“Another Birthday”

We were talking yesterday, my cancer buddies (who are also writing buddies) and I, about the way most people seem to fear or even hate old age, and how some, who are fighting to make another birthday, see every extra year as a tremendous gift.

I'm somewhere in the middle. I am grateful I am still alive, but I do fear the lack of independence that many of us, especially those with no money, face as age or infirmities increase. I think that, even more, I fear dying before I have managed to polish off my roughest edges and be the kind of person I know myself to be underneath the crust. Someone who can really embrace life.

So this is what I wrote.

Another Birthday

I don’t want one more birthday

I want a thousand

ten thousand

I want to live so long and so well

that all my fears die of old age

and I wait my stiffness out

outlast all infirmity

lose interest in whether I’m

remembering right or not

tire my fatigue

bore my hesitation

give flight to every

impulse toward life I ever have

and spend my days protecting insects

nurturing plants

feeding   giving water

giving shelter and a sense that is

the absence of all panic

to birds   and rats   and dogs

I want to live so long my crusts

crack and split and fall away

till I respond with tenderness to those

as brittle as that near-forgotten me

Image: "A woman's 78th birthday on 4th December 2005. Ardencraig Care Home (Glasgow)" by I Craig from Glasgow, Scotland.   Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

Antidote

Leanne Mya's Audition, BGT, May 2019

I belong to a group that meets to write together on very personal themes. We read a few short pieces--poems or snippets of essays, we let everyone know how we are doing, and then we write on our theme for half an hour or so. It is meant to be heartfelt and honest, not polished and literary. Afterward there is time to read aloud what we have written, if we want to. The option is always there to not read so that we will write what we most need to say, not edit it for public consumption.

Toward the end of March we took the theme "disappointment." This is what I wrote.

Disappointment

My first thought was, “What is ‘appointment’?” How can I think I understand disappointment when I don’t know its root word?[1]

I don’t go in for disappointment as much as I used to, though it still runs through the seams of life. Every time I listen to the news or go on Twitter I’m confronted by disappointing things. How can we make such bad choices for ourselves and our world, over and over, repeatedly? Why is so little of the news we see extraordinarily good? How could Robert Müller hand over the results of his two year investigation to a Trump appointee who of course would bury them? So very disappointing.

Perhaps that’s why I feed the birds, and make space for spiders and insects in my home. Why I like to watch joyous auditions on Ireland’s or Britain’s Got Talent: as a partial antidote to that onslaught of disappointment, heartbreak, and yes, fear. To see someone throw heart and soul into a song or dance, then burst into tears when the audience and judges praise them; to watch a Russian crow roll down a snowy windshield for sport, a longhorn bull play with a giant inflated ball, a long-tailed tit try leaving the nest for the first time—and change her mind. These tiny singularities are poised against a supermassive black hole of sorrowful news. Tiny but powerful. They blow air back into my lungs and life into my soul.

(Click on these photos to see the videos.)

Russian Crows

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[1] For the curious: The Online Etymology Dictionary tells me this: disappoint (v.): mid-15c., disappointen, "dispossess of appointed office," from dis- "reverse, opposite of" + appoint, or else from Old French desapointer "undo the appointment, remove from office" (14c., Modern French from désappointer). Whereas: disappointment (n.): 1610s, "defeat or failure of hope or expectation," from French désappointement or else a native formation from disappoint + -ment.