Friday Philosophy: On Aging

This Spring Break has pretty much sucked.  My car bit the big one and we are donating it to get rid of it because it’s not worth putting any more money in it.  The insurance runs out this month, so it only made sense.

But getting in and out of Debbie’s Saturn and trying to drive it has done a number on my back.  There are more times than you might imagine when being tall sucks.  Over the course of a lifetime, one is asked numerous times to invoke one’s tallness to grasp something stored up high…something that should not be lifted in that body conformation.  Damage results…mostly minute.  But they accumulate over the years.

Playing sports didn’t help. I’m sure.  Back in the days before we had “sports medicine.”  Back in the days when treatment included the words, “suck it up.”

Neither did breaking my heel in basic training…and my leg in Tulsa at Christmas in 1995.  And the doctors I’ve seen don’t know why I have an unnaturally large gap in my spine.  Treatment was supposed to be to strengthen muscles that have never been strong in my existence, including some that were rearranged during my surgery.  Nor do they know why one of my hip ligaments is unnaturally short and tends to slide off where it is supposed to be.  Treatment for that is painfully trying to stretch the ligament.  I’m not fond of pain.  Sucks to be me, sometimes.

So sometimes my hips don’t feel like supporting my upper body and the best thing I can do for it is rest.  Sometimes it helps.  Being a teacher, often resting is not an option.  That causes more damage…and we have your classic Vicious Circle™.

When those hips are in that state when one is 27 days short of being 60 years old, one thinks a lot about being old…and perhaps even more about getting to that placetime.  One thinks a lot about the things one has done and the things one had the opportunities to do and chose not to pursue…and maybe spends some hours contemplating, “What if?”

Another voice is speaking, however.  It’s a voice that asks, “Where do we go from here?”

And still another wonders, “And how do we connect the events of the past with those to come in order to weave an interesting story?

Still another wants a list of what I have learned…while simultaneously knowing the list is far too long.

I know I am annoyed by people who think humans are smarter than dolphins, when the evidence shows that they can understand us, but we can’t understand them.  Similarly I’m annoyed at people who believe in English-only.

I am dismayed that people spend their lives doing jobs that they hate.

I am astonished that young people blame people my age for being so numerous…as if we had control over that.

I’m even more astonished that some young folks would think I have nothing to offer.  I’ve spent my life becoming just the kind of 60-year old person you need.  Mostly what I hear are wishes, however coated, that we die off rapidly.

Thinking about the good things one has done, one can imagine them bundled up and hanging off those hips.  Some aches and pains are well-earned.

Choices sometimes stand on the thinnest of blades.  Do I do this or do I do that?  One day you might end up in Resurrection City because…and not know exactly why until decades later.  Or outside a courthouse in Falls City, NE on a whim.  Or Changing sex in a small town because not doing so was going to be so much harder.

Or going to school for a minimal stipend because it was easier than working and something I even enjoyed…and becoming a teacher because it was the path of least resistance.

Do I belong here or do I belong there?  What should be the setting of the next chapter of this life?  I’ve not always made those choices myself.  Go with the flow.  Wherever I end up, there I am.  I’ll strive to make do, whether it be a house in the First Addition of Lake Oswego, OR…on the streets (i.e. sleeping in the parks and crashpads) of Haight-Ashbury…being sexually assaulted in Seattle’s Skid Row… in a brothel across the street from the Have-a-Tampa factory in Miami…on a beach in Puerto Vallarta…back in Haight Ashbury, in the converted store room of a seed store on the corner of Waller and Shrader, with a sign reading Alice’s Restaurant on the door…in the house of my future in-laws in Joplin, MO, and three other houses in that city…in jail in Tulsa, OK…in basic training at Ft. Lewis, WA, AIT at Ft. Gordon, GA, and permanent station at Ft. Leavenworth, KS…in a townhouse apartment in West Linn, OR…in married student housing in Eugene, OR (1 apartment, 1 house)…in the mixed-race section on Milwaukee, WI…in rather racially-divided Conway, AR (a house and then three apartments during transition)…spending all my money (and then some) trying to find employment in Seattle…and then back to Conway to live with my friend Miriam for few months until I got my own house again…and finally to this apartment in Bloomfield, NJ.

Then there were the places I stayed for less than a month.  We end up where we end up.  Everybody’s gotta be somewhere.

Every good story requires some rambling…just like ever good folk singer writes a rambling song.

As we grow older we sometimes realize that there is a direction home.  It’s deep down within.  And though the walls creak from time to time, inside here is where I have to be comfortable living, in this bio-psychological structure that is a human being…that is this human being.

And I wonder what adventures are still to be written…about how many chapters are still to come.  And I wonder if I will make the choices that result in more good stories.

We should all live our lives in the ways we would write them if we could.

Pathway Life Stories What would you tell the protagonist of your story to do if you could? Why aren’t you living your life so that those events could happen? The deeper question: Am I? –Robyn Elaine Serven –March 7, 2008