This is Getting Old (19 page)

In this bushy room I practiced cartwheels and handstands, turning the world upside down. I sat on the grass and whittled sticks. I could see time passing by watching the sails move across the pond.

Back in the house, my father was depressed, shut up in his study writing something all the time. My mother tied her hair up in a bandanna and tried to keep us kids from bothering him. My little sisters chased each other around the house, screeching. I felt
the tension of our family life, a sadness I couldn't cure, couldn't even name as sadness.

I lay on my back on the ground that was crunchy with lichen, while the sky did cartwheels around me. As the day came to an end, the sun's light turned a thicker and thicker yellow, and clouds rushed away from me into the void on the other side of the horizon and disappeared. This daily ending, staged with the smell of the bayberry and the crying of the gulls, gave me a lump in my throat—a shout I couldn't shout out.

I had no playmates my own age and we had no near neighbors—my schoolteacher father liked to get away from people in the summer. My sisters were considerably younger than I was, and they were occupied with each other. But it wasn't just someone to play with that I wanted—it was being part of something bigger than me.

I read Howard Pyle's
Robin Hood
and made plans to start a Robin Hood club when we got back to town in the fall. My friends and I would learn to fight with cudgels, and we'd defend the little kids in the neighborhood against the bullies. I would be Little John, who was big and kind, my favorite of Robin Hood's band. I found a big stick of driftwood on the beach and practiced air-fighting with my cudgel—I made it sing as I swung it through the air.

Books from the public library were company. One summer I went through all of Louisa May Alcott's novels, in their plain cloth library bindings stamped in gold on the spine. I went kite flying with Jo and her boys in
Jo's Boys
, and then with my own family in what's called real time, on a day when my father wasn't so depressed. He was the captain of the kite, a big green one we called the Green Dragon; he was a sailor, and this was another kind of sail. We got the kite aloft, and it grew smaller and smaller as it rose closer to the half moon. Then my father held onto the spool of string and we walked down the hill, climbed into the rowboat, and pushed off from the beach. My father let me put on garden gloves and hold the string while the kite pulled us,
frictionless, across the pond. It was magic, as if God himself was up there in the air pulling us along, though my parents didn't speak of God.

I wondered about God. I wondered who I was and what I was doing there. Why was there only my one small self inside my head, serving a life sentence in the solitary confinement of my skull, looking out of my eye sockets? It didn't make sense.

The summer I was ten I had insomnia, although I didn't know that word, and I was afraid I was going to die for lack of sleep. I lay in my bed listening for the ship's clock as it chimed the watches of the night. Eight bells for midnight. The worst thing about the loneliness was that it was unspeakable. I couldn't describe it or explain it. Nothing was wrong, but I was lost. Two bells meant one in the morning. I tiptoed into my parents' room. “I can't go to sleep,” I said.

I wanted to get into bed with my parents, but I didn't dare ask. I was too old. My mother told me to imagine sheep jumping over a fence and to count them. It seemed like a dumb idea that had nothing to do with the fear that kept me awake, but I was willing to give it a try. “If you get up to a hundred sheep and you're still awake, come back,” she said.

I did—I got to a hundred, easy. “Could a person die from not sleeping?” I asked my mother. “No,” she said, “No one ever died from not sleeping. Why don't you read your book, sweetie?”

Back in my bed I read
Under the Lilacs
, about an orphan boy and his dog, and how they ran away from the circus. Four bells for two in the morning—I saw the curtains shifting like breath in the moonlight. Six bells for three in the morning, as the moonlight faded and pulsed again in a silent, scary whoosh—caused unbeknownst to me by a passing cloud—and then I must have slept, because I never heard the end of the night watch.

In the morning I walked barefoot to the secret place, watching out for poison ivy. I wanted the soles of my feet to be as tough as an Indian's by the end of the summer. There had been a light mist in the night, and so the pale green lichen was wet and soft.
I imagined myself an orphan in the wilderness. I would have to gather berries and build a shelter for myself in order to survive. I made a little one first, for practice. I snapped off some twigs from the bayberry bushes and whittled away the little bumps. When I had a nice pile of smooth twigs no more than six inches long, I constructed a lean-to with them, using long grass to join the twigs at the joints. I put some stones and shells from the beach inside it, to serve as chairs and tables for the fairies. I didn't exactly believe in fairies, but I assumed there were unseen forces in the universe and I wanted to contact them. They were either very small or very large.

When I lay on my stomach and stuck my face into the sweet-smelling grass, I saw a little red dot that revealed itself to be a spider when it crawled up a blade of grass. To that spider I was as big as a whole world. Then I rolled over on my back, being careful not to crush the spider, and looked at the clouds—the layers of them, some so far up that they made the near clouds seem to move in the opposite direction. Compared to them I was a little red spider. I was microscopic and huge at the same time.

I practiced handstands, and the more I practiced the longer I could stay up. I liked the part where I kicked up the second foot, when the momentum took over and inverted the world. In those days I didn't need a wall to practice against, as I do now in my yoga class. I wanted to be able to walk on my hands. I could take the first step—could pick up my right hand and quickly put it down again a few inches forward before I fell—but I wanted to take a second step with the left hand. Patiently, I practiced. It seemed important. When my shoulders got tired, I sat on the grass to rest and rearranged the fairies' furniture in their lean-to. “OK, fairies,” I said. “Watch me walk on my hands.” I swung my feet up against the sky and this time I took two steps with my hands before I came down. I gave a whoop. Robin Hood would be proud of me. Maybe I'd even join the circus.

