Last winter, I wrote about our epic search for cannoli to serve on Christmas Eve. We eventually found them at Rebecca’s, a cafe run by Ethiopians who grew up in a traditional culture layered with the Italian flavors of the colonial power. I am always elated when I stand at a culinary intersection and the African pastry chefs, these masters of sweetened ricotta, did not disappoint. Last weekend, we found ourselves on east Franklin Avenue again so we slipped back into Rebecca’s to indulge ourselves.

It was then that I experienced a great wave of sadness that seemed to crash down on all of the tragedy of colonial history and its aftermath, the populations of previously subject peoples scattered in pockets of color and sound throughout the white world. It came up on me unexpectedly and passed, a flurry of yearning for an imagined paradise where distinctions of color, language, class, gender…..all of it….were suspended and Life itself was free to learn and flourish and exchange recipes. I saw that in the end the Africans didn’t know me or feel at ease with me and I didn’t have the comfort level with them that I wanted. Everyone was polite but the sense of foreignness remained. It was the first time I can recall feeling not merely the injustice of what had happened across the global south, what continues to happen, but the grief of it, the personal loss. I felt the depth of the chasm between me and the rest of the world and it took my breath away. Why is it always like that?

American exceptionalism draws a very small circle around Life. Not much fits comfortably in that circle, the size of a Coke bottle cap. This worldview asserts the unlikely thesis that whatever beliefs are held, whatever behaviors practiced by the descendants of white Europeans on this continent are by definition the very best beliefs and behaviors humankind has come up with. This idea is not only unreliable and responsible for great harm to other peoples, it results in the impoverishment of the feeling life and the imagination of all Americans. The loss is incalculable. But I wondered… is it possible that the sense of loss, the sadness I experienced in the cafe - just might be the riverbed, the hidden source of a greater vision of how we can embrace each other, what we can learn from each other going forward? You can’t learn anything if you don’t know what you don’t know, if you don’t allow yourself to feel what’s missing. Far down under all the particular injustices there remains this inchoate sense of yearning for connection. I am certain that I am not alone in this yearning.

So in keeping with this inquiry, we went to a concert that was a collaboration of four people singing Yiddish music from the last century and four people playing Somali qaraami, an updated traditional form that features an oud and spectacular drumming. Quaraami speaks to the themes of love, longing, and social upheaval. The Yiddish songs, a few with accordion accompaniment but mostly a cappella, came out of the sweatshops, the tenements, the union halls. They are part of the revival of interest in the culture of the Jewish left that seems to be emanating from red diaper great-grandbabies. It is no surprise that these songs also deal with love, longing and social issues. No one in Red Thread, the Yiddish group, could understand Somali, and no one in Ardaa, the Somali group, could understand Yiddish. But you could feel the rapture in their singing and sense the shadowy beginnings of an answer in there somewhere.

People are people and we don’t want to be imprisoned in the isolation that has been imposed on us. We don’t want to be cut off from the taste of each other’s food and the sound of each other’s music. We want to be in an ardaa, a community gathering place, and we long to hear each other’s stories. We want to breathe with our brethren.

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In truth, I had been feeling on the cusp of “done” for weeks. A rodent with beady eyes, sharp teeth and long claws had moved into my belly and was methodically tearing up my insides. I don’t mean that literally. I mean that I felt that I was under siege from grouchiness, dissatisfaction, despite summer, despite love abounding. Everything upset me, especially other people. It was like trying to sleep on a plane. I couldn’t get comfortable. Coincidentally (or not) I was trying to get a handle on my food intake and had become preoccupied with what and how much I was eating. It was as if I were sacrificing my openheartedness on the altar of mindful diet. I was greedy for goodness of body and mind as if it were a bigger TV. It was not a good trade-off. There is a mysterious mathematics, a secret calculus of interbeing, that supports and maintains the delicate balance between me and other people around me. Sometimes it’s like a recipe gone bad. Too much salt and the entire ratatouille becomes invalid.

On Saturday, after throwing in the towel and eating two pieces of sourdough bread with goat cheese, Frank and I drove to our favorite spot at the Monument on the St. Paul side and made our way down the steep hill to the ledge overlooking the Mississippi. From there we could see the bridge we had just crossed from Minneapolis, like looking back at the past. There was a beer-heavy party boat inching its way north. The leaves of an occasional early onset yellowing tree fluttered in the breeze of the waning summer. The approach to the ledge declines sharply and there’s nothing to hold onto. Frank walked down cautiously, one 83 year-old foot placed carefully in front of the other. I arrived at the ledge on my ass, dirty and proud. I don’t get dirty nearly often enough, living as I am in the shadow of a Manhattan girlhood, as far from the wild as a person can get. Down where the ledge juts out over the River, the usual group of unsupervised kids ran back and forth all the way to the edge squealing with delight.

We waited for them to disperse before attempting the climb back up. Then we made our triumphant ascent, partly standing and partly on all fours, marveling, as always, at how much easier it is to come back up than it is to go down. Going down, almost as far down as you can go, is a strenuous spiritual exercise and tough on the knees. It’s hard, gritty and reliably frightening. Giving up dessert ain’t nothing in comparison. Going down a steep hillside on your ass is a much more efficient way of letting go, of disabusing yourself of the flawed notion that holding on to getting what you want will bring you what you’re looking for. It will not.

It will not get you youth, or long, silky hair. It will not get you the ability to sing again the way you did when a surprisingly big sound came out of your small-girl voice box and you could remember all the words and create intricate harmonies with other singer friends. It will not scrub your heart of pettiness and jealousies and turn you into a standing exemplar of compassion and generosity. You will always shuffle back and forth from one foot to the other, one step forward, two steps back, the bridge from the past in the near distance, the bridge to the future not yet discernible.

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In the course of this emanation, some things vanish or appear to vanish. Books, privacy, lettuce, nuns, people who work in Mexican restaurants. In ten years there will be no nuns. The convents are closing and the elderly women are dying out like the last Shakers. I remember them in black habits and wimples leading groups of pale, freckled children out of Holy Trinity school on 83rd street where I lived into my twenties. I had no idea where their church was or what they were up to and they frightened me to the point of nightmare. Now I’m curious about them and I find myself experiencing a strange loss even though nuns are not part of my religious culture. When I google Holy Trinity on the Upper West Side, I find that while the school closed in 1980, the church itself with its entrance on 82nd, seats 850 people in its vast Byzantine Revival sanctuary and is still very much in business. I learn that I grew up with my back to a large crowd of neighbors, receiving communion, saying their devotions. I had no idea. They vanished for me while they were still there but now I stand in the afterglow of their radiance.

