Erik and I have adopted as a joke what Mandi said once when she was visiting: "We're thirty." This can mean we have no time to try and befriend folks with insecurities we don't jive with. No time not to do our chosen work. It’s a joke when we break glasses, and it’s dead serious when we pay over $400 for the utility bill on our house with hollow walls. Either way we use it, we mean it with gratitude: we have walls, a dog, one another, and leftover buttermilk chicken in the refrigerator.
Last week, I spent the week in Sydney, Nova Scotia with my niece Sophia and her mommy Izrael and her grandparents, Valerie and Gerard. Sophia is 14 months and goes through the quick cycles of fever and ecstasy and dancing and desire of a little bitty. We were all in Babyland together, with late morning naps, the stroller and tiny coats, unicorn kisses, our eyes mostly always on the baby. Izrael and Sophia and I walked on the boardwalk when the weather got up to 14 degrees Celsius, and we went to the bookstore and David’s Tea in the mall when it got down around 9. Sophia crawled every aisle of the toy store, refusing to be picked up until we left. We drank at least three cups of tea each, every day. Izrael made sure I got to the pet store for a treat for Doug, and every evening, he and I came up with something nice to do the next day, despite the weather and the small town. I read Sophia books, and she read them to me, too, quickly, a surreal and sincere parody of how we read to her. I love that baby, and the whole family that’s raising her.
Seeing Sophia for the second time made me start to think about her whole life, how she’ll grow up. Two points plotted on the map. The possibilities are wide, and it makes me laugh, happy, to imagine them. It also raked up some memories I’d let go, and I processed things anew: My phases of best-friendship, and how those sustained me when I didn’t think I could know or be or become who I was with my own blood family. The ethos I took for granted, and things I refused to eat, and the fact that I sang saucy Christina Aguilera songs to familiar adults, and my fear of dogs. Not just know but feel I am experienced. I think about what markers of age show up in people’s faces, and I think a lot of it is this: knowing your age in relation to people you care about. Having that relativity to children and the family you choose to call family and think about and see. I think about how effortlessly Erik’s mother got our garage doors opening with the remotes, replaced the old lightbulbs with efficient ones, and sent cards for every holiday—addressed to Erik, Whitney, and now Doug. I wish I could manage to send cards for every holiday, but I don’t have that perspective. Until this trip, I was tangled up in the everyday. I could barely read a book the past few months. During my trip, I read Nancy Hale’s new selected stories, Where the Light Falls, organized by Lauren Groff. Oh, blessed short stories. Real crimson inspiration.
Tiffany, who went through the MFA right alongside me, tells me I’m ageist. She’s right. I am obsessed with how we plan our lives, aging, and lifetime management. Why we do it or don’t. You can imagine I have a sibling who lives in such a way that completely defies norms and values and politeness. Anyway, I am obsessed. And I am afraid of it. First thing, every morning, I reach for a bobby pin and tie my hair up on top of my head. Time to work, my mind says. In the moments just before, I was thinking about people and situations eight years in the past, trying to answer unanswerable questions, still, ones that won’t congeal for years, forgetting that when they do, they just will.
Today and yesterday, I left my hair down in the morning. In Nova Scotia, I barely put my hair up at all. Tomorrow, I may not even reach for the bobby pins.