My parents didn't worry that I was wandering around exploring the natural world by myself; they knew I would follow
their only rule: not to go swimming alone. The only other local hazard was poison ivy. They didn't know I was full of longing for something I couldn't name, because I didn't tell them.

“Susie! Time for lunch!” came my mother's voice. The other world was calling, the middle-sized world.

As I get older, I find myself coming back to childhood's yearning. I both seek solitude and fear it, just as I did at ten. Upstairs in my study in the quiet house, I'm drinking my green tea and sitting sideways in my favorite chair, with my feet hanging over one arm like a teenager, looking out the window at the redwood tree. I'm wondering who I am and what I'm doing here in this bag of skin, as the old Chinese Zen masters called it. Why am I
still
the only one inside?

Twice, I wasn't alone in my body. I could feel the company inside as I watched the bulge of a foot move across my belly. I liked having someone else with me, for a change, in the small apartment of my body, though of course I liked it even more when each of the babies came out to meet me.

If I had a partner I expect it would take the sharp edge off the longing, but I'm talking about something other than being single here, a more essential separation; I'm not talking about being alone in my bed—that's another conversation—but about being alone in my head.

I sit in meditation at home and I go out to sit with others in Buddhist practice places. Sometimes I sit in the teacher's seat, sometimes I sit in the seat of a student, and always I sit in longing. In that slow turn between the outbreath and the inbreath, the question sometimes arises: “How do I get out of this separate self?”

In the Zen tradition we usually face the wall and so can't see each other. When I sat recently with people from the Theravadan tradition, we sat in a circle facing each other with our eyes closed. I snuck a peek at the others, all of them seeming to sit so peacefully, and I thought, “What are they all doing and
how do they know how to do it?” A wave of longing vibrated in my blood like a shot of brandy, and I felt hot prickles all over my skin. I said to myself, “Hello, longing. I know you.” And in that moment I suddenly felt happy. I liked the prickles. And for the hundred thousandth time, I returned to my breathing, letting the air in the room come into my lungs like the tide—the same air that was flowing in and out of all the other bodies in the room, joining us together. Longing is its own satisfaction. It's already complete.

All my life I have felt this longing. I guess it's how I travel in the world; it's what takes me where I'm going.

The longing for connection calls forth a life of connection. The longing that took me to the secret place in the bayberry bushes is the same longing that has taken me, as an adult, to spending months in a monastery; joining a voter registration drive; and setting the table for family and friends. My small self continues to reach for something beyond myself. The girl practicing handstands in that secret place is still with me, keeping me company. If that little kid can bear the longing, I can bear it. I remember that this is who I am, the one who wonders.

Talking to My Dead Mother

W
HEN MY EIGHTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD
mother was in the hospital after a car accident, I flew to Chicago to be with her. In my hasty departure, I took no other shoes but the ones on my feet, and they fell apart the day I got there, as I hurried across the hospital parking lot. The next day, oddly, a new pair of shoes arrived at my mother's apartment. She had ordered them for herself from a catalog. The black leather walking shoes fit me well; sturdy and comfortable, they were just what I needed. I told my mother that I was borrowing her new shoes until she got better, but she never did.

I've been wearing them almost daily ever since she died. I've taken them twice to my local shoe repair shop in Berkeley to have the Velcro fastenings replaced. I feel superstitious about them. I don't want them ever to wear out, but of course they will.

When my mother died, I became an orphan. At sixty-three, I was too old to feel like a waif, and yet I did. When I was a child, my friends and I played orphan games; we were playing, I now suppose, at what we feared the most. We were brave and strong. Shipwrecked without any parents on the desert island that was my back yard, we lived in imaginary tree houses, tamed palomino horses, made hammocks out of vines, gathered wild bananas and
raspberries to eat—it was a great life. But being an orphan isn't like that at all; since my mother's death, I haven't done any of those things.

And, in a strange contradiction, the very event that turned me into an orphan also turned me into a matriarch. At my nephew's wedding, with our large extended family, I was the oldest person there. How could this have come to pass?

I'm the first of four siblings, and now both parents are gone, as well as all the aunts and uncles. The generations have rolled over: two months before my mother died, my granddaughter was born, the first of her generation in my family. For many years, the word
Grandma
was synonymous with my mother, who adored and was adored by her nine grandchildren. Yet I'm the grandma now. Everyone has to get up out of their chair and move over one notch. I'm sitting in my mother's seat, sometimes literally. I have her beloved “steamer chair” on my back porch, and I like sitting in it on warm days.

I'm also wearing some of my mother's clothes. When my sisters and I were going through her closet after her death, I took shirts and sweaters that would have been too Mother-Hubbardish for me before: a blue denim shirt, for example, with daisies embroidered on the bodice. Some impulse of loyalty to my mother makes me like it, and besides, it's comfy, and comfort trumps style these days. I also took a pair of black leather gloves, and a black wool jacket with brass buttons, made by Tibetan refugees. Sometimes, walking down the street in Berkeley on a chilly day, I look down to see that my body is embraced by my mother's coat, my mother's gloves, and my mother's shoes.

As an adolescent, I used to resent being closely identified with my mother. I went to the same small girls' high school that she had attended twenty years before me. Two of my teachers—an English teacher and a Latin teacher—sometimes called me by my mother's name, “Alice.” In my senior year, I was glad to be chosen as the editor of the high school literary magazine, except that my mother had also had that job, and I was afraid that I
might be under some kind of spell to live her life over again. But hadn't I come into the world to be a different person?