My life, as Thich Nhat Hahn says, is just Life, no more no less and Life unfolds in light and shadow. In the past week, I have been a seagull soaring high over the Atlantic, screeching at my sister birds about fish and wind and tides. I have been a mole burrowed deep into the silence of the dark earth trying to escape the punishing heat of the burning planet. I have been a camel, a beast of burden, carrying the weight of the world across its most ancient terrain under the buzz of drones. There are days when I feel tearful all the time and other days when gratitude and joy radiate into every pulse of my awareness bearing cucumbers and tomatoes from other people’s gardens. The tearfulness is embedded in the joy and vice versa. A friend tells me she worries about a grandson and his wife planning on children, things being what they are. Will there be cucumbers and tomatoes for those children?

I don’t know the answer to that question. What I do know is that being stuck in a linear grip is bad for my health. When I wake up in the morning and consider my place in line on the cosmic calendar, I can choose to see that there are twenty-four fewer hours for me than there were the day before. I can feel a train entering a narrow tunnel. Less fresh air, less loving, less amazement. But if my eyes can see that the universe is expanding, then the road ahead reaches out in all directions and the conventions of time and space become mutable. They have less of a stranglehold on me. My connection to Life, both in this moment and out of the past where I came from, become richer, more layered. I can see the hidden parishioners at Holy Trinity and I can see my grandfather, gone for more than a hundred years, davvening in the shul on the Lower East Side and before that in Iasi in Romania. Their radiance illuminates my days.

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It would be salutary for me to think more deeply about what I consume, both what I eat and what I absorb into consciousness. My body and my mind walk hand in hand down the street as if they have always known one another, as if they have one another’s best interests at heart. In reality, they are, at this late date, just getting acquainted. I like to imagine them waking up one morning together free of mental and digestive bloat, the weight of anxiety no longer parked on the heart and cluttering the mind. If you’ve had days like that, moments like that, you know it’s a party with altogether different music. You may not have a name for it, but you know it when you hear its harmonies. It’s a clean, safe, quiet place. You can rest in this place.

I once confessed to a friend that I had been bad-mouthing someone in my mind while praying on Yom Kippur. He said, “that’s nothing. I was eating a ham sandwich.” All of this is a strategy for avoiding the essential emptiness inside, the vast unknowing. We’d rather have all our teeth pulled than feel that emptiness, that impermanence. The deep reality is that we are all only passing through. Like the breath in my lungs, the peaches in my stomach, the irritability that arises when I have to make adjustments of any kind, everything is on the move. It all goes by in the blink of an eye. My life, my experience is so impermanent, so much of the essence of a soap bubble that, hard as I try, I can’t possibly hold on to it. It’s the futile attempt to hold on that brings on the anguish, the distraction, the indigestion. Pete Seeger, a great Buddhist, had it right when he sang “Passing through, passing through/Sometimes happy, sometimes blue/Glad that I ran into you/Tell the people that you saw me passing through.”

Another beloved, Reb Zalman, the Jewish Renewal rabbi who died in 2014, used to say “Make your life a good trip for God.” It may well have been a psychedelic reference, Zalman was known to partake, but I always thought he was suggesting that each of us is like a freighter carrying a divine cargo during the course of our sojourn here. So holiness, however you envision that energy, is transported by us in the course of the everyday. At the dentist, in the cereal aisle. The more empty I am, the more holy energy I can carry. When I’m crammed full of fear, self-recrimination and junk food, I have no room for the precious cargo. There’s no room at the inn.

I’m fortunate now that I have no basement and no attic. I can meet the metaphor head-on and take a long, loving look at what I can do without to unburden myself. I can imagine sorting through my accumulated self-definitions. My vanity. My impatience. My mean girl. Lifting each one to the light, I turn it over to look carefully at its underside. Where did I get this? How long has it been sitting in the back of this drawer? Do I need it anymore? Emptying out is an arduous process. I don’t know how long it will take but, I think I may have time. There will not, in any case, be a giant garage sale like the day we donated all the mattresses and box springs from our bed and breakfast to a local Catholic church. There will be rather a slow letting go, more like a lazy snake shedding its skin bit by bit.

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Mostly, I write. Writing has been a crucial companion as I navigate aging. When I sit at the screen to write these seventysomething essays (perhaps an asterisk now that I’m 81), my thoughts arrive like party guests and remind me of who I am, who I’ve been. They re-animate my lifelong love affair with language. Words greet me with affection. We are old friends with a long history. Each one carries a steamer trunk of associations to other words, pieces I’ve written, books I’ve read. Each has a scent, a melody, a backstory. Everything that I’m apt to forget in the ordinary course of engaging in a conversation, going to the store, trudging through the world outside my own limited experience, comes flooding back when I sit down to write. My passion for language has not abandoned me, baruch-ha-Shem. Still, I sometimes get a little tongue-tied when the doctor asks me “what I do for fun.” I recognize this as a deep inquiry dressed up as a survey question. But I do not play golf or mah jong and sometimes draw a blank when required to explain what I do all day long. I’m tempted to say I like to sit around planning the perfect crime, the Secret Service notwithstanding, but I don’t want to generate a psych referral or any law enforcement follow-up. So I give it a moment’s thought and respond by saying I read and write and engage with my tribe, people who have not given up on their own personal relationship with language even in the face of AI. It’s a combination spiritual practice and act of resistance, better yet defiance, against the world as it is. Laughter is lovely, but meaning is the best medicine.

Images arise in my mind that seem to be family members just returned from an extended vacation. For no particular reason, I remember my father’s intimate relationship with pencils. Suddenly, my awareness is filled with the word pencils and the memory of biting down on them, leaving teeth marks. What they tasted like. All writing in our household was done in graphite on legal pads. The constant requirement for pencils generated the need for a pencil sharpener which was affixed to a red wooden kitchen cabinet and operated by hand. Recalling the act of sharpening brings back the satisfying sensation of rotating the handle and feeling the pencil point turning in the gears, releasing an aroma of wood shavings. Then the word shavings brings back the brush that my father used to create the airy white lather like whipped cream that he applied to his face in front of the bathroom mirror each morning. I have traveled in my mind back to 1953 on the wings of pencils, shavings and lather and for a moment, I am not yet an old lady. I am a child again.

