protestant. When I grew up there was talk of the body, but it was all suspicious and guarded -- the body was a foe, a problem. Rhetoric repeated endlessly that our bodies were the Temple of God but I always felt as if that meant I had to watch myself...the body certainly wasn't mine.

It has taken me my whole life to begin to experience some harmony with my body. I'm very grateful for the lessons of this last year -- for the wonderful tai chi classes this summer under the giant fig tree in LA, and now the Monday and Wednesday night yoga classes at UM - Flint with Rachelle.

Three hundred on Sunday: Bees to Bathrobes

This is my 300th blog entry on Night Blind: Rough Drafts from a Writer's Life.

Since I started the blog in 2005, my most garrulous year was last year, when I posted here 134 times, or every 2.7 days. My second most chatty year was 2007, when I posted 105 times. This year I've been a veritable blogging hermit, posting only 53 times so far -- last winter, as most of you know, included a few months of hell in my life from which I have gratefully scrambled back.

I often forgot to attach labels to the posts, but from the ones I did,the thing I wrote about most, at 72 posts, was Flint, my home for the past 28 years -- this notorious, often infuriating place that prompts so much obsessive reflection and fulminating in my mind and heart. This is where most of my major dramas as a grownup have occurred, so it figures. It is my home; I'm interested in it and always thinking about my life here. The rest of the top ten topics, in addition to Flint, have been writing, memoir, poetry, nature, politics, LA, San Pedro, the body, and tied for 10th place, music and walking. Along the way I've also written about marriage, aging, death, food, insomnia, gratitude, health and hope. Also teaching, of course, and Tonga, the country of some of my early young adventures. And also misanthropy and what I tabbed "cranky standards." I've written about bees and bathrobes and the beer summit, and mentioned numerous people from novelist Charles Baxter to Hizzoner Dayne Walling to my friend and artist Patsy Warner. My former husband Danny has appeared on these screens, along with Jack Driscoll, Barry Lopez, Linda Gregerson, Greg Rappleye and many others. All this is a pretty accurate reflection of the things in my life that matter, that interest me, that worry me, that I love.

The post that seems to have gotten read most often, probably because of Google and which shows up under Google searches, was a piece I wrote last January about artist Jim Dine and his bathrobes. Another one that emerges often on Google is an account I offered about the appearance of Linda Gregerson at UM - Flint -- also one of my own favorites.

Obviously I haven't been as interested in this blog since I got on Facebook, where posting is easy and quick and, I'm ashamed to admit, I like that I get immediate readers, many of whom regularly say something back. As a social networking site, it feels, well, sociable. It usually cheers me up. It hasn't been unusual there for me to get four or five comments on a morning post, but here it's been rare to get even one. So, is it all about readers? When I first started this blog I did it under a pseudonym because I just wanted to write, ship it out to the blogosphere and see what happened. I was feeling reclusive and somewhat darker in my internal life than I am now; my blog entries -- or at least the way I felt when I wrote them -- tended toward the depressive, wrestling with my sadness and regrets. At least that's how I remember it. Things have changed somewhat. I'm less interested in writing about the things that make me sad or unhappy with myself. I'm attempting to savor the present, appreciate the good things in my life, and look forward.

If you've happened into this blog over the past five years, thank you for peeking in. It's been an enjoyable spot for playing out the concerns and curiosities of my life. I hope to return to it, in an attitude of leisurely rumination, a place to keep my writing chops in line when I want to develop my thoughts beyond Facebook's little popcorns.

Boston Herald: Bodacious Breakfast Bites

The only paper at the breakfast table in our hotel this morning was a stack of the tabloid Boston Herald. Its raucous alliteration soon got us guffawing over our scrambled eggs:

Headline: " Banned Nantucket dog's bite worse than its bark."
"Toney Nantucket has long frowned on rowdy rabblerousers running amok on their privileged sanctuary -- but now one four-legged party animal has found himself banned from the swanky isle...Lester, an 8-year-old Bluetick Coonhound who had summered on Nantucket for six years, was unanimously voted off the island at a Board of selectman hearing Wednesday after several neighbors complained the pooch had bitten four people."

Here's one about a 19-pound baby born to a diabetic mom:
Headline: Great Big Baby's Living Large"
"Kisaran, Indonesia-- He's a great big baby, and he just won't stop eating! ...Everyone wants a look at Akbar -- "great" in
Arabic -- who weighed in at a whopping 19.2 pounds Monday and is now drawing crowds. 'I'm very happy that my baby and his mother are in good health,' proud papa Muhammad Hasanudin said. 'I hope I can afford to feed the baby enough, because he needs more milk than other babies.' Crowds pushed to get a peek at the bouncy butterball at the hospital in Kisaran, Sumatra."

Ahh...THIS is journalism.

Rotten Apples

I'm in Boston at the moment, but in my mind I'm thinking about the rotten apples on the steps going down into Burroughs Park in Flint. I've been walking up and down those steps for more than 20 years, and this time of year, an apple tree on the north side of the steps drops its apples and nobody ever does anything about it. So they drop and get in your way when they're still hard, and then they soften and turn brown and send up the most remarkable, tangy scent.

At first it's spicy and the nose dilates like my cat's noses in the morning when they first come up from the basement and sit in the kitchen window sniffing out little birds and squirrel pheromones. Our noses are designed to dredge in information -- is this good to eat? What does this signify? I like how my nose reacts to rotten apples. I don't want to eat them, but it seems to signify rich dynamic nature and the turning of the season.

And my father. I remember my father when I smell rotten apples. In our one acre in McDonaldsville in Jackson Township in Ohio in the early 50s, he planted a miniature orchard of pear trees and a variety of apples -- I noted some of the varieties he loved in my oldy poem "World Travelers." He loved those apple trees. He thought one should not interfere with the apple drops -- he thought that was part of the plan for the other critters -- rabbits and birds, I guess. And he thought rotten apples did as they were meant to, sinking fragrantly back into the soil (humus, he proudly called it, a product of human planning he always believed in and cultivated -- he thought it was his responsibility to add to the humus layer). So those brown rotting apples were part of my father's world view, and also of my childhood, when I'd walk back there and be a little intimidated by their flagrant and fragrant journey back into the earth.

It's So Quiet

After the hustle bustle of LA/San Pedro, the peacefulness of our Flint street is almost distracting. It's lovely. Already feels like autumn -- the angle of the sun changing, the trees thinking about molting, I can tell -- there's that satiation in the air, a little weariness with all the rampant green growth. At night, cicadas thinning out; a train in the distance. After a few bumpy days of getting re-oriented, I'm reconciled and back to savoring the pleasures. A few more cherished days before the Great Again.