The Place of In-Between

The newly-mowed grass, three days of rain, and a robin's nest in the crook of the birch tree outside my bedroom window all signal to my senses that I've moved into the new season of spring. The semester's over, but my brain hasn't stopped rehashing course work and final grades. At night my sleep in still troubled by self-interrogation. What went well? What needs adjusting for the next time I teach?

It will take some time to realize where I am--the in-between. I don't yet feel right in my spring season. I'm nervously anticipating the coming days when my self-discipline and sloth fight it out head to head. I'm wondering which will win out in summer 2014. And I'm still not free from my tightly-committed semester, when it seemed like every minute required being in two places at once.

Meditation would help, but right now nothing could convince me to sit still, contemplate my breath, and watch my thoughts arise only to let them go. I'm in no state to do that. . .yet. Like a racer who has just passed the finish line, my adrenaline is still pumping, fooling me into believing there are more laps to run.

It's taken me years of practice to even recognize this place of in-between, let alone attempt to dwell in it with some effort towards patience. It's stressful letting go of the known only to move into not knowing how things will turn out. I want to get it over with and move on to something tangible and nameable. Something other than the uncertain, out-of-focus present before my self-directed work begins. Or doesn't--it's up to me.

I tell myself that this state of in-between, as uncomfortable as it is, is where insights arise. I know this from experience. There I am buried under the oblivion of doubt and regrets, when suddenly I see a new, clear perspective that's just right for the present moment. Maybe I even need the distraction of chaotic feeling to let the shift happen. Each time it's a revelation to me that my mind has been active behind the scene, puzzling and creating new paradigms.

Just now for a more pleasant distraction while the gears turn in the background, I'm heading out into this breezy spring morning to the farmer's market to buy red geraniums.

On Turning Sixty-Five

Maybe it was the card I got from the government that got me to start telling my age again. I had taken a five-year hiatus from blurting it out, starting when I turned sixty. Before then I'd had no trouble, even been proud to declare I was forty and fifty and fifty-five. But sixty bested me. I found myself smiling and keeping mum when the opportunity arose for me to reveal my age in any conversation.

Without forethought or intention I went into a closet, where I hid an essential part of myself. What some might call discretion--no big deal--felt to me like a lie. I was no age or any age, but I was not my actual age. I left it to others to guess, assuming (hoping) that they would guess I was younger.

I tried to rationalize that a person's age should have nothing to do with shame or pride. Shouldn't those feelings be a result of our actions? But I realized that those "shoulds" meant that my argument had a weak foundation. I needed to focus on what "is" and not what "should be." Just like any other closeted person, I felt ashamed of myself for being, well, for being myself. In this case that meant being over sixty or just plain old.

You'd think I'd have known better. After all, I understood first-hand the alternative to getting old. In a previous five-year span, I'd lived through the deaths of my husband, mother, and father.  But what had been upper-most in my mind then--that life is precious and too, too brief--got buried under the cultural stereotypes of aging.

Despite such exemplary models of aging as Susan Sarandon, who seems immune to type-casting, and Jane Fonda, who exposes her own conflicts for the edification of us all, I let myself be swayed by the voice of television. I had used tv as an escape from the loneliness of bereavement, perceiving it as "white noise." But its constant and consistent message had gotten to me. Whether as "news," drama, talk, or advertisement, it calls anyone over sixty old, elderly, a senior citizen. It sells potions and creams for fine lines and signs of aging to thirty-year-olds, played by twenty-year-old actors. (Notice it's "signs of aging." They don't use the word "wrinkles" any more. The mere mention of "aging" is enough for us to react in fear and reach for our wallets.)

I bought what it was selling and paid for it with my hard-won knowledge. But I'm reclaiming it now. However I look to others, I'm sixty-five years old. Sometimes I feel just that age, and I like it because I have glimpses into what life is about for me. Sometimes I feel much older than my years with my intimate knowledge of cancer and dementia, care taking and the deaths of those closest to me. Sometimes I feel very young with much still to learn about life's mysteries and my own path.

Whatever it was that snapped me out of my cultural enchantment (that Medicare card?), I'm glad to be awake and struggling to be authentic. I suppose that struggle is a funny thing to be happy about, but it means that I'm alive, evolving, and looking forward to the next challenge.

The Best We Could Do

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

W. H. Auden

Last week my college sponsored a Day of Remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust. It took place in the students' cafeteria, and the first part was the reading of the names of the dead. They were children mostly, no older than 17, many much younger. The participants were instructed to read the names slowly and not to worry about mispronunciations. The eastern European names with all those consonants butting up against one another tends to trip up an American tongue.

Each volunteer read from the list for fifteen minutes. I was the last to read, arriving after my morning class. The crowded cafeteria was buzzing with the students' conversations. It took me a minute to locate the speaker at the very back of the room. She was standing behind a podium with the microphone turned down low, so as not to interfere with the studying, texting, and talking of the students.

I sat down at a table besides the podium and strained to listen to her reading of the names and ages of the kids killed in the Holocaust. As I listened I watched the kids in the cafeteria. Most were utterly absorbed in their own business. It was, after all, the week after spring break and close to the end of the semester. The pressure on them was intense. They had projects to finish and finals to take. They had summer jobs to find and, for some, graduation and its afterlife loomed. Their minds were in the future, not the past.

A few students who sat near the podium looked up occasionally from their iPhones to watch the speaker for a quick moment before diving back into their personal screens. I wondered why they had chosen those seats. They may not have had a choice and had to take the only seats left in the cafeteria, the ones that the kids who got there first had avoided.

When my turn came to read, I stepped behind the podium and considered the final few pages. All of the family names began with W. There were groupings of siblings or relatives who had shared the same last name. The speaker before me had read the age of each victim as a number, and I wondered if the kids in the cafeteria understood that these were children who had been executed. I had decided that when my turn came to read, I would say ¨five years old¨ instead of just ¨five¨ or whatever the age for each child, but somehow when I spoke I didn't deviate from the previous format. I was frustrated with myself for locking into a mode that had already failed to wake up this potential audience.

Or maybe some of them were awake and thinking of other genocides that had no acknowledgement or memorial service. Other genocides. Multiple genocides. Their innocent dead. That's enough to put anyone back to sleep or make them want to escape into the tasks at hand.

I stumbled many times as I spoke the names. My speech sounded too quick and monotonous to my ear. Those names should have been sung or chanted. Or echoed. Or cried. But I did none of those things.

In years past the ceremony was held in the school auditorium. It may have been moved because of a conflicting event, but more likely the reason was low attendance or no attendance. I myself have skipped it in the past because I was too busy, too tired, or not in the mood. On this day, in fact, I felt somewhat self-congratulatory for participating. I tried to kick away that feeling to make room for something more comfortable--solemnity or sanctity--but that was too much. I had to make do with just showing up, standing, and speaking to an indifferent crowd.

On this day passive reception had to suffice for us all. I, with my contradictory thoughts and conflicting feelings. The students, with their overwhelming projects and fears for the future. All of us consciously or not, absorbed some essence of those children, aged one and four and seven--all the way to seventeen. Their names washed over us. Maybe for a brief time they connected us. It was the best we could do.