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Over the last week, the trashiness was particularly oppressive as it was hard to get out of the house. Peaking at 98 in Minneapolis on Monday, the heat was entrapping. I depended on the air conditioning just to keep from going off the deep end altogether and I’m very aware that this was not a freak occurrence. At my age, I do not see blue skies in my future. I see more heat, more particulates in the air, more lying and stealing on the part of the politicians who are supposed to facilitate solutions to these problems. No wonder people aren’t making love and planning families. The atmosphere, both physical and socio-political, is toxic and frankly a huge turn-off. We thought it would be diverting to get out and make a field trip to the funeral parlor to take our minds off our troubles.

I was taken with how much it felt like an initial sit-down with a real estate agent. The fortyish blond who talked with us was gregarious and upbeat. You can’t sell a house or a casket looking like Morticia Addams. Frank asked her how much it generally costs to die these days. “About fifteen grand,” she said deadpan, as it were, and we all nodded appreciatively. Some people just can’t afford it. We explained that we were an interfaith couple although we aren’t entirely sure what we mean by that since Frank is not a Catholic believer. We told her we had some interest in a natural burial although we didn’t really quite know what that was. We learned that we would need quite a few certified documents to distribute to banks, insurance companies and so on to prove that somebody had passed away because you’re in legal limbo until you have a doctor’s signature. No one will believe you’re dead. She showed us pictures of caskets. What can I tell you? It was bizarre and we still need to have a meet-up with the guy from the cemetery to look at a double plot to buy and leave empty for the time being, God willing, while the world continues to poison itself and implode all around us.

Up to this point, I have been beyond lucky. I’ve never even broken a bone. It’s as if I were always operating under the radar so the forces of disarray didn’t know where to find me. Now I feel them closing in on me. When I came along in 1945 more than a decade after my sister, my parents seemed to be stunned more than anything else. There was never any mention of previous failed attempts to have a second child. That left two remaining possibilities. Either they were waiting until after the Depression and the War the way young couples now are perhaps waiting for whatever is coming to be over. Or they were taken by surprise as if a stray kitten had arrived at the backdoor. This mystery contributed to my sense of good fortune. I could have remained a statistical probability, but instead life was given to me. Perhaps I’m not just lucky. Perhaps I’m blessed. I’ve gotten this far, eighty-one on Sunday. All I have to do when the time comes is find my way to 59th and Lyndale where Frank and I will lie in perpetuity, life in some form going on above us.

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Sometimes I feel like a member of the nativist Know Nothing party that popped up in the 1850s. Not because I hold anti-immigrant or anti-Catholic biases as they did, but because I’m aware that I literally Know Nothing. This sense of wandering in a cloud ranges from speculation regarding the meaning of life, to making friends with my devices and through who will win the midterms all the way down to where did I leave my phone. I think I remember putting it on the kitchen table, but it’s not there. Where did it go? I don’t know. This can make an otherwise sane person unravel. “I don’t know” becomes the go-to answer to almost all questions, the most accurate and most honest response, but it’s hard to admit to it over and over again. It is hard to live every day with such far-reaching uncertainty. Relief comes in the form of political, scientific, creative and spiritual systems that exist to ameliorate the anxiety of Unknowing.

The antidote to this anxiety is storytelling. If you don’t know the answer, you make one up. If you can’t find your phone, you try to reconstruct where you were when you last saw it. You tell yourself a story. If someone is inexplicably on your case, you tell yourself a different story about their personal circumstances, what might cause them to behave in such a viperish way. And crucially, if the source of life doesn’t reveal itself to you or provide a map of the path you might consider to airlift you out of the jungle of despondency and turmoil you find yourself stuck in, you develop a story that becomes scripture. Scripture gives shape to our murky origins. It gives us a place to hang our hat. Story in itself is neutral. Some stories elevate our experience and some diminish and crush it. But they are all foundational to what it is to be human because they speak to the universal need to explain why things are the way they are, the need to manage the Unknowing.

I began to question all the narratives vying for my attention twenty some odd years ago when I first heard people talking about The New Story. People who were stepping away from traditional religion with its rules and hierarchies began to formulate an alternative plot line. Instead of being about separation, struggle, and scarcity, the background radiation of capitalism and western religion, The New Story was about interbeing, cooperation and plenitude. There was a great flood of copy that denied the continued viability of the Old Story and promoted the notion that life on the planet would not survive unless the New Story effectively became scripture.

I began to wonder if all these narratives arose to palliate the pain of Unknowing and if the great work now isn’t really the work of developing the capacity to live in the world without explanation, to simply Be.

Living in the existential condition of emptiness, like a complete unknown, is a new continent for me. It’s such a foreign language, or perhaps no language at all, that it’s sometimes difficult to communicate. How do you explain that you no longer feel inclined to explain? I recognize this moment from previous periods of spiritual discovery. There’s always a concern that people won’t understand. In my experience, it feels like I’ve gone off in an unexpected direction where the road maps don’t apply, where the GPS breaks down and I’m thrown back on my own direct encounter with the material world. See the branches of the cottonwood tree out my window fluttering in the wind? I can vouch for that.

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Large tracts in my brain seem to have emptied out, once thriving neighborhoods now ghost towns. But what particularly interests me in the anecdote of the map maker is that sometimes the emptiness attracts whatever’s near at hand. So if there’s a silence that needs to be filled why not just toss in the nearest available question whether or not you’ve just asked it? That way you don’t have to work so hard to think of something else to say. These repetitions seem to be out of my control. They just appear, eager to volunteer for the cause, happy to fill in whatever blanks might arise. This makes me wonder about the more worrying possibility that I’m repeating myself in my writing. I’ve been posting these short essays for more than a decade with a break of two years when I was collecting them into my book, Twilight Time. Now that night is truly falling and the remaining twilight rapidly fading, I find myself wondering if I’m repeating myself in print. How deep is my bench of memories? How many unique stories can I unearth before I topple into the hole? There’s no knowing and, of course, not knowing is the main event, the overarching subject.

I wanted to tell you - bear with me - about the moment in 1992 when I thought life was as good as it was going to get. It was a hippie wedding at the bird sanctuary in Lenox, Mass. Everyone I knew in the Berkshires was there, each one more smashed than the next. Frank and I were sitting at a table with our best friends and even my son, just returned from his junior year abroad in Japan, was with us. We were all laughing. Who knows what was so funny. That’s not the point. The point was the collective hilarity. I was forty-seven years old and felt full of life. I wanted for nothing. Then Jimmy told Pat that he had a terrific headache and had to get away from the loud music and all the commotion. Pat was pissed. It was just like Jimmy to crash and burn like that. She told him he could leave. She’d get a ride back to Great Barrington with someone else. It was a glioblastoma, Jimmy’s headache, and the opening act of the pageant of mortality that was about to unfold for all of us. But just for that moment at the bird sanctuary, we were innocent of loss and its endless iterations. Loss does not worry about repeating itself.

