60 – fresh out of my mind

I am 60. Have I found myself yet? My parents used to tell us that we children were found under a cabbage leaf as babies, before Mom was ready to sit us down with the Encyclopedia Britannica volume that showed the nude on one half and the other without flesh. Or they’d say we were found in a shoebox.

When I gardened, I never came upon myself beneath the leaves of lettuce or rhubarb. Not under a leaf in the grapevines that hid small green orbs that looked made of wax, and tasted so sour before they were ripe.

I’ve not stumbled upon myself in an old shoebox tucked back into the shadowy corner of a closet. I’ve looked plenty of other places, too, just to be thorough: not in the breadbox or the drawer beneath the oven with the pots and pans. Not in the garage with the odor of gasoline and the hot motor of the lawn mower after a turn around the yard. I haven’t found myself in the hollow of a guitar or along the silvery tube of a flute. I looked for myself in the packages that arrived each month by mail, first with a kit for making a new craft, and later an LP or cassette tape from Capitol Records or recordings of The Academy of St Martin in the Fields that taught me to love Classical music.

Perhaps I find myself inside of notebooks, tucked between leaves of paper. Perhaps it isn’t the 3-dimensional me, but a flat, paper-doll-type approximation of who I am. The closest representation of how I appear most of the time. I take up a pen and tentatively make a mark on the paper image. I might feel self-loathing today and add a mustache, a small dark rectangle like Hitler or Groucho Marx. I might try to draw clothing that feels like myself, a black leotard, a red pashmina wrap.

Finding myself might be the greatest gift of my life, but I suspect that there’s a fear it will be a disappointment, a map of how far I have yet to journey before I am in the neighborhood of my true self. Perhaps that fear makes me set myself aside in a shoebox for now, in a shadowed corner.

For a while now, I’ve been on a minimizing kick. My lifelong tendency as been to keep everything, save everything, to make it last. Perhaps it was because my father only earned $15,,000 a year, or because of the recession in the 1970s, but something made the impression on me that I had to conserve for the future. So as I reduce my clutter these days, I’m likely to find a notebook with still-blank pages, from when I was in high school. I mean, pre-1981! Paper from 1980 has turned yellowish, and it has a smell, some sort of old-but-not-musty odor, probably from the acid in the fiber. When I find something like this, something I never completely used up, I wonder, “What have I been waiting for?” Of course I’ve needed notebooks and I’ve used paper in the past 40 years. But this particular spiral-bound notebook, I have held back. Incidentally, the cover has a woodblock image of trees, signifying that it was somehow made with less paper pulp, therefore fewer trees, than before.

My 60th birthday is not far ahead. Recently, I notice, there are a lot more things I question, in terms of time. Projects I’ve planned to do but haven’t, for years. What am I waiting for? Family heirlooms, with no descendants to whom I might leave them. I will want my sister to have them, for her grandchildren. Why keep them with me, since I don’t have a use for them? Can’t I just give the things to her, or my nieces, now, as I minimize? What am I waiting for? I’ve been culling books, aiming for at least a one-in, one-out balance. Some books I’ve had on the shelf for 20 years, but still haven’t read. What am I waiting for? It’s possible that I have books enough to keep me reading for 20 years out. What am I waiting for?

Really, although I will enter a new decade, I didn’t expect time to come up as an issue like this. I’ve never cared before about age. I was fine with turning thirty, somehow ecstatic at reaching 40, and the 50s have been fine. I don’t know why looking at 60 strikes me with this growing urgency, but it does. Each day brings more awareness of the time that is behind me now, and the truth is, I don’t know how much is still ahead of me. But something in me asks:

What are you waiting for?