At first, the change in the social chemistry appeared to be gradual but in reality it’s quite abrupt and irreversible. There is a re-alignment in the collective consciousness. It’s like a game of pick-up sticks. Now that we’re playing in earnest, each stick carefully withdrawn from the pile results in further instability. Which stick will be removed next? Which will remain at the end? None. None will remain. Am I repeating myself? I’m asking the same questions over and over again because these are the questions that preoccupy me.

The young graduate wants to make maps, nail down the railroad tracks in relation to the river, establish true north. But there are no maps of the terra incognita, the undocumented territory we are all heading into and much as we try, we can’t hold on to that youthful certainty that the party at the bird sanctuary will be repeated time and again. We’ll just have to keep telling the story.

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In the Berkshires, I saw him conventionally at Tanglewood but also memorably in 2006 at Wahconah Park, the minor league baseball stadium in Pittsfield, where we stood through the whole concert joyfully making public spectacles of ourselves as if we weren’t already on the old side. Like a long-lost second cousin, Bobby Zimmerman, even if I lost contact with him for years at a stretch, was always there, chronicling, giving us a glimpse of the big picture.

And there he was again in Minnesota, the homeland, where he was born in 1941. I’d never been to the venue and had visions of intoxicated crowds, long lines to get into the bathroom. But that was then, this is now. The event was modest, the seats not completely filled. There was an opening act, then Lucinda Williams. Lucinda at 73 could still sing and served up some hope. These are dire times and a gathering of some 15,000 people in Minnesota is an opportunity to give people something they are yearning for and can hold on to. The close ups of her face on the screens showed a woman long past caring about what she looked like. She looked lived-in, beat up. Her set was raw. We listened to her and we watched the dark shadows under her eyes and we waited for Dylan.

He came on around 9 o’clock wearing a white hoodie that was a cross between a ku klux klan outfit and a shroud, made a passing gesture to the crowd from the front of the stage, then retired far to the rear barricaded behind a keyboard. The images on the screens showed him receding into the dark with a handful of band members on each side of him. We never saw his face. At first I thought that, unlike Lucinda Williams, he didn’t want us to see what he looked like. Then people started talking about his much vaunted mystique. He doesn’t say a single word during the concert. He doesn’t even introduce the top-notch musicians backing him up. He protects himself from us, staying as far away as possible. I saw all of that, the separateness, the arrogance, but it landed in a different way for me. I identified with him. I saw that he was anticipating, rehearsing his end times and he insisted on doing it on his own terms.

Dylan is old and has arthritis in his hands. He can no longer play the guitar. So he gave us a few harmonica riffs which were a joy, but mostly he’s back there behind the piano singing over a basic blues keyboard back-up. Someone else is doing the flashy guitar solos. He does what he can still do, unapologetically, and he lets us know, singing Crossing the Rubicon and I Shall Be Released that he sees the other side coming into to focus, not so very far away. Being angry with him for not being the Dylan of Highway Sixty-One Revisited is like resisting one’s own passing. It’s not as if he tries to be twenty year old Bleecker Street Bob and can no longer sing. He can sing what he can sing and he was never Maria Callas. He gives you Dylan at 85 because, really, what’s the alternative? I wasn’t angry at him. It would have been like being angry at myself and I didn’t feel sorry for him. It would have been like feeling sorry for myself. We are old, Bob and I, but we are here in this tender moment and we have done a lot of living.

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We took the fact that black people did our domestic labor for granted, not really giving the whole thing that much thought. They were just there. We had maids, just the way we had ice cream for dessert. It was as if it were perfectly natural for women to leave their own families to come down from Harlem to wax our floors, add bleach to our wash to make white even whiter. This is what people like us did. This is what Jewish people did in the comfort of post-Holocaust New York. We engaged these others to scrub the grime of not belonging out of our linens, our clothes, our toilets so that we would be Dick and Jane perfect, movie star perfect like my mother in the photo. So that Dachau would be forgotten, so that our own people’s experience of near erasure would fade from memory and we would advance to the front of the line in the new American postwar paradise. On the plantation, we gave grocery bags full of old clothes to our maids and spoke admiringly of Marian Anderson and Ralph Bunche. Poverty was not on our radar. They came to our houses, folded our underwear and overheard our arguments, going upstairs in the service elevator and entering the apartment through the back door. But we did not go to their houses. When we drove through Harlem on the way uptown to the George Washington bridge, we locked our car doors until New Jersey was safely in sight. We stared at the people on the street as we drove by as if they were tourist attractions. Large women in tight dresses out on the stoops, men in hats standing in doorways with cigarettes dangling from their mouths two miles from where I was raised in starched rectitude.

My parents were both active in liberal causes. This made their willful blindness about race particularly painful for me as a child. I carry the memory of the uniformed black maids watching their white charges in the playground in Riverside Park very deep inside of me. It isn’t a museum with displays about race relations interspersed with videos of civil rights marches. It isn’t a textbook with excerpts of the writings of MLK and Malcolm X. It’s me taking a cookie and a glass of very white milk from a very black maid at the gray formica table in the kitchen on 83rd street. It’s me seeing her arrive after her long bus ride in the morning and leave after work in the evening, weary, preoccupied with her own unimaginable life. Where were her children? Where was her mother?

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I’d been chewing on Life is Happening in recent weeks. It seemed like a worthy replacement for I’m Alive which had been a mantra of sorts for me in the last few years. The trouble with I’m Alive, an indisputably potent message, is its overemphasis on I. I (there it is again, dammit) didn’t want my mantra to be about me. I wanted it to be a witness to the explosive energy of life, a rich unfolding of births and deaths, joys and sorrows, radiating in all directions. Life is Happening has the capacity to hold in the palms of its calloused hands the first steps of Iranian babies, the thrill of hearing both my grandsons sing karaoke at the anniversary party and, at the same time, the dementia diagnoses regularly visited upon my fading friends. It could carry all the blossoms in the Lyndale Park rose garden, pinks, reds, corals and yellows, even though we missed their peak and only met up with them when they were somewhat tired out, drooping like I am. There’s far too much living and dying to catalog. The Big Bang continues to scatter matter and energy and color and sound to the farthest reaches of the cosmos. The energy of Creation was bursting into infinite bits and pieces long before I arrived on the scene and will continue long after I’m gone. We are always at a threshold, at a Beginning of some kind. The vision is kaleidoscopic.

My life is such a small portion of this mystery. It doesn’t account for the royal purple of the sky in the west at sunset on the solstice. There’s so much to see and so much to feel. The world is imprinting itself on me every minute like a linoleum block in kindergarten. Dip it in red paint and you’ll see fire like California burning. Dip it in green and you’ll see the everyday miracle of the world outside my window. The more I detach from my own narrative, the more I can make room for the multitude of stories of everything around me. The hybrid and floribunda roses, beautiful but wilting. The effort of loving with its anguish and its luscious reward, and the grand opera of bittersweet that begins and ends and begins again without ceasing.

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My rage against the degradation of the culture, the increasingly catastrophic rise in the cost of living, the strangling of democracy in advance of the mid-terms needs an escape valve and the Kennedy Center debacle fits the bill. Otherwise, I must tell you I have a small bone to pick, a pet peeve. I keep thinking about the Times food piece about cheap weeknight dinners that suggests mac and cheese with Spam as a way to stretch the family budget. Maybe they should have served that at his birthday party.

As of this writing, the tarps have not come down from the Kennedy Center facade where his name used to be. The administration’s response to the court order has been to literally follow the letter of the law as opposed to its spirit. They will not show the outside of the building without his name and this is because the nakedness is too much for him to bear. I imagine him being visited by nightmares where the emperor literally has no clothes, no long red tie, no short cuffs exposing his bruised hands. Now the little boy can be sent to his room to think about what he has done and, if unrepentant, sent to bed without his Spam.

The tarps are diagnostically instructive. This, after all, is the person who famously believed he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without repercussion. Now, there is a dank miasma of shame, a stench, around him. It could be related to his age, his lethargy, his word salad. We are ten months apart, the president and I. Perhaps I have some insight into his state of mind. The president and I are both less energetic than we were when we were young. Gone the late night partying, the frenetic dancing until Saturday turned to Sunday. He apparently makes due with four or five hours of sleep, but then he takes those little naps during Cabinet meetings. The president and I suffer memory lapses. The slightest interruption in the completion of a thought results in scrambled eggs in the mind where the subject matter somehow gets mixed up and fried together with other random unrelated material like meal plans or travel fantasies. The president starts with the Iranians, but quickly segues into the ballroom and ends up face down in the now bright green reflecting pool sucking up some of that tasty hydrogen peroxide. The capacity to organize a coherent argument has atrophied. I get it. The thing is, insofar as it’s a problem, my aging is mine to contend with. The president’s aging is a cause for global concern and a significant source of his newfound vulnerability. He can’t shoot someone on Fifth Avenue if he can’t find Fifth Avenue. JD Vance doesn’t know what that feels like. Pete Hegseth doesn’t know what that feels like. He’s alone in his decline and even though aging is a natural process for both of us, I daresay we are not moving through it in the same way. I view aging as an opportunity to discover what I can learn about the mystery of being, about how much love I can offer in my remaining time. He views it through the only lens he has access to, the lens of domination and cruelty, an opportunity to discover how much more he can steal and what he can get away with on Fifth Avenue. He knows a lot about how to cause other people’s suffering but nothing at all - zilch - about the steel trap he has set for himself and the reality of his death despite the ballroom and the triumphal arch. He would be well-advised to take into account that he can’t avoid this outcome any more than any of the rest of us. He’s just a human being, even if he tries very hard not to be one.

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Accordingly, three infant robins fell out of their nest onto our balcony. Their mama had built her nest on top of the part of the air conditioner that extends outside of the house. This was before it got really hot. We saw her flying up to attend to her babies, but we never really saw the birds. Then one day the temperature shot up. Unthinking, we turned on the AC and they fell out of their vibrating shelter, two to the floor of the balcony, one to a wrought iron Italian deco chair where they struggled to survive. Mama watched over them, but in the morning one was dead, one was missing and one was trying hard to stay alive. I picked up the one who had died and carried her in a paper shopping bag down to the pond where I left her in a garden of purple flowers and told her ahavah rabbah ahavtanu…you are loved with an unending love.

A few days before that, a Friday, I submitted to a covid shot. I made an appointment at my trusty local CVS. But when I got there, they told me they were flat out of the juice and I’d have to go to a different CVS location. Something seemed a little off. Eventually, the politically loaded syringe, the favorite weapon of anti-science conspiracy theorists, was jabbed into the muscle of my left upper arm and I checked that errand off my to-do list. That night I was visited by demons wielding sandpaper. I encountered a non-sleep sleep, thinking all night that I was going to fall out of bed like the robins, so restless was my rest. All my covers ended up on the floor. My brain was a popcorn maker, a pinball machine, not preoccupied with any particular subject, just racing and leaping around, crashing against the walls of my skull. I woke up exhausted and rattled.

On Saturday, I slept all day. I would wake up, use the bathroom or get a glass of water, and grope my way back to the chaise in the living room to go back to sleep. Sleep was all I wanted in life. Want isn’t even the right word. I was beyond wanting. I ate a little but only out of habit. My usual more than healthy appetite was gone. I was not sick to my stomach and I had no respiratory symptoms. I simply didn’t care about food or anything else. Anything that wasn’t my pillow seemed irrelevant if not foreign. It was dizzying and nightmarish. There was nothing to hold on to. No up or down. No mental or emotional content to the experience. You couldn’t even call it an experience. It was more like an predicate state without a subject. Blurriness, scratchiness, indolence. This must be what the Buddhists mean by aimlessness, I thought. I wasn’t loving it.

Then at around eight in the evening after eating a half an apple for dinner, I was suddenly very hungry. The sensation was so distinct and unexpected. I became aware of my desire to put something into my mouth which, convention suggests, would end up in my stomach. I made a sandwich of leftover asparagus omelet on a baguette. It was so good, I could have cried. Mostly it was good to register desire and know how to fulfill it. Such a feature of animal reality. The side effect of the vaccination had turned the tables on me. Instead of walking around in a cloud of desire - I want to eat, I want to be noticed, I want to be appreciated - There was nothing. There was nothing to want. It felt like death and I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready. Now that I’ve grown closer to my own end of life, I’m somewhat less enthusiastic about moving on and I’m glad for this. I’m glad for embodiment and for the recognition of the preciousness of life. I’m glad for desire and purple flowers and asparagus omelets and I am not reluctant to say, I’d like some more, please.

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At this point, someone out there is thinking, if not saying out loud, Everything Happens for a Reason. No money, no ice cream, no additional weight gain or testing the limits of the doctor’s confidence. I’m not buying it, even if I did have the five bucks for the small container. This is not an instance of the butterfly effect where a tiny, unrelated element in the larger field influences an event far away. To attribute the failure at Baskin-Robbins to some kind of hidden agency would be to undervalue the importance of chance in the acquisition of ice cream and reduce the complex interplay of factors to a simple direct causality, in other words to privilege magic. It would be to ignore the obvious truth that shit happens and, often, for no reason at all. This is sometimes hard to accept. People want certainty and there’s no certainty more potent than Everything Happens for a Reason. Part of the challenge in this time of chaos we’re living through is that we’re increasingly called upon to forego certainty and face contradiction. The faster we’re able to communicate, the less we have to say. The more futuristic the AI cultural landscape, the less visionary, indeed the more medieval, our social arrangements. The more fragmented our lives, the greater the injunction to conform to a narrow range of extremist beliefs. Complex causality tests our ability to make sense out of all this. It’s much easier to say Everything Happens for a Reason and leave it at that and this is what religion in its most basic form has always been so good at. God moves in mysterious ways. Fuhgettaboutit.

This worldview does a disservice to all forms of human creative expression. It bypasses scientific understanding but it also undermines spiritual values that foster a rich soil of wholeness and an awareness of interbeing. Instead of speaking from inside of living and dying, recognizing the matrix of causes that always exist in relation to one another, reductionist religion, whether old-timey or new age, posits a force outside of life that dictates what will happen and knows the reasons for events in advance. It turns the sacred nature of life and death into the efforts of an all-knowing puppeteer, turning a symphony of sound into a nursery rhyme. If I were to pick the one fortune cookie most appropriate to our situation, it would not be Everything Happens for a Reason. It would be my old favorite, Beware the Man of One Book.

Thinking and feeling and connecting with one another are the most profound forms of resistance to mind control. We are under assault by the depredations of the algorithm, the narrowing of the arena of free speech, the inclination to return to discredited systems of social control in the family and at the ballot box. All of this tightening of the reins presupposes and further promotes a loss of agency in the individual heart and a dangerous determinism that makes no room for changing your mind, forgetting your wallet. It is imperative to stretch our awareness to make room for the wild unpredictable energy of life, the element of surprise that shows up and laughs along with us when we least suspect it.

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When I’m alone, I carry the heft of my age around with me like a large box from the condo package room I have to lug upstairs all by myself. Sometimes it’s difficult and sometimes I can’t do it. I monitor my energy level and critique my appearance and think about end times. But every year, the time alone also feels like getting acquainted with an identical twin I didn’t know I had. I observe her taking care of herself, going deep into a Chinese restaurant menu of spiritual traditions that speak to her and ask to be given consideration. Buddhism, hasidut, Merton and Teilhard. I watch this part of myself entering a deep contemplative space, thinking about aging and loss like a research scientist on one of those cushy grants where you don’t actually have to produce anything. Read, write, meditate. Repeat.

When Frank comes home, we pick up the very different practice of aging together in the everyday. We consider our respective dietary requirements which are fiendishly different. We demonstrate our exercise regimens. We alert each other when people die. Barney Frank, Sonny Rollins, people who have made music and noise. We cuddle and giggle over long-lost girl group song lyrics. We hold each other in a rapture of deep familiarity. Every gesture resonates with its archetype from back in the seventies when we first met and even further back to our childhoods in the fifties embedded in the stories we’ve told each other over and over again. Our knowledge of one another is cellular.

On our fourth night together, we celebrate our first date night of the season, going out to our favorite local restaurant where we sit at the bar and enjoy ten dollar happy hour martinis followed by mussels and falafel wraps and baby kale salad. We immerse ourselves in the world. This is why happy hour is happy. It’s a celebration of our longevity, fifty years this coming January, and how much we’ve witnessed. Two sons, four grandchildren, two great-grandchildren. Many arrivals and departures. The following morning, which happens to be Memorial Day, we go to check out the cemetery on Lyndale. If you go cemetery shopping you have to be matter-of-fact about it like it’s just another errand. Go to the bank, go to the post office, go to the cemetery. We find it lovely. Just the right size. Not like the vast necropolises off the LIE in Queens. Not like the tiny burial ground in El Dorado, California with its displays of plastic flowers. In the Minneapolis cemetery, there are several spouts to allow visiting families to water living plants and trash cans so they can dispose of their garden waste. The cemetery is dotted with old shade trees.

Straightaway, we decide on one large stone. We’ve only just regrouped after seven weeks and we don’t want to think of separating, even underground. This is a major departure for me after decades of leaning towards cremation. Now after four years of practicing separation and reading up on the mysteries, I am moved by the engraved stone with the husband’s birth and death dates and the wife’s unfinished history. One of us will have to wait and I’m terrible at waiting and a rank amateur at not knowing. I will have to deepen my practice. In the meanwhile, we have date night. There will be laughter and hand-holding and gratitude.

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A life heading into its last lap is so distinct from a life at the starting gate that it’s almost beyond comparison. My younger grandson, turning seventeen in August, is wading through that dense forest of college applications, doing some serious future tripping. You can almost feel the neurons colliding in his head as he weighs his options. Yesterday, he recorded an interview with me, an assignment for history class. He wanted to know about the Vietnam War, what was it like in the sixties. I tried to explain that in the college-educated middle class in 1966 when I graduated, the boys/men were understandably freaked out about the draft, but overall there was no great anxiety about planning ahead or earning a living. There were lots of jobs and piles of money lying around. Rent was cheap. You could take a shot at being a poet if that’s what you really were or even if you just wanted to check it out. I lived on 10th street and Avenue B where, granted, I was held up at gunpoint in the hallway, but it was affordable and romantic in a La Bohème starving artist kind of way. Sometimes if we had too many people hanging out in the tenement apartment, some of us would have to sit in the bathtub in the kitchen. The world was our amusement park and we headed out into it with every intention of enjoying ourselves. There may never be a party like that again.

I have to explain that, born in 1945, I’m a little too old to be a hippie or even a bonafide boomer. I thought of myself as a bohemian along the lines of Allen Ginsberg. We wore black. We smoked Gauloises. In the end, all of those labels boiled down to identifying a category of people who saw no reason to play by the old rules. Where did it get us? Cookie cutter houses in Levittown, women imprisoned in kitchens and bedrooms, children mindlessly reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. We were done. We wanted something else. The power of art and rebellion and sexuality and proto-feminism was unleashed and American postwar prosperity was ready for it and gave it a wide berth.

There is no question in my mind that those of us who benefitted from that moment were just plain lucky. It was amazing grace that rained down on us. We were not saddled by crushing debt. We were less likely to be imprisoned by outdated social codes. I take no credit for the oxygenation of American culture during the period when I came of age. It just happened to me and to millions of others in my cohort, leaving some of our children and grandchildren with a faint disdain for us, as if we might prove to be undeserving, just something out of Cheech and Chong. They will have to look deeply to discover what we’ve left for them. Our legacy will not be sacrifice, the example of the privations of the Depression and the war years, or the conformism of the fifties. It will be our vision of a larger life that’s not focused on scarcity, fear, and self-denial but rather on an embrace of what makes life worth living.

I want to tell my grandson that if he concentrates solely on accumulation, he will never have enough. That if in the process of getting ahead, he loses his capacity for connection, he will find himself alone. I want him in some way to share his considerable gifts with the real world off the screen so that he stays present to its magic, and discovers the creative possibilities of the depths and heights of human fragility and expression. Most of all, I want to enjoin him to look past the beads and outlandish outfits, even the loud rock and roll soundtrack, to feel back there the seeds of the potential he has to be free, to be himself, to carry on a noble tradition of being in the world but not of the world.

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This was the week I discovered I am eighty years old. I had been witnessing myself being altogether at a loss in the middle of conversations….like what was I talking about? This was an unfamiliar situation for me. I didn’t recognize myself. Then, I had the following experience. A man I’ve known and loved for better than fifty years sent me a text. It was a picture of a group of ten mostly familiar people taken in the Berkshires in 2011, a candid shot of folks hanging out against a greener than green woodsy New England backdrop. Spring, I would say, judging by what people were wearing. Some were standing, some sitting on the grass, several held paper plates or plastic glasses. An occasion for celebration of some kind. Frank was off to the right wearing shades and that great 40s vintage shirt of his. He and I, responding to the text from California and Minnesota respectively, were both blown away by the unexpected back-in-time and completely stumped by the woman in the tight jeans and green shirt with the short hair and the raised martini glass standing alone in the foreground. Neither of us could identify the mysterious stranger and both of us refused to entertain the possibility that her name was Susie. I didn’t recognize myself. “I’m not sure that’s you,” Frank said. “I never looked like that,” I protested, figuratively stamping my foot when my friend doubled down on his claim that it was me. “Yes, you did,” he repeated. “That’s you with the martini and the green shirt and the short hair and you’re just gorgeous.”

Six degrees of separation and eight levels of derangement later, I went into the photo library on my MacBook and checked out what I looked like in 2011 when Frank and I took lots of pictures in London and Paris. Here’s Susie at the British Museum. Here’s Susie in the Marais, both Susies softly entering their oldness at sixty-six. I felt like an imposter in the Berkshire picture and kept saying “I never looked like that,” as if for someone to suggest that I had were an offense, a misrepresentation. This despite the fact that there was evidence. My friend suggested wryly that it might be AI. Never forego an opportunity to blame AI for something.

So this is a deep unmediated dive into aging and vanity and identity. I’m accustomed to what I look like as an older woman and found it extremely disorienting to be called upon to remember a time not that long ago, at least for one day in Great Barrington in 2011, when I was fleetingly and uncharacteristically glamorous. I didn’t recognize myself. Maybe because I’m small, I tend to think I’m physically unremarkable, not a person whose appearance occasions a whole lot of notice one way or the other. This allows me to detach from the surface and focus on the interior, on my thinking life, my feeling life, my writing life, my life in spirit, parts of me I have a longstanding affection for. I imagine this is a very outdated subject that has been beaten to a pulp within an inch of its life, but for me the unrecognizable photograph of myself propelled this issue to the front of the line and made it demand to be heard. Especially now at eighty when I’ve long outlived my market value, I want to be seen for something essential about myself, not for what I look like. Comprende? Vershtehst? You’d think I would be capable of accepting a compliment gracefully, but I’m particularly sensitive about all this in the current Epstein, Mar-a-Lago, Met Gala climate of gawking at what Amy Odell in the Times calls “rich faces.” “A rich face, Odell writes, “is stretched taut, often incapable of varied expressions and plumped with filler or implants.” A rich face is no longer recognizable as the person you once knew. I didn’t recognize myself. I thought I had aged out of all that artifice and, like other women I know, was feeling relief. But no. Even the lovely Michelle Pfeiffer appears on my screen in a current TV series with lips that look like they’ve been inflated with a bicycle pump. All this remains a part of the human condition that I have to contend with when really I’d rather stay in bed in my pajamas and caress the keyboard. All this parading around with fixed expressions on indistinguishable faces and breasts so engorged as to threaten the free flow of air is nothing less than grand larceny nor maybe grand theft photo. Like taking pictures of tribal peoples who see the camera as a device that steals something from them that is rightfully theirs. This is where I went from “you’re just gorgeous” in response to a photograph of me that I didn’t recognize. This is how the deepening content of my knowing and forgetting met up with the expiration date on the packaging.

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Despite the fact that my cursive is nasty, I was tickled this morning when I saw an item in the NYT about the revival of school composition writing in longhand. Because AI has made term papers about Bismarck, Hester Prynne and so on available in seconds, there is no longer any point in assigning them to high school sophomores. The very word research has been degraded by the quaint notion that you can go online for twenty minutes and become an expert on the efficacy of vaccines or the latest use of antisemitic memes. Kids are no longer writing papers at home in front of the TV and may not even watch TV. They are, according to the Times, writing about their own responses to the bullying of Hester Prynne with number 2 pencils during the school day, leaving them much more time for Tik Tok at home. The entire enterprise is losing its appeal. What is there to teach? What is there to learn? Some people believe that education should prepare kids for the real world, whatever that is. This is the “how to” school of pedagogy…how to balance a checkbook, how to apply for a job. This reduces the Mind to a manual that addresses functional skills but misses the part about Ideas and the Inner Life altogether. On the other hand, maybe the Mind is overrated and maybe there’s no such thing as Time, although the capitalization does confer gravitas.

It’s hard to tell. Especially if you continue to be impressionable as I am at 80 and find that you’re open to new ideas. New ideas arrive like FedEx packages at my doorstep unannounced. This doesn’t necessarily make me more broad-minded, but it does make me feel more alive, even when the ideas are distressing. It makes me somewhat reluctant to give up on my old friend, the Mind. Not being sure where I come down on this question, I made a foray to Half-Price Books the other day where I discovered an original 1957 Vintage paperback of Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen. Just in case I harbored any illusions about Truth, the book itself proved to be an exemplar of Impermanence, crumbling in my lap the minute I picked it up. Every page I turned cracked at the spine, scattering desiccated crumbs of wisdom all over the couch. This seemed to underscore Watts’ point about hsin, the ancient Chinese word that best approximates the English word Mind. Hsin, writes Watts, is true, is working properly, when it works as if it were not present. The true mind is no mind. No news is good news.

This gave me something to think about in my otherwise empty, Time-drenched day. I slept deeply and woke up to twenty-four brand new hours, as Thich Nhat Hahn would say. I said the modeh ani, giving thanks for that greatest of blessings and made myself a cup of coffee.

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*************************************************************************************************************Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from your local bookseller.

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Imagine now the big shots in tuxedos and ball gowns crouching under the tables at the Washington Hilton the night before. Like many of you, I watched the unfolding chaos in real time when the network cut away from the basketball playoff game. I was at my son’s house where my family was all decked out in Timberwolves shirts watching Ayo Dosunmu defy gravity. Suddenly, it wasn’t about basketball, it was about political theater. We watched in disbelief as terrified women in dresses that cost thousands of dollars submitted to the pushing and shoving of Secret Service agents while Trump tripped and fell on his way out of the ballroom which is not his ballroom and therefore not an acceptable ballroom. How far from Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis could I be? In Washington, in place of the art-making, the power of community joining together, the collective grieving, what we were given to witness was a roomful of the overfed trampling one another to get out of the room followed within minutes by a dizzying tornado of spin. The president seemed to be enjoying himself. Nothing trumps a failed assassination attempt as far as getting attention is concerned. Everyone was watching. It had the quality of a dream, like seeing the J6ers scale the walls of the Capitol. Something had changed, the frog was getting cooked and I was watching it on ABC in my son’s basement.

On his Substack, John Pavlovitz, a former United Methodist pastor, describes the fallout from this experience as contact insanity. The daily posturing and gaslighting of the administration and its MAGA minions have spread their contagion throughout our fragile culture. “That leaves the rest of us;” Pavlovitz suggests, “the sleep-deprived, heartbroken, rightfully furious human beings to try and hold onto our right minds while being immersed in the insane, the profane, and the cruel.” Trump wants to bring us down to his level, wants us crouching under the table, trembling in fear. He wants to batter the empathy, the open-heartedness, the civility out of us so that we lose our desire to defend ourselves and our country. This is, may I remind you, our country.

He almost had me Sunday evening alone in my condo after I returned from the sidewalk memorials in Minneapolis. You’d think I would have been inspired by the collective witness to the murders of Good and Pretti…and I was. But my system was so shocked by the disconnect between the smirking theatrics at the Hilton the night before and the dignity of the shrines, that I started to lose it. I began to feel unsafe inside of myself. I didn’t pray or meditate or write. I went down to my friendly neighborhood grocery and bought something for dinner. In the store, I waited on line behind Somalis in hijabs and hasidim in kippot. I smiled at my contemporaries shuffling along and at lively children angling for candy. Then I went upstairs to my sanctuary and made a piece of salmon with a side of spinach and some steamed potatoes. I gratefully fed myself simple, basic, nutritious food and I committed yet again to take care of myself and to love as much as I can. That’s my strategy. What’s yours?

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*************************************************************************************************************Many Voices will now accept contributions from all subscribers. At this critical time, we need to hear what everyone has to say. Please let me know if you have work that you would like to send to seventysomething for our Many Voices feature. Make your voice heard. Write to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com.

Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support seventysomething and have access to the archives. Your ideas are always welcome.

*************************************************************************************************************Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from your local bookseller.

Get more from Susie Kaufman in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

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Predictability, it seems, is for oddsmakers and they don’t always get it right. Sometimes the horse is having a bad day like me when I don’t sleep well and wake up miserable and unwilling. Sometimes the horse doesn’t run a good race. People claim to love surprises, hoping that some day all their friends will jump out from behind wing chairs wearing little party hats when they open the front door on their birthday. But most of us want to know what to expect so that we can tame the future and keep it on a leash. The weather, for example. Now we have 80 degree days in April, too hot to sit in the sun even though we’ve waited all winter for that opportunity. This foretaste of summer will likely be followed by 40 degree days complete with fierce winds and cold rain. Back in the day, I had something called a spring coat that came out of storage on a predetermined date around Easter and was worn until the middle of June, preferably with black Mary Janes. Something in me is nostalgic for that sentimental certainty even if I can do without the navy and white checked coat. Nat King Cole should have named his song “Unpredictable” instead of “Unforgettable,” although I did once own a jacket that I bought from his widow in a tag sale and the fact of that is certainly unforgettable.

Predictability is all about interpreting memory. This happened once therefore it will happen again. But this calculation is impersonal. There’s a lot about memory, a lot about how life unfolds, that eludes logic. Being in thrall to a disease process that is beyond understanding is a terrible place to be. But I admit there’s something about unpredictability that I find comforting. It means that we are not all coloring inside the lines. I reassure myself that AI may know what Kash Patel likes to drink but it does not know the taste of the green mousse my mother made out of vanilla ice cream and lime jello served in parfait glasses or my feeling of breathless exultation when I saw the tall cold glasses lined up in the refrigerator. Every time the Weather Station gets it wrong, part of me thinks it’s one for the win column even if it’s disruptive or disappointing. Actuarial numbers only go so far. Someone at Medicare probably predicted that I might fall down the escalator at the airport in Minneapolis, but no one knows what that was like for me, catapulting down the jagged metal moving steps, my bags flying off in different directions according to the principles of physics. It was frightening, of course. But my body also remembered it as a sly reference to rolling down the dunes in Provincetown back when the steep sandy declines were not off limits. A safer, softer freefall, Alice falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. This is a descent that can be reliably predicted. We just, as the song goes, don’t know where or when.

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*************************************************************************************************************Many Voices will now accept contributions from all subscribers. At this critical time, we need to hear what everyone has to say. Please let me know if you have work that you would like to send to seventysomething for our Many Voices feature. Make your voice heard. Write to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com.

Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support seventysomething and have access to the archives. Your ideas are always welcome.

*************************************************************************************************************Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from your local bookseller.

Get more from Susie Kaufman in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app